Above: in a previous Independent article (1st May 2012) Owen Jones linked reactions to the riots to a variation of chav-hate rather than the race tensions he writes about today.
As we approach the first anniversary of the "London riots" one gets the impression that commentators of all kinds are itching to write about them, and in the absence of any actual excuse (there have been no riots so far this summer) seem determined to get their copy out, however strangulated and tendentious the excuse might be.
One example is Owen Jones and The London Riots One Year On - an article in the Independent (which you can read here: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/london-riots--one-year-on-owen-jones-commences-a-series-of-special-reports-7965142.html?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter
This is an intensely annoying piece, not least because Owen Jones is a skillful writer and his style is engaging and his conclusions plausible. He has visited Tottenham, interviewed the local people, allowed them to speak from the heart. The image of a resentful Tottenham, barely suppressed and about to explode is both alarming and cogently argued.
However anyone who is familiar with the north London inner suburbs will know the situation is far more complex than just resentment of the police.
For instance, Owen Jones says in the article that the police are to blame for the culture of mistrust in Tottenham (quoting someone called Stafford Scott "The average young person in Tottenham believes that the police discriminates against them, oppresses them and harasses them"). What motive would the police have for doing this? Even supposing it is true, what are the motives? Owen Jones makes no attempt to find out. He does not ask any members of the police either officially or unofficially. It is as if he does not want to know.
The article indicates that resentment of the police by the local black population (20% of the total according to YouGov) was due to "a bitter history of racism" without really detailing the chronology of this history. Quoting someone called Brown, Owen Jones writes that black people in Tottenham were "not given full status as British people". I would have liked to see this explored far more thoroughly. In one telling phrase an interviewee said the distrust could be traced back to the 1950s and 1960s "when black people moved into this community". Is it possible that the black people of Tottenham feel rejected because society has in fact rejected them? And that this rejection is because the north London majority community regards immigration without consent as illegitimate? (as one person has put it to me: mass immigration without consent is an act of violence against a community).
These are hard questions and they need to be asked, but Owen Jones is not asking them.
Feeble paragraph in which Owen Jones attempts a class analysis of the riots (the way people dress inflames police sensibilities according to a sociology student he interviewed, but again without saying why).
So on the whole a provocative article, and one that raised (obliquely) all sort of questions, but ultimately unsatisfying.
It is as if Owen Jones went to Tottenham determined to write a socialist analysis of the fulcrum of the riots, unwittingly uncovered all sorts of other issues, then put together his piece without fully understanding the importance of what he is saying.
On his Twitter microblog earlier today Owen Jones refers to a music video directed by Diamond Dogs for the Will Young single Jealousy which he interprets as an illustration of unrequited gay love. Knowing what we know about Will Young (and which he restated on BBC Question Time) it might seem reasonable to jump to this conclusion. However if you look at the video (link below) you see that it is far more nuanced, subtle and unresolved - Will Young could be jealous of either the male or female acrobat.
This reinforces my view that Owen Jones makes connections that do not appear to be borne out by an examination of the evidence.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MHtrM-jf9o
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