Historical story

Guest column on the 2011 riots in Great Britain

A guest column appears on Kennislink every two weeks. The columnist is always a different researcher, who writes from his or her field about the science behind an event in society or from our daily lives. This week:historian Jouke Turpijn about the riots in Great Britain.

The riots that broke out in London and other British cities this summer came as a total surprise to the media who covered it, the police and politicians who responded to it, and the viewers who watched everything happen on television and the internet. However, she and we would be able to interpret this chaos more quickly and know better how to proceed if the recent past was well studied. This recent past mainly concerns the 1980s.

The economic growth, democratic reforms and social experimentation of the first decades after the Second World War had come to a halt in the mid-1970s. Both politicians and citizens made a withdrawal from public life. The state had to make cutbacks, handed over all kinds of responsibilities and started to regard citizens more and more as difficult customers. And on the street people fought less for abstract ideals or the troubles of others, but mainly complained loudly about their own misery.

In Great Britain, this resentment caused all sorts of unrest among the have-nots in the 1980s. and the authority. You would think that Britons today would be used to such confrontations because the list seems endless:riots in poor neighborhoods such as St. Paul in Bristol (1980), Brixton in London (1981 and 1985), Chapeltown in Leeds (1981). ), Toxteth Liverpool (1981), Handsworth Birmingham (1981, 1985 and 1991), a near-civil war in Northern Ireland, apocalyptic states with football hooligans and battles between striking miners and police in 1984-1985. Moreover, these events have been given a place in the national memory in all kinds of cultural expressions about this period.

Why is so little done with this knowledge? The answer lies with politics. The malcontents found a closed door at 10 Downing Street in the 1980s. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, for example, in response to Brixton 1981, stated:“Nothing, but nothing, justifies what happened”. And actually the conservative 'Iron Lady' . repeated this thought after every confrontation. This actually only backfired, as witnessed by the many riots that followed and the feeling of discontent that – as we now know – has lingered until this day.

It is to be hoped that David Cameron listens more closely to these feelings than his party colleague from the 1980s. Not so much to those of the attention-seeking looters, but of 'ordinary' Britons who daily stress the tensions between have-nots. and experience the big bad world.

And while he's at it, have Cameron immediately put energy and money into a good historical investigation into urban chaos. Although results achieved in the past provide no guarantees in the present and there are also large differences with the unrest of the eighties, we can learn, for example, that social inequality and tensions between various ethnic groups are mentioned as the main cause in almost all confrontations. but that these will never be solved.

For now, this seems like a vain hope. Cameron copies Thatcher:he immediately condemned the riots as 'criminality, pure and simple' and prescribes severe penalties. This seems like a recipe for more unrest, because where people go so far as to destroy their own living environment, nothing is 'pure and simple' .