RIOT CITY -
PROTEST AND REBELLION IN THE CAPITAL -
CLIVE BLOOM
The first thing that struck me about Riot City - Protest And Rebellion In The Capital, by Clive Bloom was the actual title. There's some copyright infringement going on here, surely, because everyone knows that it's Bristol that is the genuine and original riot city? Its tradition and history of protest and rebellion is a proud one stretching back centuries, with there even having been a Bristolian record label called Riot City in its honour. Of course, there's always been riots in London as well but the mobs involved with these have often come from outside - and that means from places like Bristol - descending upon the city with our flaming torches, our cudgels, our bags of marbles to throw under the hooves of police horses, and our strictly non-Cockney accents.
On a more serious note, the second thing that struck me about the book was the accolades at the front. You know when favourable quotes are taken from reviews and highlighted as endorsements? In Riot City they're from such people as Michael Binyon OBE - a Leader Writer for The Times; and Danny Kruger MBE - the former speechwriter to David Cameron. It leaves you wondering: though I doubt very much if these people have even read the book, how did a copy end up in their hands to begin with? What interest would such such people have in reading a book such as this? And what does it bode for the book when such people are praising it?
Well, a clue is given just five pages in where the urban rioters of 2011 are described as being 'inarticulate and badly educated', which in my eyes is quite a loaded categorization. It's a description that can only be applied by someone who feel themselves to be articulate and well-educated. Someone perhaps from a public school background, educated at Eton or Cambridge perhaps, peering down upon the urban poor from their position of privilege? It's almost enough to put me off reading any further but as Don Corleone once advised: 'Keep your friends close but your enemies closer'. So I persevere.
An interesting thing about Clive Bloom's 'inarticulate and badly-educated' comment is in its relation to one of the main subjects of his book, that being the student riots of 2010. These specific riots were instigated by the announced rise in tuition fees and the abolishment of the Educational Maintenance Allowance (EMA). Bloom writes about how free education at all levels had been since the Second World War the only way to beat the poverty trap, and how this idea was a cornerstone of 'socialist-modified' capitalism and the welfare state. In the same breath, however, he also writes of how free education had actually only ever been a privilege rather than a right. And there's the nub of it: that word 'privilege'. It just keeps cropping up.
Clive Bloom would be fully aware of his privileged position but he also might think he can circumnavigate it and that it have no relevance to his writing? He certainly knows his stuff when it comes to the subjects of protest and rebellion, and Riot City is certainly well-researched but if he thinks he can write from an unbiased and impartial position then he's clearly not read Chomsky. Bloom writes from a position of having a favourable network of specific contacts. He writes from a position of conservatism.
'Since the premiership of Tony Blair, mainstream politics had suffered a malaise,' Bloom tells us. As if mainstream politics pre-Blair was some different beast altogether where everyone held hands in a land of milk and honey basking under a Conservative sun.
Elsewhere he mentions and quotes Ayn Rand but in such a way that he almost gives his game away. Does Bloom's political sympathies lie with free market, laissez-faire capitalism of the kind Rand once advocated? I suspect so but then like a lot of other Randists and supporters of Objectivism he would probably deny it even to himself.
For all that, Riot City is an interesting read not least for acting as a reminder of what we've lived through and of the calibre of those who were governing over us during the period of which Bloom writes. For example, there's the reminder of Boris Johnson's view of the Occupy London lot camping out at St Paul's as being 'hemp-smoking, fornicating hippies'. If only. And then there was the Evening Standard headline declaring 'St Paul's Junkies a Health Hazard'. As with most things with the Evening Standard: only in their fevered dreams.
And then there was Michael Gove in his role as the Secretary of State for Education during the student riots in 2010 arguing for soldiers fresh from the front line of Iraq and Afghanistan to be retrained on a 'troops to teachers' plan in order to tackle classroom indiscipline.
And Theresa May in her role as Home Secretary in 2011 authorising the potential use of rubber bullets in response to the riots rocking the country that year.
And Eric Pickles, the then Community Secretary going on about the 'uneducated, unemployed sub-class'. Pickles would some years later be summoned to the Grenfell Tower inquiry where he would make it clear he had better and more important things to do with his time than answer a load of questions about 72 people burned alive.
Bloom's book ends with a supplementary essay entitled 1968: The Revolutionary Model Redefined, which is - surprisingly - really rather good even if the relevance of the inclusion of it is questionable. It's just nineteen pages long but it's packed with references, ideas and interesting insights that suggests it's actually groundwork for a whole other book. It's a critique, essentially, of the New Left movement that came to prominence during the late Sixties, its full flowering realised in the Sorbonne in Paris of '68.
Bloom writes of one of the ideas thrown up during the Sixties that said in order to cure the alienation of capitalist exploitation and banality it would be necessary to take alienation to its extreme possibility, thereby promoting shock. The shock would be via art but of a specific kind: anti-cooperative, non-recuperable and evanescent. The same tactic, of course, that elements of Punk Rock would later immerse themselves in.
Bloom traces the failure as he sees it of the New Left and its ultimate dissolvement into personal identity politics, ending up with a situation that merely reinforces so-called 'natural' and political conservatism. It's a convincing argument but moreover you can read between the lines that Bloom is basing much of his theory on his own personal experience.
Bloom has stared into the sun, peered at the horizon and gazed into the abyss but now he's back to square one. Back to him acknowledging the fixed position of his own privilege under state control, consumption and capitalism. Though recognising and acknowledging at the same time that the barbarians are at the gate, armed with flaming torches, cudgels, bags of marbles to throw under the hooves of police horses, and strictly non-Cockney accents.
John Serpico
