For the last few days I’d been glued to the television set watching the capital city burn to the ground. At first I had been riveted, hoping to see some good old fashioned civil disorder. After all, I’d been raised on the Miner’s Strike and the Poll Tax riots and it had seemed that we as a people had been finally forced into submission. I recalled the depressing anti-war protests, populated by right-on students who had gone for the photo opportunity, and how we were all collectively herded away from any areas where the protest might have ruffled a few feathers.
An attending French activist asked me what was wrong with the people, why were they doing what they were told. I shrugged and told him we had mostly become apathetic. Amid the chanting and the twats with megaphones spitting out their slogans he told me how in France they knew how to protest and listed examples with a delirious pride. I nodded sagely and had to agree. Later, he was arrested for trying to take the protest to a non-designated area.
When it started I thought it might finally be the spark of something big. Whatever you think about the particulars of the police shooting that triggered the first riots, it was clear that it was something bigger than that and it was spreading. There would be plenty of reasons for the people to rise up, the poorest in society being squeezed dry for every penny, while the news plastered reports of energy companies and banks posting record profits, more bailouts for countries who have been financially mismanaged, white collar criminals going mostly unpunished and more British dead being shipped home from wars that we were told would be finished by now, only after politicians acknowledged they shouldn’t have happened in the first place.
Yet there was a depressing repetition to the reportage, one that made all of these factors not even relevant to the discussion. By the end of the second day the word “rioting” had been mostly replaced with “looting” as people who had took the streets used what was happening as little more than an excuse to steal. It seemed so mindless, that people who genuine cause for grievance could cheapen their own actions in such a manner. It was almost certainly true that the vast majority of people on the streets knew little of Mark Duggan. What I saw was mostly people with no ideology taking to the streets in some sort of blind fury, intent on bagging themselves something as they stripped stolen goods from broken shop fronts like souvenirs.
How fucking tragic to know that there’s an entire generation of people who will be able to say the most politically motivated action in their lives will have been stealing a plasma TV in a crime of opportunity because it was “all kicking off”. Even though I won’t sympathise with big businesses, their targeting seems to have been mostly by accident rather than design. The reality is you can throw a brick on even the smallest high street and hit a McDonalds… It doesn’t point to some sort of Marxist masterplan.
By the third day I had grown mostly bored, despairing of the hysterical calls for martial law from Daily Mail readers, bored by the wannabe anarchists talking about it as being the start of a great revolution. It was nothing more than misplaced anger and a series of thoughtless actions that will likely lead to some sort of backlash through the usual channels.
Still, it was all the way in London and as anyone who works in the media will tell you it’s a bit of a law unto itself down there. The press will make it seem more significant than it is, it’ll be front page news no matter what and the fallout will be discussed for days by mayoral candidates and soapboxing politicians. If it had happened up North they’d have deployed the death squads and we’d all be back to work Monday morning.
Then it came to Birmingham. I happened to be in the city centre on the evening when it came. From my vantage point in an apartment I could hear alarms, see the police vans driving down streets, saw people wandering around outside as if in a daze. I joked that maybe we were having our own riots. Then my phone wouldn’t stop ringing.
It seemed that there had been some shops broken into on New Street and I was told there were gangs amassing in the shopping districts near The Bull Ring. Quickly there was lots of information coming through, my circle of local friends all near the action and giving me updates, some of it laced with what was clear disinformation. For example, it was claimed that someone had sawn through the head of the famous Bull Ring Bull, a clear nod to the Simpsons episode “The Telltale Head” where the statue of Jebediah Springfield met a similar fate,
With it all happening so close I had to go out and see it for myself, to see if maybe there was something more sensible at the heart of Birmingham’s voicing of dissatisfaction. On the streets everyone was talking about it and as I walked to where the heart of where I thought the action would be I caught snippets of conversation… Things like “they’re closing New Street Station” and “the riot police are coming”.
You could hear echoes of people shouting all through the side alleys. Nothing intelligible or politically based, just the noise of a mob that was currently somewhere between angry and jubilant. There were gangs of people running around the city centre, some in masks, some in hoodies and it was clear this was no race riot as the first day of London rioting had been billed. All I saw were people of all different ethnicities texting each other on mobile phones and jumping in cars. None of them wanted to stay and talk. They had better things to do, no political statement to message. The closest I got to anything vaguely coherent was “we’re fucking things up bruv”, which I guess was a fair summary. Not far from me a group were making a beeline towards the Bull Ring mall, but riot police were en-route to intercept them.
I’ll never know what happened because another police officer told me to leave or I’d be arrested. I wasn’t going to argue. This was definitely not my kind of protest, so I set off at pace back to the apartment I’d left not so long ago to hole up for the night and await what happened next. It certainly didn’t end there, that’s for sure. We heard the screams and the shouts as the nearby local Sainsburys was overturned causing one of my colleagues to say “these looters have no taste… Why not go to the Marks and Spencers down the road?”
He always was a middle class tosser at heart but even I had to scratch my head when someone texted me to say the discount clothes Primark was little more than an empty shell. It even got to the stage where we turned off the lights and watched out the window as several groups headed towards the yuppie paradise that is The Mailbox, where apartments and shopping centres collide to make the home of the future. Walking across and blocking the main road it clearly looked like that was the next target. They never got there though. The larger part of the crowd dispersed and the people that looked like they may have been ringleaders got into a series of expensive looking cars and drove off at speed.
It’s now the small hours and all seems quiet, still a police presence in some of the affected areas visible from these windows. This was clearly organised, some even speculating that it was stirred up by people from London as if they were “agent provocateurs”. It’s unlikely to run as long and it looked like it had even less of a political sentiment than those in London. The rioters I saw were treating it in the same way a tourist might treat duty free. It’s there so why not take advantage?
That’s the true sadness, that for the rich political histories of both cities that we are reduced to this – stealing tracksuits and fags in order to stick it to the man. It wasn’t so long ago there were people out on those very same streets marching against facism, refusing to bow to the illiterate thugs of the EDL who had come expecting to march through the city unchallenged. Now, we’re showing political solidarity through stupidity, cheapening any future cause worth taking to the streets for.
It just confirms our inferiority complex here in “the second city”. Only here could we have a sympathy riot that no-one could have any sympathy with.