#3 A Punishment for Being Poor continued

After Riots: the need to reform consumer non-society 

[The future of the human race]

Ruth Skilbeck

On reflection, I have further points to draw out from the experience I describe in my blog entry UK Riots: "A Punishment for Being Poor"? - life as a young mother on a London council estate.  A main one is that, in a way, anyone can find themselves in the situation of being down and out; but that it is only perhaps when you experience this yourself that you can truly empathise with and understand the reality that it is the 'atmosphere' generated by the social system and the lived experience of being constructed as socially disadvantaged that is produced on inner city 'sink' housing estates, that produces social unrest and disorder manifest in anti-social behaviour exemplified in the riots and looting.

And this is an experience of daily living that is imbued with personal and cultural trauma, that in itself leads to disaffection, withdrawal, disconnection and alienation: the qualities that are physically manifest and reflected in the rundown dangerous precincts of the estates themselves, but this is even more a social problem than individual ‘failing’ of bad luck.

The blog entry is based on my own experience, and approached in a first attempt at putting the riots (and my own experience into perspective). 

From my own experience of living, as a young mother, in those conditions I found that personal and cultural trauma seems to result from the living in the atmosphere of social disadvantage that is constructed in the system of subsidised housing and benefits. As I said in the blog entry, it is as if there is a price to pay, a penalty for going onto social security benefits and subsidised council housing. The price is a loss of social status that is conferred by the system, and which, it seems, is (currently) existentially impossible to escape whilst one is in that atmosphere. As a young mother, that pressure is intensified. 

The 'have-nots' forced into this role feel the affects, the shame and sense of failure of being losers, and this effects how they feel about themselves and society. The class constructions of 'haves' and have-nots' leads to othering. The riots occurred after the announcements of the austerity measures, when services to the poor including youth clubs and libraries were cut back.

To summarise in a Facebook aphorism: 

Moral lesson of Consumer Capitalist Society #1. If enough people are denied access to a life they can only see through 'window shopping', they will break the windows and help themselves.

When did it ever happen that a happy fulfilled person created social mayhem and "mindless crime" at least of the publicly visible, violent, performative kind of riots and open looting that broke out en masse in cities across England? It doesn't happen.  There is a reason that the riots broke out in Tottenham not Sloane Square. In the words of people involved (on youtube videos) they felt as if they were not being listened too, they had no other way of getting people to hear them...

Although there have been calls from religious leaders and many social commentators in the media for reform at all levels of society, so far the focus has been on severity of punishment as a deterrent.

The immediate response of the British government to the rioters has been to sweep them off the streets and into elongated jail terms. Usual sentencing practices have been lifted.

The danger is that is only the 'effects' are addressed through measures such as rioters being thrown into jail for lengthy sentences, this does not address let alone try to solve the problem of the causes of social unrest, and the personal and cultural trauma attendant on severe social disadvantage. 

Poor people who live in council estates are human, and they react as humans (in this case they react, badly, as humans who are disconnected and alienated and angry that they are excluded ). If the social disadvantages, and moral decay of consumer society that offers only false values that create such an  atmosphere, are not addressed, and ways not found to engage the current generation of 'lost' and socially excluded young people in England  - and other cities around the world-  such outbursts of  ‘bad behaviour', of anger, rage and fury will no doubt keep on recurring. 

This has also occurred after 30 years of ‘post humanism’ when humanism was discredited as a philosophy in universities around the world a move that was extremely conducive to the rise of neo-liberalism and economic rationalism, and the concurrent mass transformation of universities into education businesses.

This is not to condone the riots (as many who seek to analyse the causes seem compelled to say).

But it is to conclude that it is in the interests of all in society, including those at the top, to find ways of improving the life opportunities and experiences of those born into less fortunate circumstances, to think broadly and apply socially just policies -  that apply to all whether “rich” or “poor”, allowing education, health and cultural participation for all, and for the greater good of all - if not for the survival of humanity and future of our human race.

As I mentioned in my previous blog entries the riots are a response against the false consciousness and values of consumer society, by those who are most at its mercy- and who are its victims (‘poor’ as they have no education or cultural way out of their limited and constricted situation into a more fulfilling experience of life ‘the good life’ as Plato called it through education or cultural identification consumers) 

In Facebook conversations at the time of the riots we identified literal and symbolic ‘consumption’ of society and young people, maddened by the insidious cruelty of false values and fake desire, fed by media and advertising:

As Zygmunt Bauman said ‎These are not hunger or bread riots. These are riots of defective and disqualified consumers.   

Whereas, said Wednesday Kennedy: for many they may be both (people are hungry on every level)  ... consumed with hunger and desire on an empty belly hurts)...

Desire can never be satisfied in 'consumer society' because it's a fake desire for meaningless commodities, its designed to be insatiable to keep people wanting more and more and never feeling satisfied.

Now the economic system whose advertising fed the desire for consumer commodities is breaking down, riots are breaking out in the areas where people have struggled to 'keep up' with the world they are fed through media- its those who have 'least' who seem to be targetted more by making people feel insecure and that they can increase their social status by having x brand of sportswear or bling...

And it's the case that the riots have followed the proposed austerity cuts, and that these will cutback and block the ways out that were (seen to be) available to the 'poor' through education... (Libraries are being closed and tuition fees increased, as well as closures of youth clubs etc).  It's as if the austerity measures publicly announce the end of 'social mobility' that was touted in the Thatcher era of the so called 'classless society' (which seems like a hollow joke now) which kept people striving for the 'rewards' of consumer society. The ‘urban poor' on council estates bought those values too and strove for consumer goods as signs of social status... now their options are cut off - the dominant ideology of consumerism is revealed as a confidence trick- worked through a betrayal of trust and abuse of power most acutely felt by the 'poor'.

Karen Kennedy: Funny how this war on the poor spans history changes ideologies yet is ubiquitous.

AFTER RIOTS: THE POLITICAL IS PERSONAL

References:

Bauman, Zygmunt 2011, The London Riots- On Consumerism Coming Home to Roost: by Zygmunt Bauman, Social Europe Journal.

http://www.social-europe.eu/2011/08/the-london-riots-on-consumerism-coming-home-to-roost/. 

Hall, Richard 2011, UK riots: To understand is not to condone. Aljazeera. 12 August 2011.

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/08/201181110436244207.html

Pessin, Al 2011, Experts Cite Underlying cause for UK Riots. Voice of America. 15 August 2011.

http://www.voanews.com/english/news/europe/Experts-Cite-Underlying-Causes-for-UK-Riots-127480248.html. 

Hutton, Will & Porter Henry, 2011, Our Wounded Nation will not be Healed by Vengeaful Gestures. Observer, 14 August 2011.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/14/henry-porter-will-hutton-uk-riots-responsibility?INTCMP=SRCH

Williams, Rowan 2011, Rioting is the Choice of Young People with Nothing to Lose. The Guardian, Mon 5 December 2011.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/dec/05/reading-riots-nothing-to-lose. 

2011 BBC Darcus Howe interview. Youtube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtYPN9jP1Nw.

UK Riots: Moral Extremes Reflected in Social Media Use

By Ruth Skilbeck

'Barbarians' at each end of the social scale were blamed for the riots that swept Britain last week; media commentators and religious leaders linked the predominantly socially disadvantaged young rioters behaviour in looting hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of fashion, sports wear and electronic goods across the land to an ethical disconnection, a breakdown in civic identity, deficiency in education, and lack of moral role models and leadership in contemporary consumer society that has been hi-jacked by market values.

Whereas the uprisings in the Arab world this year have been fuelled by a drive for democracy; the rioters in Britain focused on breaking into shops and looting the kinds of consumer items they wanted for themselves. The riots were triggered by the murder of Mark Duggan, a Tottenham man shot dead by the police. The uprisings that swept the land for the next four night may have seemed disproportionate, and dissociated from that event, yet the responses of some commentators and moral leaders, suggest they may be understood as a spontaneous outburst of unlawful acting out that reflects the climate of greed and moral decay of the wider consumer society, at high levels; as Britain prepares for austerity measures. 

The Telegraph pointed out that the riots occurred in England shortly after a series of exposures of corruption, greed and ‘looting’ by the upper classes - through tax evasion, the excessive imbalances of wealth in the GFC and the immoral conduct of the News of the World hacking scandal which saw politicians glossing over the unlawful behavior of media magnates, in a blog article, by Peter Oborne, the Daily Telegraph’s chief political commentator: 'The moral decay of our society is as bad at the top as the bottom' (11/8/11). Amongst several  examples he gave of of high level corruption and greed he included the recent attendance of Prime Minister David Cameron at the News International summer party, “even though the media group was at the time subject to not one but two police investigations” related to the phone hacking scandal. 

Oborne condemned the award to former News of the World editor Andy Coulson of a position in Downing Street “although he knew at the time that Coulson had resigned after criminal acts were committed under his editorship.” 

Oborne pointed out that in order to ever face the problems that have emerged this week in the riots across the land, the problems must be located far more widely than in inner city housing estates. 

He wrote: “The culture of greed and impunity... stretches right up into corporate boardrooms and the Cabinet. It embraces the political and large parts of our media. It is not just its damaged youth, but Britain itself that needs a moral reformation.” 

Meanwhile, the Guardian UK Riots blog, and the Telegraph (12/8/11) reported that in an emergency sitting of the House of Lords, the Archbishop of Canterbury said the riots reflected a “breakdown not of society as such but a sense of civic identity, shared identity, shared responsibility.” He advocated education as part of the solution to revive a sense of moral agency and identity. He said. "Can we once again build a society which takes seriously the task of educating citizens, not consumers, not cogs in an economic system, but citizens.”

The same blog article in the Telegraph quoted the Bishop of London, the Rt Rev. Richard Chartres saying  a lack of “good role models”  for many children in disadvantaged areas was a contributing factor in the looting and disorder of the past week.

Social media was blamed in parliament for aiding the uprisings as rioters contacted each other through BlackBerry Messenger a closed network system where one message can be send out to multiple receivers. There were calls for more regulation. Blackberry agreed to work with the authorities in their investigations.  However social media in the form of twitter was also the means by which people came together in communities in local clean-ups after the riots; showing once again that what is important is not the technological tools of communication but how they are used by people.


© Ruth Skilbeck, 2011

UK Riots: Moral Extremes Reflected in Social Media Use

By Ruth Skilbeck

'Barbarians' at each end of the social scale were blamed for the riots that swept Britain last week; media commentators and religious leaders linked the predominantly socially disadvantaged young rioters behaviour in looting hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of fashion, sports wear and electronic goods across the land to an ethical disconnection, a breakdown in civic identity, deficiency in education, and lack of moral role models and leadership in contemporary consumer society that has been hi-jacked by market values.

Whereas the uprisings in the Arab world this year have been fuelled by a drive for democracy; the rioters in Britain focused on breaking into shops and looting the kinds of consumer items they wanted for themselves. The riots were triggered by the murder of Mark Duggan, a Tottenham man shot dead by the police. The uprisings that swept the land for the next four night may have seemed disproportionate, and dissociated from that event, yet the responses of some commentators and moral leaders, suggest they may be understood as a spontaneous outburst of unlawful acting out that reflects the climate of greed and moral decay of the wider consumer society, at high levels; as Britain prepares for austerity measures. 

The Telegraph pointed out that the riots occurred in England shortly after a series of exposures of corruption, greed and ‘looting’ by the upper classes - through tax evasion, the excessive imbalances of wealth in the GFC and the immoral conduct of the News of the World hacking scandal which saw politicians glossing over the unlawful behavior of media magnates, in a blog article, by Peter Oborne, the Daily Telegraph’s chief political commentator: 'The moral decay of our society is as bad at the top as the bottom' (11/8/11). Amongst several  examples he gave of of high level corruption and greed he included the recent attendance of Prime Minister David Cameron at the News International summer party, “even though the media group was at the time subject to not one but two police investigations” related to the phone hacking scandal. 

Oborne condemned the award to former News of the World editor Andy Coulson of a position in Downing Street “although he knew at the time that Coulson had resigned after criminal acts were committed under his editorship.” 

Oborne pointed out that in order to ever face the problems that have emerged this week in the riots across the land, the problems must be located far more widely than in inner city housing estates. 

He wrote: “The culture of greed and impunity... stretches right up into corporate boardrooms and the Cabinet. It embraces the political and large parts of our media. It is not just its damaged youth, but Britain itself that needs a moral reformation.” 

Meanwhile, the Guardian UK Riots blog, and the Telegraph (12/8/11) reported that in an emergency sitting of the House of Lords, the Archbishop of Canterbury said the riots reflected a “breakdown not of society as such but a sense of civic identity, shared identity, shared responsibility.” He advocated education as part of the solution to revive a sense of moral agency and identity. He said. "Can we once again build a society which takes seriously the task of educating citizens, not consumers, not cogs in an economic system, but citizens.”

The same blog article in the Telegraph quoted the Bishop of London, the Rt Rev. Richard Chartres saying  a lack of “good role models”  for many children in disadvantaged areas was a contributing factor in the looting and disorder of the past week.

Social media was blamed in parliament for aiding the uprisings as rioters contacted each other through BlackBerry Messenger a closed network system where one message can be send out to multiple receivers. There were calls for more regulation. Blackberry agreed to work with the authorities in their investigations.  However social media in the form of twitter was also the means by which people came together in communities in local clean-ups after the riots; showing once again that what is important is not the technological tools of communication but how they are used by people.


© Ruth Skilbeck, 2011

UK Riots: "A Punishment for Being Poor"?- life as a young mother on a London council estate

by Ruth Skilbeck

Twenty years ago I took flight to another life in Australia. But my experience of living as a young mother on a ‘sink’ council housing estate in Camden, North London gave me an insight into the brutal reality of the influences that shape children growing up in that environment - that go beyond individual parenting; to the wider environment and social atmosphere of living in disadvantage in an unequal ‘consumer society’ where greed is a dominant value, the meaning of life is shopping, social status can be ‘bought’ with money, and celebrity culture replaces individual agency. 

It’s taken me a few days to write about the riots of looting, burning and disorder that have torn across England this week, displaying all too vividly evidence of the loosening bonds of the social contract and raising urgent questions of responsibility for the breakdown of civic values in contemporary “Consumer Society” in England. How could the uprisings have happened? 

Like many who have put thoughts into words on the riots that swept across England this week, I have struggled  to understand and analyse these events and put them into a meaningful context. Hordes of masked and hooded teenagers and children running riot, setting fire to buildings, smashing windows and looting hundreds of thousands pounds worth of consumer goods - the most expensive Armani gear, TVs, electronic goods, sports wear- night after night in London, Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham and many smaller cities and town centres, destroying local businesses and causing counter measures by groups of local vigilantes coming onto the streets to defend  property and people... The uprisings were triggered by the murder of Mark Duggan, a Tottenham man shot dead by the police. Yet the magnitude of the waves of ‘apolitical’ riots that followed, and drew in a wide cross sector of male and female, black and white children and teenagers, students and older people, seemed at first surreal, like a cross between a Clockwork Orange, Lord of the Flies, a Ray Bradbury short story... and shopping...All in the height of an English summer as the politicians were away on holiday and the police temporarily stood back.

The news that I’ve been following online, has cut close to the bone; even though I’m far away physically now in Australia; triggereing forgotten memories of why I left London. 

Twenty years ago, next month, I fled the Camden ‘sink’ housing estate where I was living, pregnant and with toddler in tow. I left in search of a better life for my children than the dismal ‘No Future” I saw around me everywhere on the litter-strewn, violent council estate. In the local playgrounds with their hypodermic needles and broken glass. In the domestic violence that blackened eyes and knocked out teeth of young mothers, my neigbours. In the hopelessness of being labelled one of the (millions of) ‘have-nots‘ alienated in Thatcher’s Britain.

I had been allocated a council flat when I was a philosophy student living in a squat with my then husband, an artist with a post-punk band. There was a chronic housing shortage and thousands of vacant council properties across London. We were (by default) part of the ‘Squat the Lot’ squatting movement of the Eighties that utilised those empty properties. For over a year we lived with a group of artists and musicians and a couple who worked in a merchant bank, in a magnificently dilapidated four-storey regency terrace house in Delancey Street one of Camden’s elegant crescents overlooking Regents Park. 

Even though there were some privations (I went through 7 months of my pregnancy with no hot water until someone worked out how to turn on the water heating system) this was compensated by a sense of community and shared purpose in that household. I read Philosophy of Mind and Phenomenology, Brentano, Leibniz, Wittgenstein and Sartre and completed my degree.  When I found out I was expecting I went to the local council, which owned the property, and was informed that the house would not be evicted for at least a year after the baby due date, so we might as well stay put for a while. We decorated our rooms in the basement and made a nursery. Two weeks before the due date, contrary to what I'd been told by the council,  the eviction notice came. Just about to give birth was no time to ask to sleep on a friend’s sofa; with no money for a bond, I went back to the council housing office feeling, desperately, like a certain personage in a well known biblical story. We were given ‘emergency accommodation’ in a ‘bed and breakfast hotel’ that turned out to be the top floor flat of a redbrick Victorian mansion in Tufnell Park. 

This was when my experience of the ‘other world’ began. Like George Orwell in Down and Out in London and Paris, I was to find out firsthand how it felt to be poor and alienated in London. In any other circumstances it could have been a great flat although it was a little small and cramped, comprising two rooms and a kitchenette. When I’d first moved to London eight years before from Dublin as a freelance journalist, by coincidence, I had rented a much smaller studio flat in a similar looking red brick mansion in an adjacent street in Tufnell Park. It was very expensive (on my writer’s budget); the house was filled with young professionals and other working people, my sister and her partner who had an advertising agency in Soho lived upstairs. The flat above mine was filled with a very large family from somewhere in Asia. The corridors were clean and the rubbish bins neatly lined in the well kept front garden. The house was a pleasant place to live, and the residents, though friendly, kept to themselves.

The atmosphere was very different in the house I called the ‘Homeless Hotel’. What was missing was the communal behaviour that enables people to share and maintain a (safe) living space. In the months I lived there -babe in arms- I had to negotiate a dangerous Rottweiler roaming the corridors and defecating on the stairs; watching in horror from my upstairs window the same dog savage the two year old child of the dog owners, in the back garden.The rubbish bins were constantly overflowing with dirty nappies strewn about the front lawn. My mail was stolen for months by my neighbours. The man living in the next door flat with his ten year old daughter, was taken away by the police as he was apparently molesting her. The fighting of the couple with the Rottweiler reverberated through the paper thin walls; every time I passed the young mother she had fresh bruises on her face. One day she had no front teeth.  Every Thursday Danny the owner of the building would drive up in his latest model Porsche to collect the sheets and hand out fresh ones. That was the extent of his hotel services, for which he charged the council a staggering 580 pounds a week for our small flat alone (and there were six flats in the building). He swaggered in and out of the house with a big smile on his smooth tanned face. I was perpetually surprised by how well he got on with my brawling neighbours and never mentioned the Rottweiler in the hallway. They seemed to admire his audacity and talked about him indulgently as if they felt favoured to have a ‘landlord’ with a Porsche. I on the other hand could not relate to him at all. 

After several months the disconnection from social normalcy began to threaten my sense of identity, and affect my relationship with my husband. I had thought we were an island of creativity and enlightened values, but it seemed that we were not immune to the toxic atmosphere we were living in.

When I moved to the estate I realised after a short while that it was not much better- it was not an atmosphere that I wanted my children to grow up in. No matter how much I wanted it to be a good place to live, I could see there were problems that were way beyond my capacity to change. It was as if the problems were built into the very structure of the estate itself. Pregnant and ill with bronchitis, I was overcome by the urge to take flight. 

Due to my parents Australian/British heritage we were able to emigrate to Australia to bring up the children in a very different environment and atmosphere in Sydney.

This week, watching the riots online in podcasts on my laptop, reading the rolling blogs and coverage from the Guardian online, the memories of how and why I left come flooding back. I still have two sisters in London, in Hackney and Brixton, boroughs which like Camden were amongst the centres of the riots; yet they stayed and brought up their children there. I was born in Clapham, and it’s true too that, ironically, for many years not a day passed that I did not miss my hometown like an amputated limb. Paradoxically I also had regular anxiety dreams that we’d never left the flat on the Estate.

As I watch the coverage and read the reports and analyses, I realise that my instinct to flee was (most probably) justified. If we’d stayed there my children could have grown up on that estate. There was nothing much for the kids to do. They formed gangs because they identified with each other. (There are now over one million young people in London alone that do not have jobs or an education). Pushing my baby buggy through beautiful millionaire’s Camden Square across the road to the estate was not a good feeling, it made me feel like a social failure. Some of my friends refused to visit. A woman from my baby group said she wouldn’t visit me in the estate because she didn’t feel safe walking there.

I came from a different social background (my parents were academics)  but like many I found myself in circumstances needing accommodation yet not being able to afford the ‘market rent’ for a family home; a council flat seemed like a viable option. It was as if in taking that option, I had crossed an invisible line. As if there was a symbolic price to pay for the subsidised housing and that was a visible loss of social standing. It was like a punishment for being poor.      


                                                       *

Whilst the authorities have gone about the process of arresting and charging the rioters, media commentators have sought to analyse and understand the ‘root causes’ of the uprisings.

In the analyses of the riots numerous commentators refer to to social inequalities and the culture of greed building up over thirty years since the last major riots in Brixton in 1981 in the Thatcher era; when Thatcher declared that there was no such thing as society just lots of individuals. I lived in London for ten years of those thirty, throughout the 80s of ‘Thatcher’s Britain’ when one of the oft heard  slogans was ‘Greed is Good’. It was in that era that social structures that had been built up over decades began to be dismantled.

The initial analyses of the riots have tended to be polarised between the ‘hang em and flog em’ ‘right wing’ criminalization brigade and the ‘its all social conditions’ ‘left wing’ view, yet what has also been emerging in the analyses and commentary in the mainstream media and through the chattering on social media sites facebook, and twitter, is that there is something new and unprecedented in the ‘apolitical’ quality of the uprisings which took as its object the compulsive looting of consumer goods, and which most disturbingly drew in so many children and young teenagers. Many agree that the riots are a reflection of imbalances in ‘consumer society’ that have build up over at least thirty years, since the Thatcher era of the 80s that did away with the idea of society in place of individuals pursuing their own interests.

Some have pointed out that the riots are akin to a reflex, a reflection and an expression of deep discontent rising up within in and against Consumer Society which is also class-based (hence as it has been pointed out why did the riots not start and occur in rich area such as Henley)? Such an analysis attributes in this ‘uprising’ the absence of meaning and values of consumerism where shopping for expensive goods is supposed to give life meaning. Many of the young people were influenced by ‘gangster chic’ rap culture where the music and fashion industry flaunts consumer goods that the majority of ‘consumers’ in the target audience could never afford ( ironically even if some individuals for example ‘celebrities’ do achieve wealth as the recent death of Amy Winehouse showed this does not necessarily bring a meaningful or happy life and can even deepen a sense of individual alienation). 

The fashion brands favoured by the looters have become a source of analysis with some brands furious at  images of rioters in their clothing and what this will do to their image. An article in the Guardian, ‘Love-affair with gangster-chic turns sour for top fashion brands’ (12/8/11) acknowledges that for some this will increase the street-cred of the clothes. 

Quoted in the Guardian, Mark Borkowski, PR and marketing specialist  said: “Brands have been aligning themselves with gang and criminal culture for decades but ramped up their association with less clean-cut figures in recent years.” Borkowski added: “The riots on the streets have triggered unprecedented middle-class opprobrium, but in a sense this adds to the uncomfortable coolness of the brands." In the same article Mark Ritson, columnist for Marketing Week magazine is quoted agreeing that “by association with the riots and looting” the most-stolen brands will receive "extra street cred".

Numerous commentators have pointed out the riots that the riots occurred in England shortly after a series of exposures of the corruption, greed and ‘looting’ of the upper classes - through tax evasion, the excessive imbalances of wealth in the GFC and the immoral conduct of the News of the World hacking scandal which saw politicians glossing over the unlawful behavior of media magnates, as pointed out in a blog article, by Peter Oborne, the Daily Telegraph’s chief political commentator: The moral decay of our society is as bad at the top as the bottom.' (11/8/11). Amongst several  examples of high level corruption, moral decay and greed he included the recent attendance of Prime Minister David Cameron at the News International summer party, “even though the media group was at the time subject to not one but two police investigations” related to the phone hacking scandal. 


Oborne condemned the award to former News of the World editor Andy Coulson of a position in Downing Street “although he knew at the time that Coulson had resigned after criminal acts were committed under his editorship.” 

Oborne pointed out that in order to ever face the problems that have emerged this week in the riots across the land, the problems must be located far more widely than in inner city housing estates. 

He writes: “The culture of greed and impunity we are witnessing on our TV screens stretches right up into corporate boardrooms and the Cabinet. It embraces the political and large parts of our media. It is not just its damaged youth, but Britain itself that needs a moral reformation.” “

The Guardian UK Riots blog, and the Telegraph (12/8/11) reported that in an emergency sitting of the House of Lords, the Archbishop of Canterbury said the riots reflected a “breakdown not of society as such but a sense of civic identity, shared identity, shared responsibility.” He advocated education as part of the solution to inculcate a sense of moral agency and identity.

“Over the last two decades, many would agree that our educational philosophy at every level has been more and more dominated by an instrumentalist model; less and less concerned with a building of virtue, character and citizenship,” he said. "Can we once again build a society which takes seriously the task of educating citizens, not consumers, not cogs in an economic system, but citizens.”

The same blog article in the Telegraph quoted the Bishop of London, the Rt Rev. Richard Chartres saying  a lack of “good role models”  for many children in disadvantaged areas was a contributing factor in the looting and disorder of the past week.

Two hundred  years ago it was poor thieves on London streets that were sent in droves as convicts to Australia.  Now it's not so easy to gain access as the immigration laws have considerably tightened since then. Flight or fight is a typical response to stress.  And that’s also what’s made me uncomfortable about watching the riots from afar, my disconnection: it’s a feeling like survivor guilt. I was able to get out. So many aren’t. Should I have stayed and tried to improve my community on the estate which I had thought seriously about and tried to become involved in until I fell ill (and pregnant) and my survival instinct to flee took over. I still miss all the good aspects about the street life, the ever changing language and creativity of life in London, the freedom of expression and speech and the dry wit, and my family...But at least I can stay in contact through social media; still read the papers every day online. 

My thoughts are with the communities coming together, organising through social media, twitter, to clean up their neighborhoods after the riots, and to all the people and groups with noble intentions who are seeking to repair the damage on more complex levels that are far harder to clean-up.

                                                                                                             
                                                                      14 August 2011

© Ruth Skilbeck, 2011

More to follow on UK riots.

UK Riots: "A Punishment for Being Poor"?- life as a young mother on a London council estate

by Ruth Skilbeck

Twenty years ago I took flight to another life in Australia. But my experience of living as a young mother on a ‘sink’ council housing estate in Camden, North London gave me an insight into the brutal reality of the influences that shape children growing up in that environment - that go beyond individual parenting; to the wider environment and social atmosphere of living in disadvantage in an unequal ‘consumer society’ where greed is a dominant value, the meaning of life is shopping, social status can be ‘bought’ with money, and celebrity culture replaces individual agency. 

It’s taken me a few days to write about the riots of looting, burning and disorder that have torn across England this week, displaying all too vividly evidence of the loosening bonds of the social contract and raising urgent questions of responsibility for the breakdown of civic values in contemporary “Consumer Society” in England. How could the uprisings have happened? 

Like many who have put thoughts into words on the riots that swept across England this week, I have struggled  to understand and analyse these events and put them into a meaningful context. Hordes of masked and hooded teenagers and children running riot, setting fire to buildings, smashing windows and looting hundreds of thousands pounds worth of consumer goods - the most expensive Armani gear, TVs, electronic goods, sports wear- night after night in London, Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham and many smaller cities and town centres, destroying local businesses and causing counter measures by groups of local vigilantes coming onto the streets to defend  property and people... The uprisings were triggered by the murder of Mark Duggan, a Tottenham man shot dead by the police. Yet the magnitude of the waves of ‘apolitical’ riots that followed, and drew in a wide cross sector of male and female, black and white children and teenagers, students and older people, seemed at first surreal, like a cross between a Clockwork Orange, Lord of the Flies, a Ray Bradbury short story... and shopping...All in the height of an English summer as the politicians were away on holiday and the police temporarily stood back.

The news that I’ve been following online, has cut close to the bone; even though I’m far away physically now in Australia; triggereing forgotten memories of why I left London. 

Twenty years ago, next month, I fled the Camden ‘sink’ housing estate where I was living, pregnant and with toddler in tow. I left in search of a better life for my children than the dismal ‘No Future” I saw around me everywhere on the litter-strewn, violent council estate. In the local playgrounds with their hypodermic needles and broken glass. In the domestic violence that blackened eyes and knocked out teeth of young mothers, my neigbours. In the hopelessness of being labelled one of the (millions of) ‘have-nots‘ alienated in Thatcher’s Britain.

I had been allocated a council flat when I was a philosophy student living in a squat with my then husband, an artist with a post-punk band. There was a chronic housing shortage and thousands of vacant council properties across London. We were (by default) part of the ‘Squat the Lot’ squatting movement of the Eighties that utilised those empty properties. For over a year we lived with a group of artists and musicians and a couple who worked in a merchant bank, in a magnificently dilapidated four-storey regency terrace house in Delancey Street one of Camden’s elegant crescents overlooking Regents Park. 

Even though there were some privations (I went through 7 months of my pregnancy with no hot water until someone worked out how to turn on the water heating system) this was compensated by a sense of community and shared purpose in that household. I read Philosophy of Mind and Phenomenology, Brentano, Leibniz, Wittgenstein and Sartre and completed my degree.  When I found out I was expecting I went to the local council, which owned the property, and was informed that the house would not be evicted for at least a year after the baby due date, so we might as well stay put for a while. We decorated our rooms in the basement and made a nursery. Two weeks before the due date, contrary to what I'd been told by the council,  the eviction notice came. Just about to give birth was no time to ask to sleep on a friend’s sofa; with no money for a bond, I went back to the council housing office feeling, desperately, like a certain personage in a well known biblical story. We were given ‘emergency accommodation’ in a ‘bed and breakfast hotel’ that turned out to be the top floor flat of a redbrick Victorian mansion in Tufnell Park. 

This was when my experience of the ‘other world’ began. Like George Orwell in Down and Out in London and Paris, I was to find out firsthand how it felt to be poor and alienated in London. In any other circumstances it could have been a great flat although it was a little small and cramped, comprising two rooms and a kitchenette. When I’d first moved to London eight years before from Dublin as a freelance journalist, by coincidence, I had rented a much smaller studio flat in a similar looking red brick mansion in an adjacent street in Tufnell Park. It was very expensive (on my writer’s budget); the house was filled with young professionals and other working people, my sister and her partner who had an advertising agency in Soho lived upstairs. The flat above mine was filled with a very large family from somewhere in Asia. The corridors were clean and the rubbish bins neatly lined in the well kept front garden. The house was a pleasant place to live, and the residents, though friendly, kept to themselves.

The atmosphere was very different in the house I called the ‘Homeless Hotel’. What was missing was the communal behaviour that enables people to share and maintain a (safe) living space. In the months I lived there -babe in arms- I had to negotiate a dangerous Rottweiler roaming the corridors and defecating on the stairs; watching in horror from my upstairs window the same dog savage the two year old child of the dog owners, in the back garden.The rubbish bins were constantly overflowing with dirty nappies strewn about the front lawn. My mail was stolen for months by my neighbours. The man living in the next door flat with his ten year old daughter, was taken away by the police as he was apparently molesting her. The fighting of the couple with the Rottweiler reverberated through the paper thin walls; every time I passed the young mother she had fresh bruises on her face. One day she had no front teeth.  Every Thursday Danny the owner of the building would drive up in his latest model Porsche to collect the sheets and hand out fresh ones. That was the extent of his hotel services, for which he charged the council a staggering 580 pounds a week for our small flat alone (and there were six flats in the building). He swaggered in and out of the house with a big smile on his smooth tanned face. I was perpetually surprised by how well he got on with my brawling neighbours and never mentioned the Rottweiler in the hallway. They seemed to admire his audacity and talked about him indulgently as if they felt favoured to have a ‘landlord’ with a Porsche. I on the other hand could not relate to him at all. 

After several months the disconnection from social normalcy began to threaten my sense of identity, and affect my relationship with my husband. I had thought we were an island of creativity and enlightened values, but it seemed that we were not immune to the toxic atmosphere we were living in.

When I moved to the estate I realised after a short while that it was not much better- it was not an atmosphere that I wanted my children to grow up in. No matter how much I wanted it to be a good place to live, I could see there were problems that were way beyond my capacity to change. It was as if the problems were built into the very structure of the estate itself. Pregnant and ill with bronchitis, I was overcome by the urge to take flight. 

Due to my parents Australian/British heritage we were able to emigrate to Australia to bring up the children in a very different environment and atmosphere in Sydney.

This week, watching the riots online in podcasts on my laptop, reading the rolling blogs and coverage from the Guardian online, the memories of how and why I left come flooding back. I still have two sisters in London, in Hackney and Brixton, boroughs which like Camden were amongst the centres of the riots; yet they stayed and brought up their children there. I was born in Clapham, and it’s true too that, ironically, for many years not a day passed that I did not miss my hometown like an amputated limb. Paradoxically I also had regular anxiety dreams that we’d never left the flat on the Estate.

As I watch the coverage and read the reports and analyses, I realise that my instinct to flee was (most probably) justified. If we’d stayed there my children could have grown up on that estate. There was nothing much for the kids to do. They formed gangs because they identified with each other. (There are now over one million young people in London alone that do not have jobs or an education). Pushing my baby buggy through beautiful millionaire’s Camden Square across the road to the estate was not a good feeling, it made me feel like a social failure. Some of my friends refused to visit. A woman from my baby group said she wouldn’t visit me in the estate because she didn’t feel safe walking there.

I came from a different social background (my parents were academics)  but like many I found myself in circumstances needing accommodation yet not being able to afford the ‘market rent’ for a family home; a council flat seemed like a viable option. It was as if in taking that option, I had crossed an invisible line. As if there was a symbolic price to pay for the subsidised housing and that was a visible loss of social standing. It was like a punishment for being poor.      


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Whilst the authorities have gone about the process of arresting and charging the rioters, media commentators have sought to analyse and understand the ‘root causes’ of the uprisings.

In the analyses of the riots numerous commentators refer to to social inequalities and the culture of greed building up over thirty years since the last major riots in Brixton in 1981 in the Thatcher era; when Thatcher declared that there was no such thing as society just lots of individuals. I lived in London for ten years of those thirty, throughout the 80s of ‘Thatcher’s Britain’ when one of the oft heard  slogans was ‘Greed is Good’. It was in that era that social structures that had been built up over decades began to be dismantled.

The initial analyses of the riots have tended to be polarised between the ‘hang em and flog em’ ‘right wing’ criminalization brigade and the ‘its all social conditions’ ‘left wing’ view, yet what has also been emerging in the analyses and commentary in the mainstream media and through the chattering on social media sites facebook, and twitter, is that there is something new and unprecedented in the ‘apolitical’ quality of the uprisings which took as its object the compulsive looting of consumer goods, and which most disturbingly drew in so many children and young teenagers. Many agree that the riots are a reflection of imbalances in ‘consumer society’ that have build up over at least thirty years, since the Thatcher era of the 80s that did away with the idea of society in place of individuals pursuing their own interests.

Some have pointed out that the riots are akin to a reflex, a reflection and an expression of deep discontent rising up within in and against Consumer Society which is also class-based (hence as it has been pointed out why did the riots not start and occur in rich area such as Henley)? Such an analysis attributes in this ‘uprising’ the absence of meaning and values of consumerism where shopping for expensive goods is supposed to give life meaning. Many of the young people were influenced by ‘gangster chic’ rap culture where the music and fashion industry flaunts consumer goods that the majority of ‘consumers’ in the target audience could never afford ( ironically even if some individuals for example ‘celebrities’ do achieve wealth as the recent death of Amy Winehouse showed this does not necessarily bring a meaningful or happy life and can even deepen a sense of individual alienation). 

The fashion brands favoured by the looters have become a source of analysis with some brands furious at  images of rioters in their clothing and what this will do to their image. An article in the Guardian, ‘Love-affair with gangster-chic turns sour for top fashion brands’ (12/8/11) acknowledges that for some this will increase the street-cred of the clothes. 

Quoted in the Guardian, Mark Borkowski, PR and marketing specialist  said: “Brands have been aligning themselves with gang and criminal culture for decades but ramped up their association with less clean-cut figures in recent years.” Borkowski added: “The riots on the streets have triggered unprecedented middle-class opprobrium, but in a sense this adds to the uncomfortable coolness of the brands." In the same article Mark Ritson, columnist for Marketing Week magazine is quoted agreeing that “by association with the riots and looting” the most-stolen brands will receive "extra street cred".

Numerous commentators have pointed out the riots that the riots occurred in England shortly after a series of exposures of the corruption, greed and ‘looting’ of the upper classes - through tax evasion, the excessive imbalances of wealth in the GFC and the immoral conduct of the News of the World hacking scandal which saw politicians glossing over the unlawful behavior of media magnates, as pointed out in a blog article, by Peter Oborne, the Daily Telegraph’s chief political commentator: The moral decay of our society is as bad at the top as the bottom.' (11/8/11). Amongst several  examples of high level corruption, moral decay and greed he included the recent attendance of Prime Minister David Cameron at the News International summer party, “even though the media group was at the time subject to not one but two police investigations” related to the phone hacking scandal. 


Oborne condemned the award to former News of the World editor Andy Coulson of a position in Downing Street “although he knew at the time that Coulson had resigned after criminal acts were committed under his editorship.” 

Oborne pointed out that in order to ever face the problems that have emerged this week in the riots across the land, the problems must be located far more widely than in inner city housing estates. 

He writes: “The culture of greed and impunity we are witnessing on our TV screens stretches right up into corporate boardrooms and the Cabinet. It embraces the political and large parts of our media. It is not just its damaged youth, but Britain itself that needs a moral reformation.” “

The Guardian UK Riots blog, and the Telegraph (12/8/11) reported that in an emergency sitting of the House of Lords, the Archbishop of Canterbury said the riots reflected a “breakdown not of society as such but a sense of civic identity, shared identity, shared responsibility.” He advocated education as part of the solution to inculcate a sense of moral agency and identity.

“Over the last two decades, many would agree that our educational philosophy at every level has been more and more dominated by an instrumentalist model; less and less concerned with a building of virtue, character and citizenship,” he said. "Can we once again build a society which takes seriously the task of educating citizens, not consumers, not cogs in an economic system, but citizens.”

The same blog article in the Telegraph quoted the Bishop of London, the Rt Rev. Richard Chartres saying  a lack of “good role models”  for many children in disadvantaged areas was a contributing factor in the looting and disorder of the past week.

Two hundred  years ago it was poor thieves on London streets that were sent in droves as convicts to Australia.  Now it's not so easy to gain access as the immigration laws have considerably tightened since then. Flight or fight is a typical response to stress.  And that’s also what’s made me uncomfortable about watching the riots from afar, my disconnection: it’s a feeling like survivor guilt. I was able to get out. So many aren’t. Should I have stayed and tried to improve my community on the estate which I had thought seriously about and tried to become involved in until I fell ill (and pregnant) and my survival instinct to flee took over. I still miss all the good aspects about the street life, the ever changing language and creativity of life in London, the freedom of expression and speech and the dry wit, and my family...But at least I can stay in contact through social media; still read the papers every day online. 

My thoughts are with the communities coming together, organising through social media, twitter, to clean up their neighborhoods after the riots, and to all the people and groups with noble intentions who are seeking to repair the damage on more complex levels that are far harder to clean-up.

                                                                                                             
                                                                      14 August 2011

© Ruth Skilbeck, 2011

More to follow on UK riots.