It is a gloom-filled evening here in London, a depressed city where the spectre of violence seems to be taking increasingly wider swathes of it in its grasp. After the unexpected and, of course, unprecedented rioting that left Tottenham devastated and its residents fearful over the weekend, it was hoped that order would swiftly return in a city where discipline has traditionally been a natural, permanent happening. That was not to be.
Over the weekend and spilling over into Monday, young men, a very large number of them hooded, have gone about setting shops on fire and then looting them. It is a London one does not usually imagine. And with the 2012 Olympics only a year away, this image of a burning London can only raise a number of questions, the most fundamental relating to why things have turned out this way.
It was the police shooting of a young man named Mark Duggan that set it off. The precise circumstances of Duggan’s death, for all the explanations offered by the police, remain unclear. What is absolutely clear, though, is that mobs in such areas as Hackney, Lewisham, Peckham, Walthamstow, Brixton, Croydon, Clapham and other areas have seized upon the shooting as an excuse to try to push the city into spasms of disorder.
The disorder spilled over into places outside London. Read Birmingham here. Buses and cars and shops have been set alight. Bins have been burning and riotous youths have cheerfully hurled projectiles at policemen. Television images have continually been focused on smoke billowing out of burning buildings and gangs of young men seemingly holding streets in their control.
A stretched police force and a harried fire service are hardly a match, at this point, for those causing all the trouble. When reports of disturbances come in even from as unlikely a spot as Oxford Circus in the centre of London, not much of cheer can be spotted in homes and in hearts.
Home Secretary Theresa May, having cut short her holiday and returned to London, has held out the warning that those behind the disorder will face the consequences. Link that statement with the arrest of 215 people and of 25 of them being slapped with charges of criminality, and you comprehend the grave nature of the crisis the government has on its hands.
Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg has been visiting Tottenham, where all of this began on the weekend, to reassure people with promises of security. Accompanied by David Lammy, the local MP, Clegg has visited the sites of the rioting, has observed silhouettes which till last week were whole buildings. London Mayor Boris Johnson, who on Sunday telephonically vented his anger at the rioters in Tottenham, plans to be back in the city after cutting his holiday short.
And, as so often happens in a democracy, a looming question related to Prime Minister David Cameron’s absence. He too was on holiday abroad with his family. Now comes news that he plans to fly back to London overnight, to preside over a security-related meeting early Tuesday morning. Nick Clegg has meanwhile tried fending off criticism of the prime minister, of his silence, even as London burns.
The Met, London’s police force, has been urging people to get off the streets. That appeal has come with another, this one to parents who, it has said, should get in touch with their children. Obviously, the children, in the assessment of the police, are the youths out there happily looking for shops to put to the torch and goods to steal. And then comes this warning from the Met: CCTV pictures of those engaged in creating disorder will be published. You get a hint of desperation there.
As twilight descends over the city, Simon Hughes, the Lib-Dem parliamentarian, speaks sombrely on television of the chaos, asks those tempted to indulge in violence not to go for a blighting of conditions.
It is a surreal London tonight. It is the unreal flooding into homes as the day draws to a close.
-With The Daily Star input
