Skip to content

When London Burned

 

This week marks the third anniversary of the start of the “summer of disorder” in the UK. In August 2011 the world watched, baffled, as the Brits seemed to be burning all of their cities down to the ground.

We watched as thousands of kids crashed through glass storefronts in Tottenham, London, and Birmingham and stole cellphones and expensive sneakers, and we watched as riot-helmeted cops stormed through street-fires at night, brandishing clubs. Commentators talked a lot about the role of technology in spreading unrest, and about the police brutality that likely kicked it all off. More than three thousand people were arrested.

But the question remained: what the hell happened over there?

For Baffler issue 19 in 2012, Dubravka Ugrešić, a Croatian writer living in the Netherlands, wrote a collection of dispatches from abroad. She wrote about wealthy aquarium hobbyists in Europe, the shrinking population of Croatia, hunger in Bulgaria, literary salons in Poland, and many other things besides. One of her pieces, “Jumping Off the Bridge,” is about the London riots.

She writes:

The devastating fact is that the majority of the young English rioters are barely literate. The research and the terrifying statistics are there. The reading ability of 63 percent of fourteen-year-old boys from the white working class, and more than 50 percent of their Afro-Caribbean peers, is at the level of the average seven-year-old. The majority of these kids leave school and continue their education on the streets. “Other kids go from school to university. We go from school to prison,” said one of them. Their “girlfriends” get pregnant early. In comparison with other European countries, Great Britain has the highest rate of teenage pregnancy. At best semiliterate, left to their own devices, and with few chances of finding any kind of job, these kids form an angry, disenfranchised mass whose futures have been stolen. They have absolutely no reason to believe in social institutions, and vandalism is the only means of articulating their fury. “I didn’t want this kind of life. It just happened to me,” said one boy.

So that’s what the hell happened. Ugrešić describes the “heaving mass” of youth in Europe, “a tribe of millions” without either enemy or remedy. She goes on:

All their lives, they’ve had it drilled into them that it’s all down to their personal choices and individual ability. And today, looking at its “feral” children, society, stupefied by the mantras of democracy and free choice, continues to try and convince these kids that they’re cutting off the branch on which they’re sitting. They might be barely literate, but the children know that the branch has been rotten for years, and that it can’t hold their weight in any case. The only weapon they possess is their rage.

Read the rest of Ugrešić’s dispatches, collected together under the heading “My Own Little Mission,” here.