The Riots

Baroness Clark of Kilwinning Excerpts

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.

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[Tom Brake]

It is about proportionality. We must all decide where the line in the sand must be drawn, but I add that the rest of the family were apparently involved in the local church and in volunteer groups. We all know from personal experience that sometimes it is necessary to take action against whole, dysfunctional families, but equally, in some families, one individual is completely out of control while the remainder of the family do their best to ensure that that individual does not act in that way.

We discussed youth services at some length during the debate earlier this week on gangs. The Government have a responsibility. Undoubtedly, we have decided to reduce budgets for local authorities, but equally, local authorities cannot hide behind that entirely when it comes to some of the decisions taken to withdraw excessively large percentages, or indeed all, of the funding available for youth services. Local authorities can exercise some degree of prioritisation, although I acknowledge that they must do so within a more restricted funding envelope.

It is also important for Government to ensure that the justice system treats children differently. It is important, even if we abolish the Youth Justice Board, that the justice system should still recognise that children are different and should be treated differently.

[Katy Clark (in the Chair)]

I will call for the winding-up speeches to begin at 5.15.

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[David T. C. Davies]

If the right hon. Gentleman does not mind, I will wait until the Chair has a problem. I am answering remarks made earlier on.

Police have been criticised for kettling, and the point I am making—this is why it is relevant to the riots—is that the criticisms of the police that they stood back and did nothing are totally unfair because Members of this House, in all parts, have in the past criticised police for using tactics that would have dealt with those riots in the first place.

The right hon. Member for Tottenham also spoke about specialist police forces coming into an area from outside. With the sorts of operations to which he referred, such as firearms units, the police officers would necessarily have to come in from outside, because of the level of training required to carry out such operations. I think it would be unwise to try to pass judgment on such a matter before a full report has taken place.

I congratulate hon. Members on the way in which they have addressed the matter. If I were them, however, I would think carefully about making general criticisms of the police without a full understanding of the pressures that they are under. I hope that all hon. Members in the House will do their best to encourage their communities, particularly black and Asian communities, to persuade their members to join the police, hopefully to ensure that such riots do not happen again.

[Katy Clark (in the Chair)]

Order. The wind-ups will start at 5.15.