Violent urban protest – identities, ethics and Islamism
Chapter in:
Gargi Bhattacharyya (ed.) (2009) Ethnicities
and Values in a Changing World, Farnham: Ashgate
To be cited as:
Farrar, Max (2009) ‘Violent urban protest – identities, ethics and Islamism’ in Bhattacharyya, Gargi (ed.) (2009) Ethnicitiesand Values in a Changing World, Farnham: Ashgate
Violent urban protest – identities, ethics and Islamism
Max Farrar, Leeds Metropolitan University
Introduction
This chapter traces the violent urban protest (that others call ‘riot’) which have punctuated British cities since the 1970s. It discusses sociological responses to ‘riot’ and argues for a re-framing of this type of activity, conceptualising it as ‘violent urban protest’. It places the bombing of London on 7th July 2005 by Leeds-based British Muslims in the context of this history of urban upheaval, in particular the protests by British Muslims in four northern cities in 2001. The chapter utilises the sociology of ‘identity’ and ‘identifications’ as a means of analysing the emergence of Islamism in the UK. It explains the parallels between the ethical legitimation of violence by supporters of violent urban protesters and those who advocate violent jihad.
Violent urban protests in the UK since 1975
This chapter argues that to properly understand the so-called Islamist violence, and plans for violence, in Britain in the 21st century we must place this in the context of a long and bitter history of violent urban protest by white, black and brown-skinned British youths since 1975. The trauma of the destruction in New York and Washington on 11th September 2001 (“9/11” as it became known) displaced attention in the UK to violence and arson in four northern British towns just a few months before 9/11. The events that most commentators mistakenly summarise as ‘riots’ began in Oldham, Lancashire, at the end of May, 2001 (Saturday 26th to Tuesday 29th). There was a firebombing of the home of the British Asian Deputy Mayor, Councillor Riaz Ahmad, on Friday 1st June. Violence took place in several parts of Oldham with high populations of residents of Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin. Councillor Ahmad’s house was extensively damaged and he, and his family, narrowly escaped with their lives (Oldham Independent Review [OIR], December 2001, p. 71). Just over a month later, over the night of 5th June, violent protest took place in the Harehills area of Leeds, in West Yorkshire (Yorkshire Evening Post, 6 June 2001). Harehills is an inner city area which has a high proportion of residents of Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin. Just over two weeks after this, violent protests took place in Burnley, Lancashire (23rd – 25th June) (Burnley Task Force Summary Report December 2001 p. 5). After about another fortnight, urban violence took place on the afternoon and evening of 7th July, in Bradford, West Yorkshire, mainly in the inner city area, where there is a high proportion of people of Pakistani origin (Yorkshire Evening Post, 9 July 2001).
The press usually defined these events as the worst riots in the UK for fifteen years. Since there were no significant ‘riots’ in 1986, their marker must be presumed to be the major events of 1985. Violent urban protest took place in Liverpool on 30th August (an attack on a police station), in the Handsworth area of Birmingham on 9th – 11th September (two dead, 50 properties gutted by fire), in the Brixton area of London (a siege of a police station on 28th September, and protests on the streets in response to the shooting by police of a black mother, Mrs Cherry Groce); in the Tottenham area of London when violence erupted in response to the death of another black mother, Mrs Cynthia Jarret, during a police raid on her house, culminating in the murder of a police officer, Keith Blakelock (Benyon and Solomos 1987 pp 15-21, Hiro 1992 pp. 97-9, Gilroy 1987 pp. 236-45). Reference might also have been made, had the journalists done their research, to the violent disorder that broke out throughout the UK during 1981. On the night of 10th July 1981, so-called riots took place in Moss Side (Manchester, 53 arrests), throughout London (385 arrests), Birmingham (42 arrests), Wolverhampton (22 arrests), Liverpool (65 arrests), Preston (24 arrests), Hull (27 arrests) and Luton (one arrest). Over the week-end of 10th – 11th July 1981 there was further disorder in Manchester, London and Birmingham, and in another 25 cities and towns, including Leeds, Bradford and Tunbridge Wells, with a further 1,065 arrests. The precursor to this conflagration was violent protest in the St Paul’s area of Bristol (2nd April 1981, 100 arrests), in Brixton, London (9 – 13 April, 244 arrests), Finsbury Park, London (20th April, 91 arrests), Southall, London (3rd July, 23 arrests), Toxteth, Liverpool (3rd – 8th July, 200 arrests) (Farrar 1982, p. 7, Benyon and Solomos 1987 pp 3-15). And the ‘2,000 mainly black citizens, many in their mid-teens’ who fought the police during and after a raid on the Black and White Café in St Paul’s, Bristol, on 2nd April 1980 should also be mentioned in this context (Hiro 1992 p. 85, Gilroy 1987 pp. 237-40), as should the attack on the Leeds’ police launched by black youth in Chapeltown on 5th November 1975 (twelve arrests) (Farrar 2002), and the violent battles between black youth and the police at the Notting Hill Carnival in London on 30th August 1976 (both of which are undocumented, so far as I can see, in the published histories of black Britain). The Table below summarises these events.
Table 1: Violent urban protest in the UK since 1975
2001 / 26-29 May / Oldham, Lancashire5th June / Harehills, Leeds, West Yorkshire
23rd – 25th June / Burnley, Lancashire
7th July / Manningham, Bradford, W Yorks
1985 / 30th August / Toxteth, Liverpool
9th-11thSeptember / Handsworth, Birmingham
28th September / Brixton, London
6th October / Tottenham, London
1981 / 3rd July, / Southall, London
3rd – 8th July / Toxteth, Liverpool
10th July 1981 / Moss Side, Manchester
“ / throughout London
“ / Birmingham
“ / Wolverhampton
“ / Liverpool
“ / Preston
“ / Hull
“ / Luton
10th – 11th July / 28 cities, including Leeds
2nd April / St Paul’s Bristol
9 – 13 April / Brixton, London
20th April / Finsbury Park, London
1980 / 2nd April / St Paul’s Bristol
1976 / 30th August / Notting Hill, London
1975 / 5th November / Chapeltown, Leeds
This listing is no substitute for a proper history of violent urban protest in the UK. But it is important to list them, in order to place the events of 2001 in the Northern towns in the context of more than twenty years of violent urban protest involving significant numbers of black (African-Caribbean and Asian) British youth.
Violent urban protest’ – not ‘riot’
In popular discourse, these events are described as ‘riots’. Stronger terms are often used, as in this editorial after the protests in Harehills (Leeds) in 2001:
Barbaric episodes of rioters hurling petrol bombs, bricks, wooden crates, bottles and stones, produced a depressing tableau depicting a city at odds with itself and communities uneasy with each other (Yorkshire Evening Post 6.6.02).
Jack Straw, then the Labour government’s Home Secretary, was quoted as saying that there is ‘no excuse’ for this ‘criminal behaviour’. This framing device powerfully positions the people engaging in these protests as mindless barbarians, for whom prison is the only answer.
Sociologists have been coy in their re-framing of these protests. The events in Chapeltown (1975) and Notting Hill (1976) were not presumed significant enough to be allocated a chapter in the book titled Racism and Political Action edited by Robert Miles and Annie Phizaklea and published in 1979. But John Rex’s chapter ‘Black Militancy and Class Conflict’, made some interesting points. Rex’s Weberian studies of the Handsworth and Sparkbrook areas of Birmingham in the 1960s and 1970s (Rex and Moore 1967, Rex and Tomlinson 1979) had provided him with the opportunity to observe black community and political organisation at first hand. Rex concluded ‘that the black political movements are moving towards a posture of defensive confrontation and that they are quite realistic in doing so’ (Rex 1979 p. 91). Although he made no reference to the protests it provoked, Rex described the police operation against pickpockets at the Notting Hill Carnival of 1976 as ‘extraordinary’ (Rex 1979 p. 90).
In a collection of articles on the so-called riots of the 1980s edited by Benyon and Solomos (1987), John Beynon provided a typology of the discourses surrounding these events. There were three identifiable positions among those who offered explanations of what they usually called riots:
- conservative: these are criminal activities by morally degenerate ‘riffraff’ who have no respect for law and order, possibly stimulated by political agitators;
- liberal: poverty and relative deprivation give rise to aggression and/or cognitive dissonance; and
- radical: alienated, politically marginal people perceive the injustice of their situation and respond violently (Benyon 1987).
While there is no specific critique of the concept of ‘riot’ in this book, Benyon seeks to establish the term ‘urban unrest’ in place of ‘riot’, the term which is unreflectively used in the conservative and liberal discourses. Rex’s concept of ‘defensive confrontation’, if applied to so-called riots, would fit in the radical category since he situates his analysis within the systematic exclusion of black people from the trade union movement, the housing market and the education system, and he sees their confrontational response as rational and justifiable. In his chapter in the Benyon and Solomos book Stuart Hall picks up the term ‘urban unrest’, arguing that ‘the central question concerns the extensive alienation of the black population in this society, and urban unrest flows from that deep sense of injustice’ (Hall 1987).
Another sociological analysis of the 1981 and 1985 so-called riots appears in the final chapter of Paul Gilroy’s There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack (1987). Gilroy makes an interesting attempt to employ Tourraine’s, Castells’ and Melucci’s 1980’s social movements theories to what he initially terms the ‘disorderly protest’ (1987 p. 224) exemplified in the events of 1981 and 1985. Later he uses the terms ‘disruptive protest’ (p. 236) and ‘riotous protests’ (p. 244), but his shorthand throughout the chapter is riot, without scare quotes or other qualifiers. Gilroy is perfectly clear, however, that these events are to be understood as rational, organised, and as ‘conveying antagonism to the world as it is’, embodying ‘a view of how participants would like it to be’. They are not reducible to ‘”marginality” and “deviance”, terms which imply that they are nothing more than crude reactions to crisis, lacking cognitive, affective and normative dimensions’ (1987 p. 237).
My initial characterisation of the so-called riots in Chapeltown and Harehills in Leeds in 1975 and in 1981 would be also be placed in the ‘radical’ category, since I sought to theorise those events as ‘uprisings’ by black and, in 1981, white working class youth who were responding politically to racism, unemployment and police brutality (Farrar 1982). Linton Kwesi Johnson, then in the Race Today Alliance, published a poem about ‘insurrection’ of black youth (Johnson 1984), and even some journalists adopted ‘uprising’ as their descriptor (Kettle and Hodges 1982). In his important study of policing the black populations of Notting Hill, in London, Michael Keith (1993) uses scare quotes for ‘riots’ and seems to prefer the term ‘uprisings’. By the end of the 1990s, however, my own ‘uprising’ analysis seemed inadequate. The growth of ethnic segmentation and apolitical professionalisation and individualism; the collapse of radical, local organisations; the growth of hard drug sales and use, and other criminal activity among a small but significant section of the youth would not have progressed so swiftly had the radical politics I had detected in the 1975 and 1981 violent protests been real, and firmly embedded in local society (Farrar 2002). Thus I now reject the term ‘uprising’ as a replacement for ‘riot’, since it imputes conscious political meanings to these events which are not usually held by the majority of the participants. But the other proposed alternatives – ‘defensive confrontation’, ‘unrest’, ‘riotous protest’ ‘the violence of hopelessness’ – have significant drawbacks. Rex’s use of ‘defensive’ is misleading in relation to these events, since participants have engaged in a violent attack on the police and property; Benyon and Hall’s ‘unrest’ fails to capture the intense hostility that underlies these attacks; and Gilroy’s use of ‘riotous’ fails to undermine the effort to establish as hegemonic the theory that these events are mere acts of criminality. But even these formulations disappeared in a response to ‘the fires that burned across Lancashire and Yorkshire through the summer of 2001’ by Arun Kundnani of the Institute of Relations, a Marxist research group and library. Contrasting these events with the ‘uprisings’ and ‘organised community self-defence’ of 1981 and 1985’, Kundnani (2001) described them as ‘the violence of hopelessness . . . the violence of the violated’.
The phrase I now seek to substitute for ‘riot’ is ‘violent urban protest’. This picks up Benyon’s point that these are specifically urban phenomenon, and suggests we should examine the spaces in which they occur – spaces which are socially produced, as Lefebvre (1991) has argued, within the political and economic processes of the modern city. It also picks up Gilroy’s point that these events are best understood as forms of protest, and that, therefore, social movement theory will be relevant to their analysis. What I have termed the ‘proto-politics’ of these events, therefore, require examination (Farrar 2002). Re-phrased as ‘urban protest’, one set of the ethical implications can be clarified. In modern democratic society, protest is ethically legitimate, and within radical democratic discourse it is positively valued, by references as varied as the Levellers of the English civil war, the Suffragettes in early feminism, the civil rights movement in the USA or the Miners’ Strike in Britain in 1983-4. But I want to stress the use of ‘violent’ as an important constituent of the term I propose. It is the forceful and dramatic use of violence which distinguishes these phenomena from the other types of political action we observe and engage with in the inner city. It is the move away from the seminar and onto the street as the form of negotiation with the police, and the decision to destroy the urban fabric rather than to debate the best methods of regeneration that draws a fierce ideological line between the participants and the rest of the inner-city population. The ethical implications of the public adoption of violence as a proto-political tactic will be explored later in this chapter; at this point I simply note that even the radical democratic tradition normally eschews violence as unethical, either by explicit adoption of the Gandhian ethic of non-violence or by the argument that worthy ends cannot be achieved by unworthy means. It is because of ethical qualms like these, I suggest, that even radical commentators such as those cited above have deployed concepts like ‘defensive confrontation’ or ‘riotous protest’, backing off from the violence, destruction, and sometimes death (e.g. PC Blakelock’s murder in the Broadwater Farm violent urban protests in Tottenham, London, on 6th October 1985) that characterises ‘riot’.
The tumult of the 2001 protests in northern English towns was brushed aside when political Islamists attacked New York and Washington in September of that year. When supporters of Al Qu’eda who grew up in my own city of Leeds bombed London in July 2005 public discourse turned to a ferocious attack on the adoption of a multiculturalist ideology in Britain since the 1960s. Elsewhere I have denounced this retreat from multiculturalism (Farrar 2008), but here I want to explore one of the results: the failure to examine the sociological continuities between the long history of violent urban protest in the UK’s multi-ethnic inner city areas.
Identities and identifications in the British inner city
The assumptions commonly held by political radicals include: ‘the people’ will always ‘rise up’ in protest against the State’s mis-management of society; these ‘uprisings’ will regularly undermine the smooth running of the State, thereby inciting repression; and that all these disturbances have similar causes, namely the oppression felt by those who believe that their well-being is unfairly circumscribed by the State. Radicals’ ethical objections to capitalism and its State apparatus, results in us tending to legitimise these protests, despite holding some anxieties about their violent aspects. Conservatives and liberals, as we have seen, reject this effort at legitimation because they regard both capitalism and its agencies of management as ethically well-founded, despite its practical imperfections (which they believe to be corrected over time by the normal democratic process).
While these ethical arguments are important for the process of forging good governance in the city, they fail to address the sociological processes of shifting identities in the multi-ethnic inner cities of the UK and the ready availability of an identification with violence which may be mobilised not only in the hum-drum routines of everyday life, but, much less often but equally easily legitimated, in violent urban protest. I follow Richard Jenkins’ approach to the concept of identity, which he derives from George Hebert Mead’s pioneering work on ‘the self’. Thus, identity is a process of negotiating relationships of similarity and difference:
the systematic establishment and signification, between individuals, between collectivities, and between individuals and collectivities, of relationships of similarity and difference . . . Social identity is no more essential than meaning; it too is the product of agreement and disagreement, it too is negotiable . . . [i]dentity can in fact only be understood as process. As ‘being’ or ‘becoming’.
(Jenkins 1996 pp. 4-5).
But, as Stuart Hall points out, this process can and does congeal and at certain points in time people will both adopt, and have imposed upon them, relatively stable formations of self which they call identities. But to further stress the processual, even dialectical nature of identity, and to insist on the instability of identities, he argues for the concept of ‘identification’. Hall states:
I use ‘identity’ to refer to the meeting point, the point of suture, between on the one hand the discourses and practices which attempt to ‘interpellate’, speak to us or hail us into place as the social subjects of particular discourses, and on the other hand, the processes which produce subjectivities, which construct us as subjects which can be ‘spoken’ . . . . [This] suturing has to be thought of as an articulation, rather than as a one-sided process, and that in turn places identification, if not identities, firmly on the theoretical agenda.
(Hall 1996 pp. 5 - 6).
Hall’s work inspired the now commonplace assertion that the identities of the ‘new black British subjects’ of the last decades of the Twentieth Century were complex, changing, hybrid and, even ‘diasporic’ (Gilroy 1997). What is hardly researched, however, is the variety of identity positions which have been forged over the past 30 or 40 years by the populations African, Caribbean and Asian in the UK. The goal of white racist and racialising processes to interpellate these black and brown-skinned subjects as, variously: athletic, musical, excitable, criminal, hard-working, lazy, entrepreneurial, inscrutable, intelligent, stupid, split and, overall, inferior to whites has been exposed and effectively critiqued. But, apart from the work of Claire Alexander (1996, 2000) and Miri Song (2003) little of substance has been written which captures the results of the suturing processes through which black and brown citizens produce their own identities. In my study of Chapeltown, the area of black and Asian settlement in Leeds, I charted over a period of about 30 years from 1970 the rise and fall of various types of political identifications (radical, proto-political and reformist), the construction of ethnically particular identities (often but not always with specific religious elements) and of individualist and professional identities (Farrar 2002). All of these positions, I would argue, are observable throughout the UK and shift in their form and their social significance as social conditions change.