Why 'business as usual' is a fatal response to Birmingham's riots

Image by marcreeves via Flickr
There have been riots in Birmingham at regular intervals throughout my life, and I’m sick of it.

It's like a simmering pot that occasionally boils over, but instead of taking it off the flame, we just force the lid down ever tighter.

I grew up in Handsworth and saw the impact of the 1981 riots at first hand. I reported on the 1985 Handsworth troubles as a cub reporter, and after living and working away for more than a decade returned to my home city in the still-raw aftermath of the 2005 disturbances.

I remember someone remarking to me then what fantastic changes I must have seen in the city after my years away. They meant the city centre sheen of the ICC, Brindleyplace and the horizon of budding skyscrapers, all taken as symbols of Birmingham’s progress. I saw and liked these developments for
sure, but I also saw that actual deprivation had significantly worsened in Handsworth, Witton, Aston and many other areas I knew – made all the more stark in contrast to the apparently booming centre.

What I saw was two Birminghams – the shining ‘global city’ of the brochures and the unrecognised city of the underclass where most citizens actually lived, typified by appalling housing, educational attainment, skills and chronic unemployment.

And two weeks ago, one of these cities broke through the divide and  played out its despair in full view of the other.

The sheen was punctured, despite the best efforts over the years of many to paint a picture of the perfect city.

Glossy brochures proudly proclaim Birmingham's diversity and its youth, and business leaders celebrate civic achievements they label as corporate social responsibility. At the same time, politicians highlight improving exam results in the city's schools.

Yet on the night of Tuesday August 9, thousands of young people laid siege to this city and at least one of them fired a gun at police.

On the same night, three innocent people died in the violence.

If there's anything good to come from all of this, I hope it will be the end of the conspiracy of complacency that is Birmingham's fatal flaw.

Complacency is the single biggest obstacle to this city's future safety and prosperity. And it's everywhere.

It's in the belief that slogans alone are enough to improve the city's lot, and that ticked boxes discharge a business's debt to its community.

In the enclave of Colmore Row, business professionals work feverishly 'creating wealth' all day, before taking themselves and their money home to the stockbroker belt in the Midlands shires.

In Victoria Square, tired politicians and council staff labour to shore up an inept, bloated and irrelevant way of running the city because they're scared of the alternative.

In suburban front rooms, the 'squeezed middle' celebrate their normality by drowning out the real world with a tidal wave of reality TV and other consumer fetishes.

When the inhabitants of these cosy worlds are shaken from their complacency by two nights of rioting, looting, murder and shootings, could it be that they'll realise that things in Birmingham are perhaps not as they should be?

Will they look to themselves and those around them and wonder that while their firm's award-winning CSR programme is admirable enough, it's clearly failing to make a real difference to the city and its people?

Will they consider the possibility that behind the hype is a city with real problems that hundreds of jauntily named committees, inquiries and initiatives have singularly failed to solve over the past four decades of decline?

Will they realise that you can't delegate to others your own duties as a citizen, that change cannot be left to someone else, that being a city dweller comes with obligations to make your neighbour's life better, as well as your own?

Or will they embrace the response that puts the perpetrators of the riots in a box handily marked 'Not like us. Not part of our world. Not our problem'?

Perhaps their shock will last as long as it takes to clear away the debris and lock up a satisfactory number of criminals. Everything will soon look reassuringly normal, just as it did before those days in August, when the people who became looters and rioters lived alongside them in the same city, their presence only occasionally registering in the peripheral vision of fellow Brummies.

It'll be business as usual - and the cycle will begin again.

Not everyone looks the other way, of course. People of all faiths and none, all backgrounds and ages - thousands of them - forego luxuries and often make real sacrifices to make the city a better place. They volunteer, campaign, mentor, agitate, educate and get engaged. Some make it their job, others seek office to make a difference. But all of this is a drop in the ocean when countered by the complacency shown by the rest of us.

So what's to be done? What's the magic answer?

I honestly don't know, but I think we have an opportunity to try to answer that as a city before our memories of the riots fade and daily routines push out that nagging feeling that we should do something after all.

I've been mulling this over in various conversations with friends and colleagues over the past ten days.

Three of us got together to see if we could articulate our thoughts and turn them into something more practical.

We don't have a masterplan or a ten point policy proposal, and we certainly don't want to launch an initiative that will dilute or frustrate the impact of existing efforts to destroy the environment that nurtured the riots.

But we believe that leaving it others alone is simply not acceptable, and we particularly want to give businesses and the people involved in them ways to engage with the city like never before.

Our tentative plan is to talk to as many people as possible across all communities in the city, as well as businesses and their leader, by posing four questions that we think might help to get to the heart of things. We'll be talking to young people, to the public and voluntary sectors, and also to the owners of small businesses, young professionals, social entrepreneurs, artists, bloggers, academics and even a few politicians. Most of all, we'll be talking to people as individuals, not just as representatives.

We'll pull the responses together and present them to a small panel of people that we think, to speak plainly, have the balls to do something with the messages that emerge.

We sincerely hope that by then something concrete will have emerged that can contribute significantly to forcing the step change that we believe the city needs. We certainly don't own this process, nor claim any special insight or 'right' to do anything about it, but we do commit to taking this as far as we can. Many others are making similar noises (such as post-riot clean-up king Miles Weaver: see his post here) and we’ll happily combine forces with anyone who wants to work with us.

But one thing’s for certain.

We don't want Birmingham to go back to business as usual.

The questions?

1.    As an individual, Do you feel part of Birmingham? Tell us what the city owes you, and your responsibilities to it.

2.    Do you think you know the causes of the troubles? What single thing could ensure they don’t happen again?

3.    What are you doing, or what could you be doing, to make a difference?

4.    What do you think the business community in particular could do?

My fellow citizens in this endeavour are Louise Teboul of Common Purpose, and Karl George, a city professional and church pastor. The views in this blog post are mine alone, but we’re working together on the action plan I’ve described above.

To contribute, simply put a comment at the bottom of this blog post (anonymously if you wish),  email me at marcreeves1965@gmail.com, or contribute to the conversations that we’re intending to start on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. We will use the hashtag #wearebrum, which has already been used in similar social media conversations over the past weeks.

Related articles

• UK riots: Clean-up as England riots spread - BBC News (news.google.com)
• A tale of two societies (nlgn.org.uk)