Tottenham: From Riot to Riot

I’m not a natural born Londoner, and most certainly not an authentic cockney born within hearing of Bow Bells. But a quarter of a century ago I moved to the city to work and ended up living in Tottenham. This was 1986 The Tory government reigned supreme having defeated the miners strike the year before. The weekend I moved in US planes bombed Libya, nothing much has changed you can see, and with a decent chunk of radical London I went down to Grosvenor Square to protest. We sat in the road, blockaded Oxford Street and ended up being manhandled by the police. I dusted myself down and looked forward to London life.

Tottenham in 1986 was only known for two things. First the Broadwater Farm riots a year earlier which had ended with a British bobby being hacked to death with a machete. This most notorious episode of public disorder had stained the reputation of where I was living. Second, our football club, the delightfully named Tottenham Hotspur FC. This was at the club of the soon to be most famous English footballer of the late 1980s, Paul Gascoigne. Gazzamania was an early version of Becks’ celebrity status. And five years after I moved to Tottenham Spurs lifted the FA Cup thanks to Gazza’s glorious semi-final goal against our rivals Arsenal in the red half of North London. I joined the celebrations outside the Town Hall and bought my Spurs season ticket the next day. I’ve sat in the same seat, West Stand Lower, Block 12 ever since.

Tottenham, like the rest of London is incredibly multicultural. There is a popular cosmopolitanism about the city, the anti-Muslim right and the fascist fringe which are a potent force in other parts of Europe have no traction here. But it is too easy to assume therefore all is well. A social segregation exists founded on old fashioned models of poverty and class. Travel round the city by bus outside the West End tourist trail like I do northwards on my way home to city. My bus journeys are full of the mainly black poor, entirely disconnected from the political process, with little or no share in the wealth and career opportunities London proffers to some, but most certainly not all.

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Olympics 2012 will I fear reveal the severity of this divide. An event largely enjoyed by white middle England, with little or no presence from black inner city London apart from a few track athletes and the cheap casual labour staffing the catering franchises and providing stadium security with some muscle. The exclusion will be more obvious than ever before, while some are enjoying the party of a lifetime in the Olympic Park a major part of the population in the surrounding boroughs will just be surviving, conscious and angry at what they are missing, yet able to see it too. The contrast will have all the potential to reignite the disturbances of the last few days with a powerful sense of injustice and visible evidence of exclusion.

Of course most in Tottenham, black and white don’t riot. But there is a section of mainly black youth who have had enough, have few responsibilities to care too much about , nothing to lose and fed up with being on the outside looking in for most of their lives. This isn’t a politicised fightback against austerity, the sort of which we have seen in Greece, Spain and elsewhere. It is instead a violence framed by a desire to be taken notice of, to cause some fear, to be seen, if not yet heard. None of this is an excuse yet politicians who simply denounce the riots as criminality are almost wilfully missing the point. Tottenham’s MP is the young black Labour politician David Lammy. He is a graduate of an Ivy League university, he’ has done well for himself , good luck to him. But he is an entirely different character to the Labour MP for Tottenham when I first moved here, Bernie Grant. He was a firebrand, formed by the struggles against racism and discrimination he had led. Of course like many MP’s he eventually became a bit detached too, seduced by the Westminster lifestyle but in 1986 he still spoke a language that wasn’t so different that the rioters couldn’t see that he was from their community too. That's simply no longer the case with Labour which has little or no real roots anymore in black inner-city London, certainly nothing to give hope and direction to the anger of these communities.

Twenty-five years after moving to Tottenham we’re moving out, to Lewes in the Sussex countryside. I’m a lefty, of impeccable liberal credentials.Its not the the ethnic mix of Tottenham I’m trying to escape its the depravation, the infrastructure of a city on the verge of falling apart at the seams, the anger and frustration this generates. Public transport is the single biggest sign of this in London but beyond the traffic jams on Tottenham High Road there is plenty else wrong too. We’re escaping, hopeful our quality of life will be better elsewhere, it was either that or the creeping privatisation of our everyday lives London’s middle classes indulge in to protect them from what’s outside our doors. Living another 25 years here, its too much to ask, we’ve done London its time for something new. But how many of those who live here have that choice?

So farewell Tottenham, riots and football, it was all this place was known for then, its still the same. And no, not even the football has been that good either.

Mark Perryman is the author of “Breaking up Britain : Four Nations after a Union” and co-founder of the “Philosophy Football” label.