Compared with other areas, Peckham got off relatively easy last night. Today was a sunny August Peckham shopping day, but with an understandable edge, and people talking outside shops and through broken shop windows. Understandably, some businesses stayed shut, There was no guarantee that the nightmare banditry of yesterday, when the laws disappeared, wouldn't continue in daylight. One elderly shopkeeper was very vocal, scorning both the nervous nellies who had stayed at home and the people of the abyss. Her motto was very much Business as Usual. Just like everyone else I heard voice an opinion.
There were naturally lots of opinions, all of them sincere and urgent. people were afraid and angry and defiant, which is a volatile mix. But the people who confronted Ed Milliband when he showed up unannounced were surprisingly unfortunate for a politician hoping to placate nervous pensioners. This was a far more demanding and informed room.
From the start he was told that society was 'letting the children down', he was given a detailed breakdown of the decline in Southwark's youth budget over the last decade, he was treated to some fascinating home truths about the alienation and demonisation of young people worthy of a veteran social worker. Various people gave him harrowing and vivid accounts of their experiences. If he hadn't known before he found that the kids had now lost their fear, and were not part of the same world as the rest of us, he was told it in no uncertain terms. It was impressed on him that we had somehow created an vast underclass network of gangs with their own morality and their own rules, and that now they had come out into the open. They were not afraid of anything, he was told. Many didn't believe they would live to be thirty anyway, and have nothing to lose anymore.
He listened a lot, and sympathised well, but would not commit in any way, except to the routine explanation of Mass Criminality. In the end, his host Harriet Harman shepherded him into his car and away, before people forgot their manners and got irritated.
He left a Peckham which, like much of London, was very uncertain about tonight. Would the guns come out as desperate shopkeepers defended their property from desperate Berserkirs with no affiliation or affinity with the world of mortgages, qualifications, and laws?
Would this turn into a vicious backlash and open the door to alliances with the likes of the EDL? Sikhs have organised to defend Southall tonight, and there are numerous reports of shops acquiring large aggressive dogs, So presumably, much more weaponry is being stockpiled.
Given that the deep social and cultural sickness which creates such vast mob of desperadoes will not be cured overnight, we are now due for the greatest extension of police powers since 9/11. The fact is that the gangs have stopped killing each other for a few days, and decided to rampage collectively. And looking at this crisis another way, it is an act of unconscious terrorism. And one which, by totally crippling and undermining ordinary life works rather better than the histrionics of Al Qaida.
Leaving aside the deplorable reasons for this vast alienated medieval-scale underclass, their tactics, whether conscious or not, are a criminal masterstroke of stunning brilliance and simplicity. The assorted urban gangs all over the country have simply discovered strength in numbers, and the power of co-operation. After thousands of years of concealing their crimes in fear of prosecution, the criminal classes have completely lost their inferiority complex. So the more who commit crimes, the more will go unpunished. Schools of fish adopt a similar strategy. As a great Leap Forward in the history of Crime it overturns at a stroke all the old assumptions and conventions of secrecy and concealment. They know that they can, if they want, arrive in their longboats and pillage any settlement they choose.
How we prevent a complete slide into chaos is obviously beyond the capacity of any mainstream politicians, with their sadistic punitive fantasy solutions. The likes of Michael Gove and (guess who?) Kelvin McKenzie have already rejected the rational world by explicitly stating that we should not even try to understand the situation. And they sneer the word understand, as if if doing so makes the need for it go away, and makes their hopeless, barbaric remedies more effective. Which raises the question of whether we should we try to understand and explain Kelvin McKenzie and Michael Gove? Or is that to excuse and glorify them?
The task will be left to ordinary people, in the main, talking to each other and trying to find real solutions which can begin to repair the damage of the last 30 years, and trying to resurrect some hope for the next generation of teenagers. Not the futile, impotent demands that the past be re-written, and that hundred of thousands of young people be miraculously re-programmed into obedient, docile, debt-enchained members of the consumer society. As for the Floggers, they must try to remember that many of the kids rioting know exactly what the proverbial Clip Round the Earhole feels like, and the real one too. In fact, I would challenge any black teenager to testify that they had never been licked into shape by their parents.
So many people have warned of this schism for many years. Entire political ideologies have been built on the assumption that what we call civilisation does not stand on solid foundations, and is not sustainable. And that the crisis of its contradictions would invariably cause a mass rejection of its norms which would destroy it from within.
Even though tonight is relatively quiet in London, everyone knows this is now a different world, and that nothing will really be the same again.
all images © rob kenyon 2011
Sleeping it off on the back seat of the 171 - hopefully. Who was to know whether this was just a casualty of too much good times, or something else? And what response would an offer of help or concern get? According to the general wisdom, anyone can be an enemy. And young people carry knives. So don't get involved. If someone wants to die on the back seat of a bus, what business is it of ours?
So the entire bus from Peckham to Catford simply turned away and hoped for the best.
Assuming again that this was innocent enough, and ignoring any larger condemnations of society for the time being, the more mundane fact is that this spectacle is only possible on the unsocial, greasy ghetto of the top deck of one of Batty Boris Johnson's beloved routemasters.
Downstairs, or on a Bendy Bus, instant peer pressure, facial contact and a diverse passenger list creates a far more social environment, and people tend not to disgrace themselves.
Shame Boris can't learn the same lesson somewhere.
I regularly walk the streets of Peckham, New Cross, Deptford and Bermondsey at night, alone, without feeling afraid. So do many other people I know, of both sexes and all sizes, and all of us have done so for many years without any trouble. How can this be possible in an areas which has seen such terrible slaughter? Especially in the past six months. We are loudly told that nowhere in Britain is safe. So my friends and I should be cowering behind double-locked doors until the mini-cab angel appears to escort us safely through the apocalyptic urban charnelhouse to our destination - if we are to believe the media, rather than the official statistics.
Meanwhile, the teenage boys who live in neighbouring flats are definitely terrified. They rightly feel in danger, and have the experience to justify their fears. They retreat into drink and drugs and TV, and choose to play the waiting game, putting their lives on hold until they reach an age when they imagine they will be safe. Several have even given up on school for this reason. In much the same way, teenage girls skip a stage of the real, dangerous world, and rush into motherhood to gain an identity of some kind, and with it some status. Teenage boys can gain a sliver of the same status by being the father, but this is not enough alone.
Why are young, fit, strong men, able to run like the wind, more afraid of their environment than me and my peer group? Why are they killing each other? The simple answer is because their environment is as suitable for them - as a species - as a desert is for a dolphin. In ecological terms, it is a hostile environment. Young homo-sapiens is not an urban animal - at least, not the kind of urban we have in London now. And as less real money is invested in nurturing them through their adolescence, and as the last shreds of community (look it up in an old dictionary) are torn apart by the tax-subsidised property industry and the road transport lobby, the chances of them growing into fully functioning human beings in this wasteland are getting longer with each shopping mall and gated yuppie estate.
The reason I feel safe and they don't is because, in spite of being immediate neighbours, we live in completely different worlds. My peer group have a non-geographical surrogate community created out of work and experience.
Teenagers have not had the time to establish such networks, and because of the failure of the education system and destruction of community spirit, many will never have much of a chance to. They are forced to fall back on the only support they know, from the tribal Old School network, which can carry with it all kinds of infantile vendettas and can be intensely territorial. Also, many will not get jobs, and any they do get will be menial and demeaning - and as such they are branded as a Loser among their peers, who watch the same TV and see the same images which glorify wealth as the only quality deserving of Respect.
They also see politicians and businessmen, the most respected members of society, routinely lying and breaking the law to get richer and even more respected, and they naturally assume they are just as entitled to resort to crime as anyone else.
They see politicians and businessmen starting wars to get rich, and naturally assume that if human life is that cheap to the most respected members of society, that they are just as entitled to place the same value on life to get what they want.
The media have recently been accused of glamorising knife crime, and of deliberately making people afraid, all of which is naturally true, but the overriding message glorified in the press, on TV, in music, movies, online, and by the games industry is that You Are On Your Own. Nobody will look after you but you. You are responsible for your own fate. There Is No Such Thing As Society. Their parents are bombarded with the same crippled ethos, and this is the result.
The media are striking back by accusing the government of lying. The recent statistics which show violent crime to be no worse than in the past are being distorted. The real rate of stabbings, in particular, being blunted by the reluctance of victims to report to the police.
There are no ways of knowing how much real truth there is to any of this speculation, but none of it alters the essential truth, that children across the country, but particularly in the inner cities, are being systematically robbed of their right to a normal, productive adolescence, and robbed of their opportunities to lead healthy, fulfilled lives. They are being robbed of their true individuality, and a synthetic substitute personality installed instead. One indifferent to the suffering of others, and ruthless in pursuit of its own interest. Perfect Alan Sugar material, in fact.
They are being robbed left, right and centre, and all the metal detectors, curfews, mandatory sentences and boot camps in the world won't undo the theft without massive, wholehearted, profit-free investment in communities and their people - all of them.
In a world in which long-distance gap-year grand tours of the world are routine for some young people, others, such as my young neighbours, live in a virtual state of seige, behind invisible walls built of schoolday allegiances and a dozen petty squabbles which escalated into violence.
'Stevie's' friend sells a dog to someone else. A friend of his recognises the dog as belonging to a friend of theirs, and so it all kicks off, ending up with stanley knives drawn and 'Stevie' ending up in hospital.
After that, a quarter mile section of the Old Kent Rd is out of bounds. As is the area near either of two rival schools, and much of Peckham and New Cross because of previous, pointless squabbles for Respect. Squabbles which would never happen if there was some achievable purpose to their lives. It is easy for the columnists and radio shock jocks to sneer that they had it tough and they made it to the top. They had the benefit of communities which still worked, and in many cases free university education. They grew up before the profit fetish had destroyed the youth service and the spaces children used to play and grow in. To today's generation of teenagers, the city is a battlefield, not a playground or the cornucopaeia of 'opportunity' and 'choice' touted by the media. It is their version of the cutthroat competition displayed by the nice adult middle class they see ruling the world. And this bearpit is how we teach them to be adults. This is their Nanny State. And their almost constant anger and resentment is entirely natural.
TBC
