When is a Riot a Riot?

Some quick comments from Arzu on the unfolding situation in England.  Why is the government and media reluctant to use the term ‘riot’?

My auto-prompt suggested 2011 after I started typing in today’s date.  It is the thirteenth anniversary of the killing of Mark Duggan by police officers in London, justice for which is still denied.  In the days that followed, riots broke out across the UK, the blame for which was (in the eyes of media and therefore the wider public) lain at the door of a protest outside Tottenham police station.  This simplistic and thoroughly incorrect assumption is one example of many ways that the state, mainstream media, the cohort of post-violence analysts and the legal system seek to assign blame when ‘riots’ occur in an always racialised British landscape.

 

A couple of things come to mind today, in 2024, as the country is now four days into street violence that has targeted mosques, Muslims, ‘migrants’ and people of colour generally and en route set fire to cars (including police cars), attacked violently people of colour (and also police officers), set fire to buildings, including a Citizens Advice Bureau, a library and as it happens a police station.

 

Why isn’t the state and media universally calling this violence rioting?  What difference is the perception of grievance by those rioting against those they are targeting affecting the way we talk about this, and also how the state is responding?

 

Put simply, how much does ‘whiteness’ matter?

 

The changing language around riots and grievance is not new with this week’s events.  We have seen paradigm shifts in understanding social unrest already.  I discussed these in Environment of Hate: The New Normal for Muslims in the UK (pp21-3, almost a decade ago.  This discussion is informed by the work and commentary of John Lea, Arun Kundnani and Lee Bridges.

 

The Conservative-LibDem coalition government in power at the time of the 2011 ‘riots’ did not according to previous precedent set up a judicial inquiry.  Instead it set up cross-party panel whose findings cited criminality and poor character amongst rioters as a causal factor, again ignoring the possibilities of there being pre-existing structural and institutional problems.  Structural issues and the understanding of the grievance of (structural) racism against and inequality for ethnic minorities was something that the Scarman report and other investigations into the riots of the 1980s gave time and analysis to.

 

The shift in tone could be seen in the inquiry findings post the 1990s riots of ‘white’ youth, and the 2001 riots of ‘Asian’ (read Muslim) youth in certain northern towns that summer.  As Lea (2003) explains the reports into these ‘riots’ eschewed structural issues and asked instead:

 

“how have the socially excluded communities—poor whites and Asians—got into this mess, and what can be done—in particular what can they do—to restore their ‘community cohesion’?”

 

By the time of the 2011 ‘riots’ the attacks on police cars, stations, banks and betting shops were all understood to be the result of the rioters ‘ill discipline,’ ‘inability to defer gratifications’ poor upbringings, ‘absent fathers’ etc.  Up to this point, regardless of how the cause of grievances were discussed, ‘riot’ was the term used.

 

In 2011, courts sat 24-7 to process the 3000 plus people arrested: including children as young as 11, first time offenders, people who innocently took possession of items looted by others[1], many of these receiving custodial sentences.  The media looked on with a race / class eye of disdain, with clips like the West London boutique owner decrying the rioters as ‘feral youths, feral rats’ becoming viral sensations.

 

Come 2024, police cars and stations are ablaze, people of colour have had acid thrown at them, been stabbed and even pulled out of their cars and attacked by mobs.  Confrontation between mobs and the police are taking place across England.  There is palpable fear amongst racialised communities, as mosques, any place suspected of housing refugees, businesses owned by (those perceived to be) Muslims are attacked and threatened.  Yet the media disdain is at best mute, and largely absent.  New ‘news’ outlets, like GB News and Talk TV seem to be much aligned with the grievances of those whom they (and indeed the BBC and Sky News) describe as ‘protestors’.  Their gatherings and confrontations ‘protests’, and sometimes ‘protests that have turned violent’.

 

It is clear that the idea of who the perpetrator is now a variable when deciding whether something should be called a riot or not.  Likewise if those who are the victims of the violence are racialised (and deliberately targeted because they are), the likelihood of something being called a ‘riot’, is also low.  Why is this important?  Once labelled a riot, social stigma is attached, the idea that things need to change and something needs to be done (and we can justifiably critique those narratives and what they lead to elsewhere) become apparent.  At the moment, all we hear is that there are protestors with grievances about Muslim and migrant overstep.  We are not hearing about large scale, co-ordinated racist violence running across England day and night.  This is telling about the state of the UK, its political culture and the position of its new government.

 

Again, this failed reporting / understanding (whether deliberate and malign or unconscious) is not new.  There have been quiet reports of ‘protests’ that have often turned violent, against places housing refugees, on estates with refugees and other racialised residents (often by other residents) for years now.  Had the racialisation been reversed, these would undoubtedly been reported as t the very least as ‘riots’, even as acts of terrorism.  What we are seeing is an escalation of violence perpetrated and sparked in the moment by far-right voices and foot soldiers.  However it is the state, its institutions, mainstream media and the political culture which they have promulgated for several decades, which are the cause.

 

There is hope.  We have seen it on the streets as people from all communities banding together to oppose the violence and to rebuild in its wake.  The state is at best irrelevant to this process.  At worse, it is inimical to it.  Our challenge is to make that process the basis of the social norms of the future, where the hatreds fomented by this failing state have no more hold.

 

Arzu Merali is a writer and researcher based in London, UK.  Follow her on Instgram and X @arzumerali.

Photo: Still taken from

[1] As I write, it appears this is now being mooted again.  The delay to do so however is even more staggering when you realise that the Director of Public Prosecutions who initiated this measure so quickly in 2011, was none other than Keir Starmer, our newly elected Prime Minister.  This time round, whilst racist violence abounds in towns and cities, Starmer is going on holiday.

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