Racist riots in the UK: which root causes need to be addressed?
The United Kingdom (UK) has recently been facing racist violence outbreaks. Tahir Abbas, Professor of Radicalisation Studies, discusses this in an article on newssite Hyphen.
The riots which recently broke out in the UK caused a lot of commotion, Tahir Abbas points out: 'We have had race riots before, in 2001, riots broke out in Oldham and spread to Bradford, Leeds and Burnley. Rumours that the National Front was coming led these angry young kids to trash up their own streets and neighbourhoods.'
Back in 2001 the government came up with 'community cohesion', this did not address the root causes of the problem which include material deprivation, exclusion, poor policing practices and really terrible housing policy. Abbas believes the 'community cohesion' policy to be 'regressive nonsense'.
The policy implied that communities lacked cohesion, that the problem could be tackled by people talking to their neighbours over the garden fence. Abbas states: 'What we saw then and what we are seeing now is not something that can be washed away with some nice talk about being polite with your neighbours. There are structural, economic, foundational issues that require genuine addressing. But we don’t do that. We don’t want to do that.'
Read the full article on the website of Hyphen.