The future of austerity?

The Tottenham disturbances instantly raised memories of the Broadwater Farm riots that rocked the neighborhood 26 years ago. While an early report claimed tonight’s violence to have been much more limited, Twitter is currently ablaze with live reporting. At one point, BBC reporter @rickin_majithia tweeted that he was being pulled out by the BBC because the situation was getting too dangerous, after one man was allegedly beaten up for taking pictures.

The violence was not entirely unpredicted. Earlier this year, the Guardian published a report with the following message: “after Haringey council shuts eight of its 13 youth clubs, local teenagers fear boredom will fuel violence between young gang members on the streets of north London.” At the end of the video clip, one man can be heard saying, with near-frightening conviction in his voice, “there’ll be riots, there’ll be riots.”

Is this a troubling early sign of what lies ahead in the coming years? As Martin Luther King put it, “a riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.” The UK already was one of the most unequal societies in the Western world, but the dismantling of social services will only further accentuate these economic inequities. The storm has been brewing for a while...

Can David Cameron survive this and News of the World? And, really, closing clubs to save money? Was that it? If so, the officials behind the closures are crazy. It's as if they have no idea about their own culture. The UK is not the US. The UK takes its clubs seriously. Indeed, I recall one Scandinavian critic (he wrote a book called LA Nonstop—I failed to find a link to it) speculating that the richness of the musical culture in the UK was a consequence of the centrality of clubs in the culture as a whole. "Everyone there is in a club. And each club has its own sound. It's really quite extraordinary." You do not close clubs to save money; you close clubs to start trouble.