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Riots report published

After the riots

The Riots Communities and Victims Panel’s final report was published on 28 March 2012. This sets out the final findings and recommendations for action to help prevent future riots.

The wide ranging issues and recommendations tackled in the Panel-s final report include:

• Families aren’t getting the support they need. The Panel supports the Government’s Troubled Families Programme, but found that the overlap with rioters is limited. Government and local public services should develop a strategy incorporating the principles of the Troubled Families Programme to help 500,000 ‘forgotten families’ turn their lives around.
• Communities told the Panel that young people need to build character to help them realise their potential and to prevent them making poor decisions, like rioting. Schools should assume responsibility for helping children build character.
• Children are leaving school unable to read and write – one fifth of school leavers have the literacy skills of an eleven year old, or younger. Where schools fail to teach children to read and write they should pay a financial penalty, used to help the pupil ‘catch up’.
• Communities and young people told the Panel that having a job is key to people feeling that they have a stake in society. Government and local public services should fund together a ‘Youth Job Promise’ scheme to get young people a job, when they have been unemployed for a year.

What kind of life? Archbishop on riots report

Rioting is the choice of young people with nothing to lose

The Archbishop of Canterbury writes in response to the Guardian's Reading the Riots report.

“England risks a repeat” of the summer riots “unless the government and civil society do more to ‘rescue those who think they have nothing to lose’”.

'To ask if the riots were "political" or "opportunistic" is pointless. These are not people who live complacently in a culture of entitlement, nor are they, for the most part, committed criminals. Neither are they heroes of democratic protest, Britain's answer to Tahrir Square. They are people who have vague but strong longings for something like secure employment, and no idea where to look for it; who on the whole want to belong, and live in a climate where they are taken seriously as workers, as citizens – and as needy individuals; and who have got used to being pushed to the margins and told that they are dispensable.'

'How do we as a society back up good lessons in the home and show that we corporately want what a good family wants – mutual attention and affirmation, stability and emotional literacy, a sense of value that doesn't depend on accessories?'

'Demonising volatile and destructive young people doesn't help; criminalising them wholesale reinforces a lot of what produces the problem in the first place.'

 

Reporting the Riots

Reading the Riots - Guardian/LSE

The project collected more than 1.3m words of first-person accounts from rioters, giving an unprecedented insight into what drove people to participate in England's most serious bout of civil unrest in a generation. Rioters revealed that a complex mix of grievances brought them on to the streets but analysts appointed by the LSE identified distrust and antipathy toward police as a key driving force.

The August riots in England Understanding the involvement of young people - Nat Cen

NatCen who conducted interviews and focus groups with young people, business owners, youth workers and community leaders in affected and non-affected areas, speaking both to those directly involved and those who chose not to be.

5 Days in August -Riots Communities and Victims Panel Interim Report

There was no single cause of the riots and there is no single solution. This report is intended to prompt discussion about every aspect of the riots. It will generate ideas from which we will develop recommendations which will appear in our final report. We hope everyone who reads this report will want to work with us to develop proposals to address the fundamental challenges we face as a society.

 

 

Documenting the unrest

A great deal has been published about the events of August. The following are some of the more provocative or informative articles. (Some are reposted following the disruption this site experienced in late August).

Victor Adebowale Poverty isn't an excuse for the riots. It's a reason

Camila Batmanghelidjh: Caring costs – but so do riots

Philip Blond: Britain’s Liberal Riots

Luke Bretherton: Shopping with violence: Riots and the responsible society

Adrian Hamilton: Lets not go the way of LA

Ken Livingtone: These Riots Are Heartbreaking For London But We Must Learn Lessons

Hugh Muir: Tottenham riots: missteps in the dance of police and a frustrated community

Jonathan Rutherford Labour's response to the riots has to be conservative and radical

Archbishop of Canterbury in the House of Lords

Faith Matters report highlights EDL threat

The English Defence League: Challenging Our Country and Our Values of Social Inclusion, Fairness and Equality.

Authored by Prof. Nigel Copsey, this important new report highlights concerns about the EDL, and challenges goverenment, community and faith groups to work together to meet this threat to our communities.

Racial violence: the buried issue

New IRR research

Research published by the Institute of Race Relations (IRR), reveals dangerously high levels of racial violence in the UK - a violence which is spreading into new areas.

As mainstream parties compete as to which can reduce immigration fastest - ostensibly to defuse community fears - no one asks who actually bears the immediate fall-out of such tensions - Black and Minority Ethnic, asylum-seeker/refugee and migrant communities.

Surveillance city

These cities within cities are eating up Britain's streets

Anna Minton on how urban regeneration has seen entire districts pass into the hands of private companies – and their security guards.

This monitoring and surveillance of innocent activities, which does not necessarily require anti-terror laws, is taking place all around Britain as a result of the growing private ownership and private control of cities. Liverpool One, which spans 34 streets in the heart of Liverpool, is effectively owned by the Duke of Westminster's property company, Grosvenor, which leased the entire site, including streets and public places, from the council for 250 years. Cabot Circus in Bristol, Highcross in Leicester and what promises to be the biggest of all, Stratford City in London, are all owned and run by property companies.

How not to prevent violent extremism

Spooked: a report published  by the Institute of Race Relations finds that the government's Prevent programme for tackling extremism fosters division, mistrust and alienation.

"The atmosphere promoted by Prevent is one in which to make radical criticisms of the government is to risk losing funding and facing isolation as an 'extremist', while those organisations which support the government are rewarded. "

LSE Autumn Public Lectures

Events open to the LSE community and the public

 

Tuesday 6 October, 6.30-8pm

Bringing the Penal State Back In

SPEAKER: Professor Loïc Wacquant

 

Monday 19 October, 6.30-8pm

Beijing Inside Out: Caochangdi

SPEAKERS: Robert Mangurian, Mary-Ann Ray

 

Tuesday 10 November, 6.30-8pm

 The First Legacy Games: the physical and

socio-economic transformation of East London

SPEAKERS: Andrew Altman, Councillor Paul Brickell,  Ricky Burdett

 

Tuesday 17 November, 6.30-8pmC

Cities, Design and Climate Change

SPEAKERS: Professor Saskia Sassen, Professor Richard Sennett

“I’m sorry, you can’t drink here.”

A Public Nuisance:  Tim Abraham investigates the increasing control of public space.

“Something is lost when our understanding of the public is reduced to consumers on best behaviour.”