Timeline of the Riots

Thursday 4 August

• Mark Duggan is shot dead by police in Tottenham Hale. Police claim that that there was an exchange of gunfire and one police officer was injured.

Saturday 6 August

• Mark Duggan’s family and friends hold a peaceful demonstration at Tottenham police station where senior police refuse to meet them and police assault a 16-year-old girl. Rioting follows. Police cars are attacked, a bus is set alight and shops are looted. Looting spreads to Tottenham Hale retail park and Wood Green shopping centre.

Sunday 7 August

• Disturbances erupt in Enfield and Ponders End. Shops looted and bricks thrown at police.

• Protesters in Brixton fight police, throwing rocks and bins. Shops are looted and set on fire. The tube line to Brixton is closed ‘due to civil unrest’.

• Rioting and looting spread to Wood Green and Dalston, where Turkish and Kurdish shop owners organise to protect their property; Woolwich; Leyton; Waltham Cross; Oxford Circus; Streatham.

• Clashes with police in Shepherd’s Bush, Islington and Hackney.

• Police launch Operation Withern to investigate the riots and police from other areas are drafted in.

Monday 8 August

London

• All 32 boroughs are placed on riot alert.

• By early evening rioting has erupted all over London, spreading to Kent and Essex. Shops are looted and in Bethnal Green, Walworth, Lewisham and Hackney youth fight the police, throwing missiles, bottles and petrol bombs. In Ealing, Richard Mannington Bowes is assaulted; he dies in hospital three days later.

• In Croydon bricks, bottles, stones and fireworks are thrown at police, shops and vehicles set alight and a large furniture shop burned down; a 26-year-old man is shot dead.

Rioting spreads across England

• Shop windows in Birmingham city centre are smashed and shops looted; a police station in Handsworth is set alight.

• Riots erupt in the Chapeltown area of Leeds, during which a young man is shot in the face; he later dies.

• Looting and fighting with police in Toxteth, Liverpool.

• A police station is attacked and car tyres set alight in St Ann’s, Nottingham.

• Protesters burn cars and confront police in Gillingham and Chatham, Kent.

• Other incidents are reported in Bristol, Epsom, Oxford, and Luton.

Tuesday 9 August

• In Winson Green, Birmingham, three men are killed in a hit-and-run while protecting a local petrol station.

• Manchester city centre is closed to all traffic after buildings are set alight. Looting begins and youth fight running battles with police.

• 80 people confront police at Salford Precinct.

• In Nottingham there is widespread rioting and attacks on police stations.

• Gloucester’s central shopping centre is looted and rioters set fire to cars and an

empty building.

• In Toxteth, Liverpool, youths hurl missiles at police, shops are looted and set on fire.

• Extensive looting in Wolverhampton, where rioters also confront police.

• Prime Minister David Cameron returns early from holiday in Italy to chair an emergency COBRA meeting. 16,000 police are deployed in London and all police leave is cancelled.

• The IPCC announces that there is no evidence that Mark Duggan fired at police.

Wednesday 10 August

• In London, vigilante groups are formed in Enfield, Eltham and Southall. Police clash with bottle-throwing vigilantes in Eltham, many of them English Defence League supporters.

• Disturbances in Liverpool, Nottingham, West Bromwich and Leicester.

• Cameron announces police can use plastic bullets and contingency plans are in place to make water cannon available.

Thursday 11 August

• Parliament is recalled to discuss the riots.

• Between 3,000 and 4,000 people have been arrested. Courts sit round-the-clock.

• An estimated £200 million worth of property has been damaged.

 

The report of the inquiry into the death of Baha Mousa by Sir William Gage, published on 8 September, is a damning critique of the British army – including senior officers, their legal advisers and right up the chain of command to the Ministry of Defence.

Baha Mousa, an Iraqi hotel worker, died in 2003 with 93 separate injuries on his body, including a broken nose and cracked ribs, and his head shoved down a prison latrine after he and eight others had been abused for over 36 hours by members of the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment. However, in the subsequent court martial only one soldier, Corporal Donald Payne, was convicted of ‘inhumane’ treatment of civilians and gaoled for a year. Six others, including the regiment’s commanding officer Jorge Mendonca, were acquitted of all charges.

The report criticises 19 members of the regiment as complicit in the ‘appalling episode of serious gratuitous violence’ meted out to the detainees – violence that included beating or kicking each man in turn to make them groan in a grotesque musical parody that their torturers dubbed ‘The Choir’. They include:

• Colonel Jorge Mendonca who, as commanding officer, bears ‘heavy responsibility’ for the ‘grave and shameful events’.

• Lieutenant Craig Rodgers and Major Michael Peebles who did nothing to stop the detainees being serious assaulted by soldiers under their command.

• Chaplain Father Peter Madden who visited the detention centre and ‘must have seen the shocking condition of the detainees’.

• Dr Derek Keilloh, the regiment’s medical officer, who claimed that he saw no injuries on Baha Mousa’s corpse.

All should face criminal charges. However, these are not just a few ‘bad apples’; Gage points at what he calls the ‘systemic and corporate failure’ of the Ministry of Defence to prevent the use of ‘conditioning’ methods [ie torture] banned by the Heath government in 1972 after their use against Republican prisoners in Ireland was exposed. Neither the soldiers carrying out the abuse, nor their superiors, seemed aware that forcing detainees to wear hoods and adopt excruciating stress positions was in contravention both of British law and the Geneva Conventions. During the inquiry it emerged that ‘the ban was never made explicit in British army guidance on prisoner of war handling’ and that ‘a four-star general was not aware of the Heath ruling. Nor was Adam Ingram, the former [Labour] armed forces minister’.

This blanket ignorance of any limitations on the abuse that could be meted out to detainees was no oversight, but rather, after 2002, a matter of official policy. The soldiers did what they did because they had been taught that, in the ‘war on terror’ the rules did not apply to them and that Iraqi lives were worthless. Phil Shiner, the lawyer for Baha Mousa’s family, also acts for 150 other Iraqis who are demanding an inquiry into Britain’s detention policy. On 8 September he told The Guardian that the allegations in these cases ‘involve a range of techniques and practices which were simply not on Sir William’s radar: unbelievably debased sexual behaviour, mock executions, vicious threats of rape of detainees’ female relatives, and systematic use of hooding, sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation…’. This is British imperialism at war.

No matter how much Britain’s ruling elite wants to convince itself and us that the rioting in English cities and towns in August 2011 was an outbreak of ‘criminality pure and simple’, as Prime Minister David Cameron put it, the fact is that riots have always been a feature of capitalist society in crisis. The August riots expressed the depth of the crisis that now faces British imperialism. The ruling class has systematically shifted the burden of solving this crisis onto the backs of the working class and the poor while claiming that ‘we are all in this together’. In reality there is no such thing as ‘we’: the ruling class is willing to abandon every figment of democracy, every notion of ‘human progress’ or ‘equality’, every remnant of civilisation, in order to restore profits. The August riots are the writing on the wall. As the ruling class turns the screw, it is time to fight back.

 

When Parliament was recalled on 11 August to deal with the aftermath, politicians on all sides scrambled to make the same condemnations of the rioters, to promise severe penalties and to reaffirm their already established plans for disciplining the working class to pay for the capitalist crisis. The similarities between the party statements are no accident: these parties are all the servants of British imperialism. So, Prime Minister Cameron reiterated a tranche of ‘reforms’ ostensibly aimed at the high moral ground of ‘mending our broken society’, but in reality attacking the working class, and in particular its poorest sections:

‘For years we’ve had a [welfare] system that encourages the worst in people – that incites laziness, that excuses bad behaviour, that erodes self-discipline, that discourages hard work … above all that drains responsibility away from people … I want us to look at toughening up the conditions for those who are out of work and receiving benefits…’

Labour leader Ed Miliband, after calling for swift justice and tough sentences for ‘horrendous criminal acts’, lamented: ‘… the take-what-you-can culture that needs to change from the benefits office to the boardroom’. In fact the last Labour government only targeted the benefits system. The ‘boardrooms’, like the banks, have been free of any regulation by Labour and Tory governments alike.

Since the August riots, Coalition ministers have threatened wider punishments on working class communities, alongside the raft of sanctions already announced in the October 2010 spending review. The review promised to cut housing benefit, incapacity benefits for disabled and sick people, benefits for single parents and education maintenance allowance for school students aged 16-18. Parliament has so far failed to oppose any of these measures despite their proven discrimination against the poorest communities. Local councils across the country, Labour, Tory and LibDem alike, have imposed the spending review cuts with vigour against their most vulnerable constituents.

Some London borough councils, including Labour-controlled Greenwich and Southwark, have threatened to evict any council tenants and their families convicted of charges arising from the riots. Maite de la Calva, a Wandsworth council tenant with an eight-year-old daughter who has been threatened with eviction by the local council because of riot charges against her 18-year-old son, described the council as ‘behaving like fascists’. She is absolutely right. Such community punishments would certainly breach human rights, but Cameron has already flagged up the government’s intention to rid itself of this impediment:

‘… in this country we are proud to stand up for human rights, at home and abroad. It is part of the British tradition. But what is alien to our tradition – and now exerting such a corrosive influence on behaviour and morality … is the twisting and misrepresenting of human rights in a way that has undermined personal responsibility.’

This is the opposite of the truth. The British imperialist tradition is to bomb, torture, oppress and exploit at home and abroad. Human rights are dispensible: profits are not.

Attempts to argue that the riots were not fuelled by poverty and deprivation were swiftly proved wrong when the Institute for Public Policy Research published analysis on 16 August showing that the areas affected by the riots had rates of youth unemployment and child poverty significantly higher than average. In the London borough of Hackney, for instance, youth unemployment is almost double the UK average. In London as a whole, taking into account housing costs, 38% of children live in poverty compared to a national figure of 20% – in itself a disgrace.

The corollary to this government-imposed economic and social deprivation is intensifying the repression that is led by the police and criminal justice system (see p9). Police stop and searches have increased 70% in the last five years, and it is the youth in the riot-affected areas who have overwhelmingly been the targets. In England and Wales, black people are at least six times as likely to be stopped and searched by the police as white people. Asian people are around twice as likely. Against the background of government cuts to welfare benefits and rapidly rising unemployment, especially among young people, it is plain to see that the pressures experienced by working class families are explosive.

So who is going to take the side of working class people struggling to survive against this onslaught? Certainly not the main political parties which have concentrated with slave-like devotion on ticking boxes for British imperialism. What then of those who claim to represent the working class – the trade union movement? For months they have promised to launch an action campaign to defend jobs and pensions in the public sector. So far only one national day of action has been held. The promises are beginning to wear thin, and the newly awakened militancy of trade union members at the TUC Congress in September is threatening to expose the feebleness of its leaders.

To fill the breach, Len McCluskey, leader of Unite the Union, renewed promises of uncompromising ‘civil disobedience’ for the coming autumn and winter. At the same time he reassured his political masters and warned any potential militants who might overstep the mark that: ‘[last month’s riots and looting were] the exact opposite of community spirit, collectivism and what trade unionism is all about’. FRFI supports any movement that is prepared to take up an uncompromising fight against the cuts, but the fault lines are clear: if pushed the unions will defend workers with jobs and the privileges that go with those jobs. The fight to defend the most oppressed sections of the working class will be a different matter.

The ruling class is engaged in class war, and millions of ordinary people are being forced to pay for the crisis while the banks, the big institutions, utility companies and multinationals, and the political elite themselves expand their profit margins, expense accounts, bonuses and pensions.

The ruling class argues that there is no excuse for rioting and looting. This is like saying there is no excuse for the weather. The more the ruling class turns the screw on working class and oppressed communities, the more likely there are to be riots and looting and the more reason there is to fight back. FRFI is involved in defence campaigns in Tottenham, Hackney and Southwark that aim to defend anyone charged with riot offences and their families from victimisation by a pernicious and vengeful state. Anyone claiming to be a socialist will be joining them.