Young, lacking opportunity, angry at the system and organising phenomenally fast over social media, London’s rioters show some of the same characteristics as the pro-democracy demonstrators of the “Arab Spring”.
LONDON – Young, lacking opportunity, angry at the system and organising phenomenally fast over social media, London’s rioters show some of the same characteristics as the pro-democracy demonstrators of the “Arab Spring”.
But while those in the Middle East have marched in the hope of positive change, Britain’s violence has been almost nihilist, focused on looting and a quick burst of the sort of publicity and power inner-city youth feel they have long been denied.
Across the world, the financial crisis may leave a whole generation of young people with opportunities that fall well short of their aspirations, perhaps to the point where they might even abandon hope for the future at all.
In the developed world, the crisis means they almost invariably face fewer and less well paid entry-level jobs at every level, from graduate openings to factory work. Benefits and educational support are also being cut.
In the developing world, economic opportunities might still be rising but expectations may often have risen faster. Now, the downturn leaves them ever more unfulfilled. In ageing economies, the young may also have to fund rising social bills.
Whether that sense of disenchantment fuels political protest, extremism or simply random crime and contempt for the law, the running battles, destruction and arson in London, among the worst seen in Western Europe in decades, suggest politics and protest could get uglier in the years to come.
“It’s very sad to see. But kids have got no work, no future and the cuts have made it worse,” Hackney electrician Adrian Anthony Burns, 39, told Reuters.
“These kids are from another generation to us and they just don’t care. You watch, it’s only just begun.”
The sort of near-spontaneous riot that began in Tottenham on Saturday is far from new. Similar grievances helped kindle unrest in Paris’s poor peripheral suburbs in 2005, “service delivery” riots in poor South African townships and other occasional urban protests from China to Latin America.
But two dynamics in particular may be now acting as a powerful accelerant, the rise of social media that allow rapid organisation putting authorities on the back foot as well as economic shifts that worsen pre-existing hardships.
In North Africa earlier this year, the last straws were rapidly rising food prices and then anger at authority encapsulated by the self-immolation of a Tunisian vegetable seller. As governments tried to crush the protest with force and Internet controls, they merely fanned the flames.
In Britain, pre-existing social problems were compounded by initial austerity measures, including shutting down “non-essential” public services such as youth clubs, and then fury at a perceived attempted cover-up of a police shooting.
A blizzard of social media incitement, primarily using Blackberry smart phones and their semi-encrypted messaging system, and wall-to-wall media coverage then look to have sparked copycat rioting as surely as satellite TV and Twitter coverage of Egypt’s protests sparked similar events elsewhere.
One clear lesson of the “Arab Spring”, it seems, is that crushing unrest through use of force may simply not work. Even the killing of hundreds or more by Syria’s security forces has not been enough to stem the pro-reform uprising there.
