British youth talk about the cause of the rioting.

These scenes make me homesick. I used to drink around this part of Wood Green and lived not far down the road. Last time I was there there was a great steel drum band playing at this very spot and the mood was festive and warm. In fact when  I was there a few years ago I stayed at a bed and breakfast down on West Green Road a little further down from Wood Green off Green Lanes toward Turnpike Lane.

I got off the tube at Turnpike Lane and caught the bus, I think it might have been the 42.  I was pretty much the only white person on the bus which was crowded and wanted to ask someone which stop I get off at. There wasn't an issue of me being the only white person, it was of no consequence to anyone including me except that I knew the B&B was down from the Black Boy Pub near Black Boy Lane. Having been in the US for so long I am well aware of the consequences of using "black" and "boy" in the same sentence when talking to a black man and looked around me trying to find a suitable candidate to ask and how to put it.  Everyone was a suitable candidate of course it's just that things are a bit different over there.  The urban areas are more integrated than here for example. 

So I see a young black guy sitting across from me and ask him if he knows how far the Black Boy pub is.  He answers me in that distinctive London/Jamaican accent of someone born and brought up there and tells me how many stops etc.  We chat a bit more and I tell him I used to drink in a pub on this street, The Duke of Cambridge and I lived up the road there toward Muswell Hill on Priory Road. We talked about living in America and stuff like that as we moved in to a community that seemed to have more Africans. Poles and other Eastern Europeans.

I finally mention to him that I was a bit nervous about asking him where the Black Boy pub is because I live in the US.  He had a laugh about that and said I could have asked him where the "Anglo/African heritage drinking establishment was." to be safe.

I have an Asian friend (Indian) over there who was very upset about the killing of three of the Asian family in Birmingham.  He's not a racist at all but he expressed anger at the youth and the Afro Caribbeans.  But we have to look at the source of the media we see.  No one condones indiscriminate violence and particularly attacks on small neighborhood shopkeepers, Turks, Kurds, Indians, or any others  who are part of a community as opposed to the property of the corporate structure which I would guess was the prime target of most of the anger.  Social uprisings,  when there is no organizational form through which they can be expressed are complicated and contain many negative aspects at times just like the LA uprising.  The media brought us the horrible images of Reginald Denny, the truck driver that was brutality attacked by three or four youths time and time again. What was the purpose of this?  They don't bring us the images of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi's brutality killed by their illegal war. They don't bring us images of landlords and their dumps they rent out to tenants.

They learned in the televising of the Vietnam invasion that American's, like any other human beings are deeply affected by violence and the pain of others so the reports and the media are strictly controlled. We saw no images on US TV of the dead in the invasion of Panama when they went in to get Noriega, the CIA stooge of Bush senior and Oliver North. Check out the movie, The Panama Deception if you want to see what actually occurred in Panama.

The object of showing us Denny's beating day in day out was to portray the individuals of the LA community as no better than animals and turn us against them, prevent unity between different sections of the working class, to stir up racist antagonism.  The same with the looting whether in LA or London. They used to do the same in the Irish struggles, the violence of the IRA was always available but never the violence of the British state and its occupation.  They do the same when workers have to defend ourselves on picket lines or when the boss takes food from the mouths of our children.  Violence throughout history is always initiated by the state and its forces, workers and the poor are merely responding to it. 

The media did the same in the UK. I saw  a report from Enfield where a group of men were out protecting communities and there to "help the police". They were mixed but mostly white. We sympathize with their anger but when the reporter stuck a mike in one white guy's face, he talked about how these rioters were thugs and "they're not English. " That's not true of course but so what, if the rioters were "English" would that be OK?  This language is what the bosses like to hear,  very divisive, let's blame foreigners.

When people like Obama, Blair, Cameron, the British prime minister or Miliband the Labor Party leader, or the media and its owners like Murdoch and others talk of violence they have no credibility.  These are the perpetrators of violence on a grand scale.  The spark that set off the LA uprising was the Rodney King beating, something that occurred on a daily basis in LA and we were only priviliged to see because a member of the public captured it.  The conditions that exist in that community that were the actual basis for the uprising we never see on their media or extremely rarely and there is always a class bent to it. The same with Britain.  There are some one million youth between the ages of 16 to 24 in the UK who are unemployed.  The British capitalists have cut over $212 billion from social services.  Like Greece, Ireland, Portugal Spain and other countries including the US, the capitalist class are making workers pay for their crisis and it is the youth, the disenfranchised, the ethnic and religious minorities that are driven even further to despair.  This is violence in itself and is the underlying cause of misdirected anger in such events as people just lash out.

As one friend pointed out, if the Labor movement is offended by the mistaken methods of the most abused sections of society then we have an obligation to offer an alternative. When the young guys that beat Denny were brought to trial and threatened with sentences that were far more severe than rapists and murderers have gotten in many cases as a means of "teaching these thugs a lesson", my local passed a motion  I introduced demanding from the LA DA that they not be discriminated against and that their charges and sentences were punitive and discriminatory.  This was one of the most difficult debates we had had as we had a worker almost beaten to death by four youth up here in Oakland. Most in attendance that night were white workers and and we often worked in areas of high unemployment and police abuse of local youth. Many of the youth admitted to me on many occasions that the only white person they knew were cops.

But the argument I made was that we had to take a position that we have to change the condition that creates such situations, and sympathize with the youth while not condoning random violence in any way.  We want to prevent this from happening again to anyone. It was in our best interests as workers to defend the right of a job for the youth in whose community we worked and understand their plight.  Here we were, with good jobs and decent benefits and amid a community with as much as 30% unemployment among the youth, mostly black youth and many of us were white.  No matter who the participants, this is a situation that the bosses will use against us or we use to build a stronger working class movement.  Denny was a teamster.  Had his bosses laid him off and he'd lost his home and livelihood because of it we wouldn't hear a peep about Denny and violence then.  The only part that wasn't passed was that I called for all charges to be dropped.

The young people in the video above are articulating what the issues are.  It is being heard on You Tube.  Of the thousands of hours of television they will hardly get an ear.  The British state run by millionaires is now introducing further repression against the youth.  This is their answer and any repressive laws they introduce after this will be used against trade Unionists and all workers fighting for their rights, just like anti-terrorist laws are.

The uprising int he UK, despite it's negative aspects should be understood in all its complexities for the crisis is not over, capitalism from Italy to Chile is in crisis and the increased security they claim will protect us from the "mob" will be used against us all, have no doubt about that.