Riots Communities and Victims Panel Final Report

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Monday 28th May 2012 Grand Committee

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port]

My Lords, we owe a great debt to the noble Baroness and her colleagues, who have worked so hard to bring this report to our attention. We must share with her the sadness that, as yet, we do not have an official response to it. I do not need to say more than that.

Yesterday, I was with the family of a young man who, one year ago, was stabbed to death in Tottenham. Just two weeks ago, I was with a young man who escaped being killed on the streets of London on the release of a young man who had spent seven years wrongly accused and imprisoned with all the anxiety that flowed from that. On Sunday, I was with the family of one young man who was in Pentonville prison awaiting sentence for pushing drugs. His best friend, who is playing for Arsenal football team, came to church on his seventeenth birthday driving a BMW.

It is not just those with no education and no family support. I was with a very fine family with four kids. One of them, who had four straight As for his A-levels, was dropping out of university and said to me, “What is the point of building a career? We all know on the street that the ways to get ahead are through crime or drugs or fame or football or music”. He has dedicated himself to music. The breakthrough perhaps will come or perhaps it will not. It is a tough old world out there.

It is a very tough world on the streets of London. The church that I minister fronts on to Islington and backs on to Hackney. It is true that the low expectations and aspirations of people living in the urban jungle have to be combated at every stage. We find scholarships and support through university. We are all the time robbing philanthropists of their money and trying desperately to put packages together. At the same time, I could name a whole pile of things in local authority or voluntary community work with young people in the arts, activities, football, and raising awareness that are no longer happening.

How can we possibly talk about building society from the top downwards? Everything that is happening at the bottom is being severely challenged by goodhearted people who can no longer put in the 60 hours a week for the minimum wage that they were doing. We have to look at this and take corporate responsibility for it. I do not want to address my questions to the Government; I want to address my questions to all of us. Some of us are working in the inner city and have been for decades. I have never known it quite as devoid of hope as it is now. Last August, it was appropriate to point the finger at those who did bad things and it is right that we should expect them to be punished. However, I do not think that the analysis ends there or that the responsibility ends there either.