Britannia burning

An eerie calm has settled over London since Wednesday after three nights of rioting and looting that saw shops and offices smashed and violated. The riot began in north London where poor immigrant communities reside; then spread south and east and everywhere else. More than 1,200 people were arrested as British Prime Minister David Cameron announced a get-tough policy against general lawlessness and dispatched 16,000 police troops to stop the riots. While the show of force proved successful, there were reports of violence elsewhere in Britain’s second largest city of Birmingham and in Manchester. Now British leaders and commentators are hard-pressed to explain the causes of the unrest.

The riots began the other Saturday when what was at first a peaceful protest over a police shooting in London’s Tottenham neighborhood turned violent. The clash unleashed an open season for mayhem and looting especially by young people. Predictably enough, the rioters ran off with goods every teen wants—bikes, electronics sneakers and leather goods. But they also torched stores, apparently just for the fun of seeing something burn. One youth rioter gleefully told a television news camera man, “Come join the fun.”

Britain is bitterly divided over the riots. The police have blamed it on sheer criminality, on the infectious spirit of anarchy fueled by opportunism and a false sense of freedom. Considering that most of the rioters are young and in the age when they are prey to feelings of rebellion, this may have some basis. But it is also true that the young rioters have reasons to be angry and the violence that took place was an occasion to let off steam, to vent their wrath on a world that’s increasingly hemming them in a sort of prison.

Their reasons have social and economic moorings. Like America, Britain is fighting colossal debts and it’s doing so by harsh cuts on social services. The austerity measures include closing youth clubs, and it is quite tempting to surmise that the move has fostered anomie among young people. Considering further that Britain has a big immigrant community, the closure of youth clubs and other welfare cuts may have driven young immigrants underground so that they have become “ghettoized.” What later happened would be the outbreak of pogroms of hate. The fact, too, that austerity measures involve cuts in the police budget contributed to the initial inadequate police response to contain the violence.

Social analysts have pointed to the role of social networking in fueling the unrest. Social media were prominent in the “Arab Spring” early this year, and even earlier, during our own Edsa Dos 10 years ago. The Arabs were reeling from an economic crisis that saw the prices of food and other basic commodities skyrocket, sparking unrest and later a movement to topple their authoritarian governments. But while the Arab movement driven by social networking sparked a pro-democracy wave, the London riots were sheer chaos, organized as it were by the power of social networking. This may indicate that for all of its potential to build, the “global village” (a phrase coined by the late Canadian media guru Marshall McLuhan to indicate how the electronic media have so connected people around the world as to shrink it into a village), that has been created by social networking also has the potential to foster alienation and a false social integration especially among young people, constituting them into the “new illiteracy” (another of McLuhan fancy but revealing phrases). In short, social networking may have produced the 21st century version of the “angry young man.”

The “angry young man” phenomenon was typically British in the ‘50s and ‘60s. But it threatens to become global now because it cannot be denied that the socio-economic basis of the unrest owes to the wages of globalization. The global financial crisis may be creating a generation of young people watching the opportunities around them falling short of their aspirations. The crisis has created an army of jobless people, with fewer and less well-paid jobs at every level. Benefits and educational support have been cut. The crisis may be creating a generation of hate and lawlessness.

But as the young man captured on British television says, “Come join the fun.” The “fun” is confounding to a world that had witnessed the United Kingdom basking in the glow of the royal wedding between Prince William and his bride just months back. Moreover, London is set to host the Olympics next year. Sandwiched between these two “fun” events is—in the phrase of Shakespeare that should ennoble an ugly summer of chaos and havoc—“the winter of our discontent.”