Back to London

We left Edinburgh in the rain, early Thursday morning,  and were delayed by an hour getting back to London due to flooding on the tracks.  The trains in the UK have a reputation for running on time and you would have thought that we had been delayed by days rather than minutes judging from the number of times the engineer came on the intercom to apologize for the inconvenience. 

Before checking into our hotel in Kensington, we stopped by Bloomsbury to pick up some baggage that we had stored in Andrea's office to lighten our load on the Scotland trip. John, one of the volunteers at the desk, updated us on the status of the riots that had broken out on August 6, in Tottenham, a northeastern neighborhood in London, after a peaceful protest of the death by police of a local man, Mark Duggan. While we were away, the looting and burning had spread in copy-cat fashion to other locations in London as well as the neighboring cities of Birmingham, Liverpool, Nottingham, and Bristol. The police appeared to be taken off guard at the magnitude and random nature of the violence, and they were indecisive and slow in putting a stop to it.

Prime Minister David Cameron and other MP's cut short their vacations and returned to London to deal with the crisis.  Tube stops near rioting neighborhoods were temporarily closed and the football match between England and Holland at Wembley was cancelled.  John said that on his street, the merchants removed merchandise from the display windows and boarded up their shops to prevent vandalism and looting  by the bands of disgruntled youths that were roaming neighborhoods and recklessly destroying property and striking out at innocent bystanders.

By Thursday, August 11, when we returned to London, the crisis had abated and everything appeared to be under control. The neighborhoods had been calm and without incident for several nights, due to increased police presence.  Scotland Yard had identified murder suspects and over a thousand people had been arrested in connection with the violence, looting, and robbery.  The House of Commons was engaged in spirited debate on long term solutions for addressing the social issues underlying the violence, and Bill Bratton, former New York and LA police chief, had been called in to consult with British law enforcement on gang violence and social unrest, a decision which gained mixed reviews  and a few raised eyebrows from the British press.

Most of the news coverage we managed to find in Edinburgh centered around the need for swift justice and accountability for the perpetrators of the senseless attacks on the innocent as well as the looting, and destruction of property.  Interviews of law officials, clergy, social workers, politicians, as well as citizens on the street denounced the violence as unacceptable acts of thuggery and brutality by bands of youth, undisciplined and out of control.  They called for increased security and protection across the city, and favored a zero tolerance approach, with severe consequences imposed on any individual involved in action resulting in the destruction of lives or property.

At the same time, there was a discernible sense of recognition among those interviewed, as well as  from the coverage on the debates from the floor of the Commons, that the implementation of a "Get Tough on Crime" approach could never address the root cause of the problem, which appears to reside in the anger of  a youthful underclass, unemployed and ineligible for university, with nothing but time on their hands to act out their frustration and disillusionment.  They seemed to concur that while looting and burning can never be tolerated by civilized society, neither can the repression and deprivation of basic human needs be ignored in the process of  protecting the resources of the privileged while ignoring the plight of the underprivileged. 

In the midst of our sightseeing and fun, 2500 miles away from home, came the jolting reminder of the widening gap that exists in our world between Haves and Have Nots, which has been accentuated by a weak global economy, war, and natural disaster. 

Competing with the story of the London riots that week, was the news of Standard and Poor's downgrade of the U.S. credit rating from AAA to AA-plus, sending the stock market into a tail spin.  Headlines across the UK read"US Humbled" and news analysts talked endlessly about what this might mean for the US economy and how this would affect the outcome of upcoming political contests between Democrats and Republicans.  Would Sarah Palin or Michelle Bachman succeed in ousting Mr. Obama?

It was not the ideal time to be travelling, in terms of dollar to pound exchange rate, and the news about the US economy was beginning to give me nightmares about what the trip would ultimately cost.  I was reassured when I called home to touch base with Bill.  He put everything in perspective for me with his classic response to my financial jitters:  "Don't worry," he said, "It's only money."