Kemi Badenoch was right about the chaos in Clapham

The night of Palm Sunday and the following Tuesday saw outbreaks of a peculiar form of disorder in South London. Teenagers gathered along Clapham High Street in large numbers, organised beforehand on social media. There was shoplifting and criminal damage, but the main purpose of the “linkup” during the school holidays was to dominate a public space through force of numbers and intimidating behaviour.  The police took a de-escalatory approach and made relatively few arrests, but were there as a significant presence. 

On Wednesday, Tory leader Kemi Badenoch took to Twitter to condemn the disorder, and the social dysfunction that she regarded as having allowed it to happen. She also took a swipe at “those making snide comments about race or black kids”, stating that scenes like those witnessed in Clapham could not be seen in African cities such as Lagos or Nairobi. This inspired accusations of naivety on the Leader of the Opposition’s part. Clearly, we can see disorder and crime and chaos in Africa all the time. 

A few years ago, I travelled to Guinea-Bissau from Senegal, on the promise of a meeting with their prime minister. It was a 14 hour car journey during which I was continuously “fined”  for supposed traffic infringements. This was perhaps not helped by the fact I was in a bright yellow Humvee that I’d been lent by a Gambian business associate, and which prompted one Bissau-Guinean border guard to question whether I was a homosexual. The following three days were an interminable wait in my hotel lobby, for a meeting that never transpired. Bored and frustrated, I decided to go for a short walk, and got as far as the road beyond the car-park. Across the road was a patch of wasteground that served as a bus station, where a fracas was unfolding. 

An angry crowd was encircling a man, who was gesticulating wildly. The hotel security guard told me that he had been caught stealing from the handbag of a woman on the bus, from which they had all recently disembarked, and other passengers were now accusing him of taking their possessions as well. The guard casually said that the man was being foolish and that he needed to display due contrition, otherwise the mob would kill him. No sooner had he said this than a melee ensued. A few moments later, the crowd quickly began to disperse; the accused man was dead and his corpse appeared to be in several pieces. I turned to the guard, who shrugged, and I decided to return to the hotel lobby.  

The following evening I was introduced to the inspector general of the city’s police at the poolside bar, and I asked him about what I had seen. He said that he was aware that a thief had been “arrested” by a group of bus passengers, but did not seem to regard it as being worthy of investigation; the mob had already done the job. 

I believe that she is right to say that the scenes witnessed in Clapham would not have taken place in Africa

Returning to Mrs Badenoch’s comments, I believe that she is right to say that the scenes witnessed in Clapham would not have taken place in Africa. Conflating the sort of violence that you can see in the world’s poorest places with what went on in South London over the last couple of days leads us further away from understanding what causes the latter. She didn’t go as far as explicitly saying there was no ethnic angle to the disturbances — clearly there was. However, these should be considered in the context of the economic and human geography of the black population of London since the beginning of the large-scale arrival of Afro-Carribbeans seventy years ago, rather than in spurious terms of racial essentialism.

Violence and disorder in Africa generally serves a purpose that would at least be comprehensible to most people in Britain. It can be economic — people using force to gain access to resources or goods, or at least to deny them to others. Or it can be about power —  tribal or ethnic disputes between groups — sometimes openly, or else under the guise of more European-style religious or political conflict. In other cases, it can be retributory — mob or family justice of the kind that I saw in Bissau (though rarely quite so brutal).  Frequently, all of these motivations can be muddled up together simultaneously. 

As such, what we perceive as disorder is in fact human beings navigating life without the norms and institutions that we in the rich world take for granted to resolve disputes, govern commercial life and enforce law and order. This can often be extremely chaotic, destructive and lead to injury or loss of life in ways that we would regard as unnecessary. However, it is seldom entirely wanton. The participants are behaving rationally according to their own circumstances. 

This kind of behavior in Nigeria or Kenya would be unnecessarily risky, to the point of decadence

This is not what we saw in London, where the gatherings seemed to be more a form of entertainment and a result of boredom. The shoplifting that went on had little to do with the goods themselves or their potential value on the black market, and more to do with demonstrating that the shoplifter could take what they wanted and there was nothing that anybody could do about it. Intimidating the rest of the population was a gesture of defiance or latent power which was its own reward. For individual participants, footage of audacious behavior might garner status when posted on social media — which could potentially lead to some ambiguously defined form of advancement — but there wasn’t any concrete objective in the physical activity itself. 

This kind of behavior in Nigeria or Kenya would be unnecessarily risky, to the point of decadence. It would invite swift retribution. As Mrs Badenoch says of responses to delinquency in Africa: “actions have consequences. There are clear boundaries. Parents, communities, and the authorities do not wring their hands or look the other way.” But the absence of consequences cannot be the only explanation — most people, even bored young people, don’t behave in this manner. If anything, public delinquency has generally decreased in Britain in recent decades; football hooliganism has all but vanished when compared with its peak in the 1980s, and the concept of intimidating groups of “young layabouts” seems almost as anachronistic, at least in most of the country. 

The predominantly black youths we saw congregating in Clapham belong to a sub-culture that is very clearly distinct from that of most of the rest of the country. They speak in a sociolect that is so specific it can often be difficult to tell that it is based on English, and as we witnessed this week, appear to be motivated by things that the general public would struggle to understand. To at least some extent, they regard the rest of the British population as “other”, to use the language of critical theory. If we saw large groups of young South Asian Muslims behaving in this way in a public space, we would think about it in the context of cultural integration; of people who still seem jarringly and alarmingly foreign, notwithstanding their having mainly been born and brought up in this country. But we have never considered black diaspora groups in Britain in the same cultural terms. 

Afro-Caribbean communities, joined in later decades by new arrivals from Africa itself, established themselves in Britain’s larger cities on the eve of an economic transformation that saw an exodus of heavy industries and labour intensive manufacturing out of urban areas. They arrived almost simultaneously to a larger influx of immigrants from South Asia. The exodus of jobs and industries was matched by a generational pattern of urban-to-suburban migration by working and middle class whites, leaving the black communities marooned in the inner cities with other minority groups. But whereas the Asians could rely on a kinship-based pooling of financial resources and their own mercantile tradition to start independent business and dominate local housing markets, black communities generally had little such wherewithal. Social housing tenancies and welfare traps kept them in areas with little economic potential, and interlocking crises of unemployment, low educational attainment and addiction set in. 

This is the background of a pervasive ennui that evangelical commentator Jide Ehizele refers to as urban nihilism. This is a world in which the basic struggle for survival is absent — the welfare system takes care of that for the most part. There is a well-understood sub-culture of gang-related criminality which does entail more visceral risk-taking, but beyond those immediately involved in that type of criminality, there is a far larger youth culture inflected with similar aspirations of dominance, wealth and machismo, but without the purpose and structure, either of legitimate wealth-generating activity or of serious organised crime. This manifests itself in displays of swagger, aggressive materialism and braggadocio, but in reality it merely masks a void with what Ehizele calls “reckless hedonism”.  

Despite the fact that all of this might seem alien to the lives of most English people outside London and other inner city areas, it is most definitely a First World phenomenon. Kemi Badenoch is right to point out that it is the result of a system that has failed to set boundaries or to impose meaningful consequences for delinquency or transgression. It has created an urban culture with a severe compression of outcomes; regardless of what people do or how they behave, neither anything particularly good nor anything particularly bad is likely to happen to them. As such, it’s a world in which individuals are robbed of agency. Seen in this context, it’s easier to understand why people get involved in gang crime — at least it offers the chance to experience life or death balances of risk and reward. And for those who don’t go that far, giving it the big man around the Clapham High Street branch of Boot’s is the next best thing.