The social unrest in the Harehills area of Leeds on Thursday 18th July provoked a wearily predictable response from the usual suspects. GB News, with trademark subtlety, quoted one viewer who described participants as “terrorists”, while the Mail and Express went with the tried-and-tested “thugs”. Nigel Farage, never one to miss an excuse to blow his dogwhistle, claimed “the politics of the subcontinent are currently being played out on the streets of Leeds,” wilfully (how else?) ignoring the fact that the disorder had nothing to do with the area’s South Asian citizens. Keir Starmer’s response was hardly incisive: “Shocking and disgraceful,” he said “disorder of this nature has no place in our society.”
What none of these identikit soundbites provide is context, not that demagogues like Farage and the Murdoch press care much about that. For much of Friday locals were urged by police not to speculate over what sparked the disturbances; little wonder when a video emerged later of two children from the Roma community being dragged kicking and screaming from their homes by officers who had been called in to support social services workers who had received a “hostile” reception at the address. “Harrowing moment boy is hauled from his home,” says the updated Mail website, although words like “rabble” and “mayhem” are still scattered in the text. The Express treads a similar path, calling the clip “shocking” and describing the child as “visibly upset” while making no attempt to dampen the inflammatory tone.
For the uninitiated, Harehills is arguably the most culturally diverse part of Leeds, with residents from over 80 nationalities and ethnicities. It is home to nearly 31,000 people, with a population density of 8,444 people per square kilometre, far outstripping London’s 5,640; there are a lot of people in a small space. It’s also one of the most deprived areas of the country, consistently placing in the top 10 per cent on the Index Of Multiple Deprivation, with two neighbourhoods (technically LSOAs) figuring in the most deprived one per cent. A decade and a half of Tory attacks on local government coffers have reduced central funding in Leeds to less than half the level in 2010-2011, which means, according to council leader James Lewis, that “£2.5bn cumulatively has been taken away from frontline local services.” In the face of this financial butchery, demand for support spirals in inverse proportion to plummeting bottom lines; the people with the highest needs are expendable, collateral damage.
Areas such as Harehills are 21st-century ghettoes, hidden in plain sight, often cheek by jowl with supremely affluent places (like Harehills’ neighbour Roundhay, where Liz Truss reckons she was brought up rough and the average house price is a handful of change short of 360 grand). Poverty deprives the people who live there not only of the basic necessities of life, but a voice and a presence, too. They are disenfranchised in the extreme.
Hermetically sealed in a social sense, residents have no one to rely on but themselves; anyone who represents anything that can be loosely construed as “authority” is not to be trusted. When I was doing the food parcel deliveries documented in Ghost Signs, my book on poverty and the pandemic, there were occasions when I was threatened by the people I was there to help, because the council insignia on the van signified “Other”, and their lived experience has conditioned them to believe nothing good can come from anyone associated with it. In this gestalt one person’s fight can rapidly become everyone else’s, especially when the Other poses a threat (the police taking screaming children from their parents, for example), and things can easily get out of hand. Which is exactly what happened last week.
In January, figures from Joseph Rowntree Foundation showed that 22 per cent of all people in the UK live in poverty; the same report says that it’s been over 20 years since there was a prolonged period of poverty falling, and that from 2010 the figure has “barely moved.” JRF chief executive Paul Kissack’s concluding comments are damning: “Little wonder that the visceral signs of hardship and destitution are all around us […] This is social failure at scale. It is a story of both moral and fiscal irresponsibility—an affront to the dignity of those living in hardship.” Incidentally, doctors in the US and UK have coined a term for the aggregated detrimental effects on physical and mental health caused by long-term poverty: Shit Life Syndrome. Think about that for a minute.
With economic pressures only increasing, the country’s collective psyche still scarred by the unspeakable psychological violence of Covid and lockdown, and a change of government that looks like it’s not going to change much else, communities are stretched to breaking point and something has to give.
There’s a fine line between riot and rebellion; how you define an event depends on which side you stand. Martin Luther King once said, “A riot is the language of the unheard.” Last week, Harehills spoke. But did anyone listen?
