The Riots

Debate between Baroness Clark of Kilwinning and David Lammy

Thursday 13th October 2011 Westminster Hall

[Mr Lammy]

The hon. Gentleman puts his point well. In a civilised country, a burden always lies on the majority, and some of what we say in such a country relates to how the minority are treated. I have met young men—good young men—at university. I asked two young men who run the youth group at my local church whether they had been stopped and searched. One had had a good experience; the other had had several experiences that were not so good and had left him embarrassed and demoralised in relation to his local community. The differentiation that one needs to make in a complex, multi-layered, multicultural, multiracial London of subcultures takes local knowledge and understanding, and we need to face up to that truth.

There are questions about why the rioting took place on the scale that it did, against the backdrop of 460 people having died as a result of police contact since the IPCC was set up and not one police officer having been convicted. I ask hon. Members to think about those statistics and about why a community such as mine finds it extraordinary that, following Mark Duggan’s death in August, measures were not put in place to anticipate the worst, given current levels of unemployment and the fact that too many young people were out on the streets with nothing to do.

It is important that I qualify my use of “young people”. When I speak to my secondary schools, not one of their young people has been arrested, and when I look at the profile of arrests, there is a tiny proportion of under-18s.

When someone gets well into their 20s, I believe that they account for their own behaviour, so the caricaturing of young people that I saw this summer and some of rhetoric about race made me deeply ashamed to be part of this country. It was so sad to see us slip back to the sort of discourse we saw in the 1980s. I was disappointed that major national shows such as “Newsnight” could get their presentation of the issues so badly wrong. Let me say in this House to David Starkey, “How do I sound? I sound English because I am English, thank you very much.” For one of our historians to be allowed to question me in the way that he did was a disgrace, and it undermines the importance of the debate and the 20,000 young people sitting at home in my constituency, wanting to do what is best, but worried and anxious about what is going on. It is for those young people that I hope we all play our part in properly regenerating Tottenham, ensuring that there are opportunities and a growth strategy. We cannot have a constituency with the highest unemployment in London left to sink when bankers and others are bailed out.

[Katy Clark (in the Chair)]

The previous Chair asked Members to keep their contributions brief. The Member who has just spoken took more than 30 minutes, so I, too, ask Members to speak for a shorter time.