Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
You were born in the London borough you now represent, Tottenham. When you were a kid, you witnessed the Broadwater Farm riot there in 1985. Last August, now an MP, you saw the first of the UK riots again strike Tottenham. What was it like on the ground?
I was 13 during the Broadwater Farm riots. I remember how painful and challenging the stigma that attached to Tottenham was. I was away from home during the riots because I had won a scholarship to go to school. It was very difficult having to explain to new friends in a very white environment what was happening in Tottenham.
I never dreamed that 25 years later I would find myself as the member of parliament for my home, yet again articulating what was happening but this time to a wider world. What I struggled to convey when I was 13, and wanted to convey this time, was that 99% of the community of Tottenham was not on the streets and was not rioting.
As I walked up Tottenham High Road on Sunday morning [6 August 2011] when the riots first hit, through the rubble, the glass and the smell of what looked like a war zone, to see buildings that I’d grown up with – the post office, the supermarket, the shop where I bought the lino for my kitchen – burnt to the ground, with fellow constituents standing next to me in their nightclothes, that was the most stressful experience I’ve ever had. It was humbling and emotional.
Three months later you’ve written Out of the Ashes, which I read last night. Besides making the point that the N17 postcode is more than a stamp of criminality, what did you want to get across by writing it?
I started writing this book in the dying days of the Labour government. I became convinced that we would lose the general election, and writing became a form of therapy for me. I was writing about how I thought the government was no longer in touch with the people and the communities on the ground. I came to the view that the two big themes or revolutions of the 20th century – the social liberalism of the 1960s and the economic liberalism of the 1980s – have made us richer and freer as a society, but at this point it’s clear that there are downsides. They have combined to create a hyper-individualistic culture in which we don’t treat each other well. Then the riots happened and my thinking fell into place. The riots are that writ large. And in a sense, recession and riot go together.
In a sentence, how do we change the situation?
We have to give people a stake in society. We have to create and moderate a responsible society against the backdrop of those two revolutions.
Let’s get stuck into your book selection. In Chavs, Owen Jones condemns the demonisation of the working class. And in your own book you criticise the Conservative front-bench talk of “Shameless Britain” and the “Jeremy Kyle generation”. I take it you agree with Jones?
Owen has written an outstanding book that is doing extremely well at the moment. It is seminal in the sense that it has captured the zeitgeist and is reaching deep places. That is because he taps into what is going on in Britain. More and more people define themselves as middle class, and as a consequence there is what appears to be an emerging “other” class. Class remains the unresolved wound that runs throughout British history, in the same sense that in the US, race is the subtext. Class is that for us.
In Chavs Owen defines this idea and how the word “chavs” is entering our lexicon as an underclass. He says it is becoming de facto acceptable to treat and talk about a certain kind of person in a certain kind of way. I agree this is not about a feral underclass, and it’s not about “sick Britain” as it was described by the prime minister. When David Cameron used the phrase “broken Britain” that was fine, because it meant all of us. When he started talking about “sick Britain” he was basically saying that a group of people at the bottom of society are sick.
I think what we’re really talking about is the workless poor. The best way to think about this is to remind ourselves of the housing estates and tower blocks in our major cities. They were built after the [Second World] War to accommodate people whose homes had been burnt out or destroyed in the bombing, and they were largely made up of the working class. What has happened is that because of the huge inequality in our society – because of the way that economic liberalism has worked and because we haven’t managed to give people a stake in society – they have largely become estates of the workless poor.
It’s well-trodden territory that Cameron and his top ministers come from privileged backgrounds. Do you feel, as Owen Jones does, that the workless poor are under-represented in government?
We’ve got to be careful when we talk about class not to enter into a class war. We must face up to class divisions and inequality, but avoid a politics of them and us. I’m interested in giving the working class a stake in capitalism, and restoring a middle class trust in the welfare state.
I do think that we’ve had a real emphasis in politics on Middle England, on the centre ground, on soundbite politics, on spin and on being a politician – ie the art of argument in the amphitheatre that is the House of Commons. So Owen touches on something when he talks about representational politics. The most successful democracies have that sense of representation, that you are representing all people. That is a challenge for our democracy at this point. It’s not just about class – there are subcultures, young people, regional issues.
Instead we have a politics that has become very technocratic, very bureaucratic, very policy wonk and that has lost a kind of authenticity. That’s not to say you have to be poor to represent somebody poor, or rich to represent somebody rich, but empathy is essential. I’m concerned that hyper-individualistic society affects politicians as much as anybody else. It’s easy to become detached because we’re no longer relational. We’re not encountering one another, and trust is breaking down as a consequence.
David Lammy is a British Labour Party politician and the member of parliament for Tottenham in London since 2000. He was born in Tottenham to a Guyanese family, studied law at the School of Oriental and African Studies, and received his master’s from Harvard Law School. His book Out of Ashes: Britain After the Riots was published in November 2011
Brief history of moral panic in Britain. One gem: "Morals of children are tenfold worse than formerly" amid a "preposterous epidemic of hybrid negro songs". No, not gangsta rap-inspired mayhem. Try a parliamentary debate in 1842
After the British riots. Youth worker, who runs "tough love" boxing academy, explains how it came to this. And how we can do better by our children. Read alongside piece by Camila Batmanghelidjh in our UK Riots special section
Historical perspective on British disturbances. Riots often start when people think risk of arrest has become low. One lesson: To stop a riot, more effective to apply light penalties widely than heavy penalties to a few
A social contract has been torn up in Britain. We should be rewarding creation of enduring, shared wealth. "Today's world of bailouts and golden parachutes — while middle incomes stagnate — seems to be exactly the reverse"
"The so-called feral youth seem oblivious to decency and morality. But so are the venal rich and powerful – too many of our bankers, footballers, wealthy businessmen and politicians." Culture of greed, impunity stretches a long way
