Report: UCL inter-faith week: Lessons of the London riots

Tonight’s meeting at UCL as part of their inter-faith week explored lessons to be learned from the London riots and how we build stronger communities. Jim Jepps reports.

The riots in August have caused a lot of soul searching in London and no doubt there will be a great deal more of that to come. The government response seems to be beef up the police while continuing with their project to close the libraries and community centers, there must be something better than that.

As an aside Mehri Nicknam (Joseph Interfaith Foundation), when talking about the need for communities to talk to each other, mentioned her project that was putting Rabbis in Mosques to answer questions large and small. That theme of the need to understand and talk to each other was a good one as there is a natural tendency when talking about the riots to talk about “them” when in fact these are our communities and we make  them together – the questions are often about “us” not some shadowy other.

When talking about the family she made the interesting point that there was no use telling people to, for example, respect the old – they had to have old people in their lives who they actually respected. For Mehri this meant the extended family over the nuclear family which is a slightly uncomfortable point but there was something very interesting at the heart of the point.

Sophie Stephens (Citizens UK), talked about the impressive work of London Citizens and the need not to talk faith but to apply pragmatic politics. As a community organiser its important to be able to point to, say, a street light and say “we got together and got that fixed” whether that be through pressuring authorities or self organising.

She pointed out that the powerful will only talk to the powerful and so, in order to make them listen, we have to be powerful to – through collective action, practical work and a strategic understanding of how to get things done. It was inspiring to listen to the work they are doing to “make Tottenham a better place”.

Sophie also tried to tease out a distinction between issues and problems. Problems – inequality, injustice, capitalism are often too big and too nebulous for a community to solve, she said. Issues have a place. They are identifiable and they can be fixed and it was often her job to focus on these “issues” without getting distracted by wider problems that are pressing, bbut insoluable by a hard pressed organisation that does not want to get bogged down in debate.

Reverend Jenny Welsh (Anglican Chaplain to UCL) almost lost me when she described London as a smoking ruin after the riots (there were smoking ruins but the place was hardly a slag heap the days after) but she quickly pulled it back with a very interesting discussion of the way consumerism is interlinked with poverty and the lack of self-esteem in more deprived areas.

She talked about her time as a prison chaplain and that when we send people there we have to understand what dehumanising places they are. Add to this the unhelpful language about feral youth, scum and whatever all we end up doing is reinforcing the exclusion of those already excluded.

We need to help people see they have value and build that self worth rather than draw a sharp dividing line between “the bad” and “the good”.

Finally Sayed Ali Abbas Razawi,  spoke about unity. Not just between faiths and those with no faith but also within faiths, where Islam and Christianity are divided among themselves this can cause barriers. I think he was pointing towards how xenophobia or fear of other communities created problems when community tensions arose and how, if those divides had been closed, those tensions would not be  so severe.

He described watching building burn during the riots and saying to his friend “there is a deeper problem here than criminality”. He argued we should be looking to see how we can help deprived and alienated communities that had uttered such a clear cry of anguish. But where people were looking to flat screen TV’s to fill a void in there lives he felt there were more ethical or moral solutions.

Where the meeting as a whole, and the discussion section after, was strong  was in its desire to find practical ways of working and looking outwards to make London a better place but also address inequalities and injustices. That attempt to look for a different set of values than what we own, earn and can buy is a good one. It was also really healthy in the way it looked to bring groups of people together who might not naturally sit together discussing common issues.

What probably needs  little more work is that its all very well people who would never  go rioting discussing why people riot but until you’re reaching into communities that were more deeply touched and participated in the riots you can’t really get to the root of the problem. In part this i where London Citizens comes in who do do that direct community organising and look towards community solutions  to the problems we face.