As the days slip by, the likelihood that anything will be learned from the recent rioting looks ever more remote. And with that suspicion comes the inevitable sense of déjà-vu. Because we have indeed been here before.
In 2011 England was engulfed by riots, originating in London but leading to copycat violence across the north of England. The ostensible cause that time was the shooting by police of Mark Duggan, a charming young drug dealer who was in possession of a gun. The initial unrest in Tottenham may well have started as a result of claims that police had shot an innocent man – and an innocent black man at that. But by the time Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool were going at it, the proximate cause for the violence seemed to have been forgotten.
The economy has created more jobs, but this has not reduced the workless levels of local populations
The coalition government set up a panel to look into the causes of the violence, and as with most such government panels it was made clear from the start what the answers could not be. Indeed, after the report was released The Spectator published a minority report by Simon Marcus, one of the members of the panel, blowing the whistle on matters his fellow panel members refused to consider. These things included gang membership and ‘an epidemic of father absence’.
Equally interesting is to look at the few things that people were allowed to focus on back then. The 2011 riots happened in the aftermath of the great crash of 2008. Many government officials and wise heads in the media tried to understand the spate of lawlessness by looking at things through this lens. One of the few acceptable questions to ask about those riots regarded the correlation between deprivation and rioting. This was one of the fashionable things to fix on.
Doubtless similar fixations will emerge now. The long-defunct English Defence League and the question of social media appear to be the main focuses of permitted attention. But I decided to do some checking on the employment stats for some of the northern towns that have seen the worst rioting in the past week. I also checked the 2011 statistics and then compared the two. I should warn you in advance that if you’re easily depressed, you should look away now.
Back in 2011, the proportion on out-of-work benefits (including incapacity benefit) in Sunderland was 18 per cent; today it is 19 per cent. In 2011 the unemployment figure in Rotherham was 16 per cent; today it is 18 per cent. In Hartlepool, it was 21 per cent; today, 23 per cent. Consider just that last one. A quarter of people of working age in the area are claiming welfare for incapacity or worklessness.
If you look at the figures for the towns in which rioting has occurred in the past week, there is not one of them in which the job situation has improved in 13 years. In every one, the employment has got demonstrably worse since 2011.
Let us assume that unemployment and the resultant hopelessness were factors in the 2011 riots. Personally, I am slightly reluctant to do so, because plenty of people who have had every disadvantage in life do not decide to burn police stations. But since this was seen as one of the causes of the 2011 conflagration, why did nothing get better? Why, instead, did it get measurably worse?
One reason is that from 2011 until today, all three main parties have followed the same model on job creation. Seemingly un-able to actually improve education, incentives and job opportunities in these areas, they went for the easy route. That was to issue visas for migrants to come to the UK and to claim that the economy was growing as a result. Of course this ‘growth’ is almost entirely faked. Study after study shows that this type of migration benefits the migrant (naturally) but does almost nothing to improve the actual economy. In fact for many people it undercuts local labour and, due to increased demand for housing and limited housing stock, it makes their situation much worse.
At the time of the 2011 riots, foreign-born workers accounted for 14 per cent of the UK workforce. Today it’s 21 per cent. Employment has grown by 3.6 million since 2011, but fully 74 per cent of this is down to immigrant workers.
In these figures you see one of the inevitable failures of consecutive governments. The economy has created more jobs, but this has not reduced the workless levels of local populations. The communities who needed the work have been bypassed. ‘Left behind’ doesn’t do justice to what has happened, because it makes it sound like it happened in a fit of absentmindedness. It didn’t. It was a decision. So while 3.6 million more are in work compared with 2011, only 929,000 were born here. The job creation benefited many people, but it did not do much for Bolton, Sefton or Rotherham.
There will be plenty of discussion in the coming days about the cultural and immigration factors in these riots – as there should be. But this other cause of the unrest should not be ignored. Successive governments promised to do something to help improve the lives of people in these towns. An inclusive economic model, we were told. A dividend of Brexit, even. But they didn’t just do nothing. They did worse than nothing.
Our government has the same choice the Conservative and coalition governments had. It could focus on getting people into work and bringing work back to these areas. Or, like the governments before them, it could try to cover up the problem with immigration. As the Tory party could tell them, it is an easy and addictive fix. Does Keir Starmer have the guts to go cold turkey? Everything will depend on whether he does.
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