England Burns, Ireland Simmers

England is the land of the orderly queue, the door held open for the next person, the polite “sorry” at even the slightest hint of being on a collision course in the street, and the stifled understated emotions that dare not breach the surface. It is the land where people on crowded trains hide behind their newspapers, talk in discreet whispers, and will not stand up to open a window on even the hottest of summer days for fear of embarrassment. And yet this most docile and civilized of societies descended into chaos, vandalism, and riot for a few summer days in August.

These events are not unprecedented. It was exactly three decades ago that Toxteth in Liverpool and Brixton in London were aflame with civil unrest, which was blamed by editorial writers on everything from black immigration to liberal values. Going back a little further to 1978 one finds the British government under pressure to bring back corporal punishment and “Saturday night floggings” for football hooligans. In 1858 there were equally loud calls for a return to a supposed golden age that had apparently been lost in a steady wave of increasingly permissive values over the previous thirty years. One could trace similar fears that the fabric of society had become threadbare all the way back to antiquity. As for football hooliganism, the less that is said the better.

Nonetheless, these riots come as no surprise to someone like this writer who has lived in the less well-developed inner city areas of England. Substance abuse, petty crime, vandalism, and general antisocial behavior thrive in a Petri dish of a workless culture where one generation after another lives off state handouts. What has changed is that for a brief time a relatively small but significantly large enough number of people saw a weakness in the system and used new communication tools to exploit it. They knew that if enough people acted in unison at the same time, they could overwhelm the forces of law and order and turn urban commercial centers into a scene from a Mad Max film.

Prime Minister David Cameron has been happy to pin the blame on mindless violence and shore up his conservative credentials with promises of a heavy-handed crackdown. The authorities have certainly delivered with a tsunami of offenders being processed by the system, some of them attracting headlines for harsh sentences for supposedly minor offenses. These complaints will find few sympathetic ears and the sentences will play well in the populist press.

But is it wise to dismiss all of the violence as mere thuggery? Certainly in the latter stages of the riots and the copycat events taking place in cities far away from where it all began, the hooligan element is almost certainly the culprit. But the initially peaceful protest was over the police shooting of Mark Duggan in Tottenham during a botched attempt to arrest him on suspicion that he was planning a revenge attack for the fatal stabbing of his cousin. This struck a chord with people who report excessive police use of stop-and-search powers. Some young people citing racial profiling by police have complained at having been stopped and searched up to three times a day while going about normal business. These concerns are legitimate.

Could it happen in Ireland? It’s not as if Irish cities are free of an underclass that does not participate in civil society. Dublin is no different from Salford in having people who feel like they may never own a house, own a car or have a steady job. Poverty in the midst of plenty is a dangerous cocktail. To its credit, Enda Kenny’s government has put initiatives in place to ensure that people are motivated to find new avenues of employment and not be better off on the dole. One such scheme is Job Bridge, a nationally regulated program that allows people to earn an extra €50 per week on top of their dole if they take up an internship in skilled work.

The system requires monitoring to prevent abuse and measures have been put in place. Participating employers may not have laid anyone off in the previous three months and trainees must have been on the live register for three months. Cynicism will doubtless be rampant given the track record of government schemes in Ireland, but this kind of initiative is a vital ingredient of the country’s recovery, deserves credit where it is due, and deserves a chance to see if it makes an impact.

A recession is nature’s way of saying that too many resources have been allocated to one sector and a correction is needed. In Ireland’s case this is the property bubble which caused the construction industry to bloat and swell to engulf nearly a quarter of the economy. Not only was too much money poured into bricks, mortar, kitchen counter tops and roofing, but too many people became builders and they now need to get retrained into more productive careers if they want to remain in the country. Schemes like Job Bridge actually have a good chance of making that happen if they are managed correctly.

Finally, one interesting aspect of the English riots has been the difference in response between the authorities in England and those in a certain other corner of the United Kingdom. Water cannon was one of the tamer crowd control devices used by the RUC during the troubles; plastic bullets were not as subtle, controversially resulting in 17 deaths including children. Sir Hugh Orde, a former PSNI Chief Constable and now president of the Association of Chief Police Officers, deemed the use of such techniques in London inappropriate. In Belfast or Derry it would be considered commonplace.

Mr Orde claims that the difference in London is that the Metropolitan police were not in a life-threatening situation and were not dealing with a politically motivated insurgency. However a more likely explanation as to why these weapons have never been fired in Britain is an attitude that has long been well understood and well documented. The British people and their government have never really considered Northern Ireland to be an integral part of their own country. It has always been considered a place apart; a place where a different set of values applies.