The Riots

Debate between Lord Barwell and David Lammy

Thursday 13th October 2011 Westminster Hall

[Mr Lammy]

I was not wearing my rosette on that occasion; I had taken it off. I was stopped and searched. I was not happy about it, but I understood. Obviously, I opened my mouth to speak, although I did not say who I was because I wanted to see how it would pan out, and it was okay.

Stop and search is a reality of communities such as mine, but it must be done with trust. I am also concerned about the officers who are doing it. If we are to have a Met, I want young people—I do not care what their colour is, actually—who have grown up on the streets of Hackney, Peckham, Camberwell, Tottenham and Kensal Rise in our police force. I do not want a police force that effectively consists of young men and women who have grown up anywhere but in London. I must say that too many officers come from far-flung areas, which means that the relationship-building process with communities is problematic.

[Gavin Barwell]

Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that what is wrong is not the policy per se, but a lack of empathy and understanding on the part of young people of what it is like to be a police officer and to have to approach a group of young people and stop them? More importantly, as he says, there is a lack of understanding among police officers who are not local to a community about what it is like to be someone who is stopped every time they go out at the weekend and to see a lack of respect in the way that that is done? The problem is not the policy per se, but the way it is being applied.

[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.