Like everyone else, I gaped in dismay as rioting tore across the country last week, but as the reflexive search for the “root” or “underlying” cause gathered pace, I couldn’t help recalling the parable of the good sociologist.
In this parody of the Bible, when the traveller on the road to Jericho is assaulted, the first sociologist crosses the road and passes by on the other side. The second does the same. But the good sociologist rushes to the scene, cradles the victim’s head and weeps: “Boy, the person who did this needs help.”
Last week’s violence was the opposite of a laughing matter. But I groaned to see how swiftly it was taken to be symptomatic of a credible point of view. Almost everyone was calling the stone-throwers “far-right protesters” or “Islamophobic” – as though name-calling might be enough make them come to their senses.
Surely this was giving them too much credit. It allowed them to style themselves as warriors for a cause instead of thugs. Worse, it walked into the Faragian trap of insisting that though the violence, yes, might be over the top, the grievances were understandable, and the conversation we really needed to have was about … immigration.
It wasn’t. The subject here was violence.
This is not to say that immigration is trivial or a simple matter. It is neither. The Channel is being crossed by overcrowded boats. The government is having to spend up to £5bn a year on asylum seekers. That is inspiring enough culture-war friction to keep the thinktanks occupied for years. There are major policy discussions to be had in all these areas.
But it pained me to see what was obviously a criminal uproar so swiftly becoming a “debate”. Surely, if there is one thing we could agree on, it was the fact that it is wrong for someone halfway through a six-pack to be setting fire to someone’s car, in a town (not their own) where children have just been murdered, because someone on the internet has said something angry about someone else whose name they couldn’t remember.
Part of my twinge was selfish, down to the fact that some years ago I wrote Bloody Foreigners, a book that presented the age-old saga of migration to Britain (since the ice melted) not as a sociopolitical nightmare but as a natural part of human life – which happened to have enriched Britain greatly. I was mindful of Tolstoy’s observation that in all literature there were really only two stories: someone leaves home, or a stranger arrives in town.
But given that one of my hopes had been to pour oil on troubled waters, it looked as though I now had to admit – as flames lit up the night sky in Southport and Plymouth – that I had written the most unsuccessful book in the history of books.
Except, perhaps, in one respect, because one of the main things I learned writing it was that angry summer uprisings against perceived outsiders are nothing new. Far from being a heated response to a modern problem, they are as entrenched a part of the English social scene as Ascot, Henley and the Lord’s Test.
In 1190 the Jews of York were herded into a castle and killed; in 1263 a further 400 died in a Palm Sunday rampage in London; and in 1290 the entire Jewish population was roughly escorted to the coast and deported. The year 1312 saw race riots against the Flemish weavers who had come, it was said, “onlie to seeke woorck”.
In the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt, foreigners were set upon for saying “brod” instead of “bread”, and 100 years later the Steelyard in Blackfriars in London, home to the Scandinavian trade, was ransacked. There were anti-Italian uprisings in 1456-7, and on the night before the May Day holiday of 1517, a 1,000-strong mob in London attacked anybody that looked foreign.
Things got even busier after that. Every time people came, fists flew. No room here for the full list, but there have been riots ever since, against all-comers from Cardiff to Notting Hill.
It is a shameful thread in the national epic.
We should be wary, however, of seeing this only as evidence of irredeemable (as we now say, “institutional”) racism, because it did tend to call forth an equal and opposite counter-reaction. The leaders of the “Evil May Day Riots”, also known as the Ill May Day riots, were executed; Bishop John Jewel replied to protests against the French Huguenots by asking: “Is it so heinous a thing to show mercy?” In some ways, each racist convulsion drew out an anti-racist movement to counter it, which usually outweighed the original splinter groups.
Moreover, the convulsions of the past did in time lead people to reflect on the harsh conditions in which violence flared – squalid slums, inhuman working practices, child poverty, the “demon drink” and so on. One of the unsettling background noises last week concerned the power of online rabble-rousing – a side effect of the information revolution that may (just as Gutenberg’s printing press provoked a century of religious conflict) have bigger consequences than we imagine.
Of course, we can’t read these neat lessons from history as a sign that the present trouble will blow over and be fine in the end. Last week’s violence was awful. But it was a breakdown in behaviour, not an argument, a burst of football-like hooliganism rather than a disagreement on Newsnight that got out of hand.
That is the principle that came under attack last week, and why it felt like a crisis with existential dimensions. Freedom is not absolute. We settle disputes through argument. Not with sticks and stones, and certainly not with guns and knives. Crossing that line (as Mark Rowley, the Metropolitan police commissioner, declared on Thursday) is just about the most unpatriotic move anyone can make.
There are rules within which we live. We disagree without throwing punches: actions speak louder than words. Manners, after all, evolved as a formal code so that enemies could eat, with knives present, and not kill each other.
After writing my book, I became a trustee and supporter of the Migration Museum, which aims to tell “all our stories” on the grounds that stories are more resonant than arguments. One tale I’ve been repeating a lot lately concerns Gottlieb Wilhelm Leitner, a child prodigy of languages born in Budapest in 1840. Thanks to his extraordinary gift he was appointed chief interpreter to the British army in Crimea, and since this carried the rank of colonel he returned to London after the war.
He became a professor at King’s College London, and then helped to set up the new University of the Punjab, where he made himself expert in Arabic and Urdu too. Back in England, he created the Oriental Institute in Woking, Surrey, thoughtfully commissioning an architect to build a mosque for his students.
And that is how, in 1889, the country’s first mosque came to be built by a British, Hungarian, Christian, Jewish immigrant. Quite a bit there for the good sociologist to think about. The rest of us too.
Robert Winder is a historian, the author of Bloody Foreigners and The Last Wolf: The Hidden Springs of Englishness
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