What They Said: The U.K. Riots

Source: wsj blog

By Margherita Stancati

Riots in London and other English cities over the past week left a trail of destruction that is estimated to have caused over $300 million in damages. Flaming buildings, looted shops and burned-out cars were just some of the common sights that sent shockwaves through a country that is unaccustomed to such episodes of lawlessness. More than 1,000 people have been arrested so far, and almost 500 of them have been charged.

Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

Riots in England over the past week left a trail of destruction. Above, a woman walked past a broken window of a shop, in London, England.

British officials have vowed to impose new measures to prevent further violence as they worry about the long-term damage to their country’s reputation, particularly in light of the upcoming 2012 London Olympic Games.

Here is a roundup of what several Indian papers had to say about the riots:

“Welcome to the post-modern riot,” said The Hindustan Times in a Wednesday editorial headlined “Anarchy in the UK.” The piece said that one of the reasons the riots were remarkable was because they reminded us “of Britain’s long history of class conflict, something that has not been evident as mob action for a quarter of a century.” It also pointed at the lack of a political agenda among the rioters: “Banks and ministries, icons of capitalism and government, were largely ignored.”

The paper gave a socio-economic explanation of the riots, saying that the working classes, hard-hit by Britain’s recent financial woes, have been largely ignored by the political establishment. It warns that a similar recipe could trigger unrest elsewhere, too: “It is clear the sense of economic uncertainty, coupled with an evident leadership deficit, that pervades much of the world has put many societies on a short fuse. The trigger could be austerity in some countries, inflation in others, but the shock and awe that PM Cameron is experiencing could well befall almost any government in the world today.”

The Times of India, Thursday offered a similar reading of the violence: “It can’t be a coincidence that English cities are burning at a time when the UK economy is in parlous shape, with job cuts, unemployment, growth that’s been below 1% over the past year and negative before, the eurozone imploding next door.” The editorial worried about what would happen should the riots escalate into a full-blown political crisis. In that case, it warned “it will be tempting to scapegoat immigrants, global competition and so on for Britain’s woes.” This, in turn “should worry us, given intensive India-UK trade ties and a large Indian diaspora in the UK. It’s best, for our own sakes, that the riots stop quickly.”

“The big picture is one of urban society in decay and being shaken to its roots,” was how the Asian Age made sense of the riots. In a Thursday editorial, the paper similarly pointed at the government’s spending cutbacks and at youth unemployment as the root causes of the violence.

It also called into question the U.K.’s racial-integration policies: “What is perhaps true is that there has been no sustained effort since the 1950s, when Afro-Caribbean communities arrived in Britain, to deal with their invidious alienation in which race and colour played a key part in addition to their very poor economic status. Policies for a ‘multicultural’ Britain put in place simply did not address issues arising out of sociology and economics squarely enough.” The paper added that south Asian immigrants are, overall, better integrated than most other communities.

In a Thursday editorial, the Indian Express focused instead on what the riots mean for the London Olympic Games. It noted that “it would not be sensible to judge security arrangements for 2012 on the basis” of the recent nights of rioting, since security will be a lot tighter during the Olympics.

At the same time, it saw the rioting as evidence of the government’s failure to transform the spirit and youth of London’s East End, a traditionally working-class and multicultural area of the city. “If the purpose was to rebrand an entire swathe of one of the world’s greatest cities, to demonstrate the vibrancy of the communities that call it home, then the images that have been coming out of East London — particularly Hackney, one of the Games’ major locations — do tend to undermine the Olympic mission,” it said.

While it described the challenges the U.K. government has to face between now and the start of the Games as “susbstantial,” the editorial also said one should “never underestimate the ability of events like the Olympics to, indeed, build solidarity even within communities as stressed as those which produced East London’s young rioters. It seems London did not just want the Games. It needed them, too.”