Riots and Disparity: Rome, London and Toronto

International headlines in the last two weeks have reported a massive amount of social unrest and unsettling news across the developed world, including riots and economic data which on the surface may appear discordant and unrelated, but are united as part of larger political and economic trends. 

Fees Protest, by Andrea_F

Days of protests and rioting in London have seen the metropolitan police employing illegal crowd control tactics such as kettling, assault, and the use of horseback police charging at canter to provoke demonstrators who could not disperse to areas already cordoned off by police.  The protesters themselves have attacked government buildings and corporate franchise outlets, as well as molesting Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles, who demonstrated an incredible lack of forethought in their failure to associate themselves with the objects of the 50,000 protesters’ anger when they ventured into downtown London for an evening at the theatre, their car being attacked with billiard balls, sticks and paint amid shouts of “Shame... Your government fucked us,” and “Off with their heads!” 

by Andrew Moss Photography

The London ‘fees riots’ have been precipitated by public anger over the government’s decision to allow university tuitions to rise by as much as threefold, or more precisely, the betrayal of campaign pledges and promises made by the Liberal-Democratic Party to oppose any attempt by a government to increase tuition fees.  This week the party made a fantastic U turn by abandoning this key point in their manifesto, and providing the swing vote the government needed to push the measure through; in so doing, perhaps a generation of middle-low income youth have been simultaneously denied an affordable post-secondary education and disabused of the notion that their government functions as a credible democracy.  With the perception that they have lost any means of redress or democratic expression and that the government exists to serve financial and corporate institutions after tax-payer funded bailouts, the students have lashed out against government and corporate property, and responded with violence against police who have attempted to pacify demonstrators with violence of their own.  While British papers polemicise as to whether the police and/or demonstrators have been criminally violent, it is not difficult to understand on a sociological level how such a reaction could occur when teens and twenty-somethings have had the image of their own futures swept out from under them by a duplicitous group of politicians.  After all, revolution is for the young. 

Bandana Bianco by surfstyle

Similarly, riots in Rome erupted this week after Silvio Berlusconi managed somehow to maintain his control of the office of Prime Minister by defeating 2 no-confidence votes, in the Senate and lower-house.  Berlusconi has long been something of a controversial playboy figure in Italian politics, he is a multi-billionaire, ranked by Forbes as the world’s 74^th richest man, and has always been unabashed and opinionated, endearing himself to a wide base of the Italian population; his tenure as Prime Minister being the second-longest in Italian history.  However, many Italians, have throughout his career decried his virtual monopoly of control over the state and private media, as well as his many moves to change Italian law in his favour; in one instance he changed a statute of limitation to quash conflict-of-interest charges levelled against him.  He has employed his personal fortune to mire his opponents in law-suits, more recently to allegedly hire dozens of girls for a bunga-bunga-orgy-party.  His office has lied to police in the attempt to get a 17 year-old belly dancer/prostitute released from custody, with the absurd story that she was a relative of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, and his wife divorced him last year stating publicly that she “cannot remain with a man who consorts with minors” and “is not well.” 

Va fa'n... by Alessio85

Beyond the litany of credible allegations of corruption and solicitation of prostitution spanning his career, which one must wonder if he has throughout maintained his office only by his control of Italian media, there are the recent revelations in the leaked cables by Wikileaks that Berlusconi has moved in an attempt to curb freedom of expression on the Internet in Italy to silence his critics; that he has personally profited enormously through his nation’s rapprochement and energy deals with Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and that his long hours of partying have a narcoleptic effect on his meetings with US diplomats.  That Italy’s elected government, in light of the very recent Wikileaks revelations and prostitution scandals, would still somehow find reason to vote in confidence of him as leader of their nation is too much for his most belligerent opponents who no longer believe they can find a voice in parliament, in the senate, or in the press.  As such, they have chosen to cast their votes in the streets through violence and destruction, in rioting the likes of which has not been seen in Italy in “over 30 years.”

Toronto's Queen st. by C.G. Cunningham

While many media outlets would like to describe these violent protests in Rome and London as mindless apolitical thuggery, as was the mantra of major Canadian media outlets after G20 protests in Toronto this summer, it is much more likely that it is an expression of a deep feeling of political disenfranchisement.  The protests in Canada saw major abuses of power and a total abridgement of people’s rights to free movement, peaceful assembly, security of the person and due process.  Nearly all ‘charges’ against protesters in Toronto who were jailed have been thrown out, and there are now multiple investigations into police wrongdoings.  The protests on the second day of the G20 meetings swelled as the residents of Toronto spilled out onto the streets as they sensed that their rights were being trampled on; not by the IMF; the World Bank or the Group of 20; but by the Toronto Police and the other anti-riot squads and intelligence squads running amok in their city, indiscriminately searching and arresting people wearing "suspicious" or dark clothing, kettling areas of the city without warning and trapping peaceful demonstrators and people going about normal business.  Stories of beatings and sexual intimidation by police abound.  Reporters, video journalists and accredited media personnel, even from the CBC, were attacked by police, having their equipment seized and destroyed in an ostensible effort to control information on what was happening.  Many Canadians travelled to Toronto simply to protest the government’s eagerness to spend $1billion on security for the meetings while other social spending was being cut. 

Protest for Inquest by My Toronto Democracy

Though it may be too cold to protest in Canada now as winter approaches, there must be further consternation among all who have read a recent report by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, which discusses the continuing trend of rising income disparity in Canada since the 1970s.  As the top earning Canadian households continue to earn a greater and greater share of dollars, the result can only be a growing perception amongst lower earners that they are not getting their fair shake.   As long as a coalition government between Canada’s two major parties continues to support policies which encourage the trend of increasing disparity, which favours a numerical minority, so will there be a growing perception amongst the majority that the government is in service of that wealthy minority class, is unresponsive to the will of the majority, and that there is an erosion of democracy and social justice.  The disparity trend is the same in the US.  After the G20 summit in Toronto, it has also become public knowledge that to join a group which seeks redress against the government’s seeming anti-democratic leanings is to find oneself on a ‘security list’, and that should you present yourself at a public protest while being on such a list, you may be targeted for kidnapping and wrongful confinement in makeshift jails for the duration of the demonstrations, as happened to several activists who found themselves on government and police watch-lists. 

The British government has attacked its own future by making it harder for its citizens to educate themselves; they have stunted social mobility, and entrenched class divisions through this recent measure which was enacted in a gross and anti-democratic breach of public trust.  In Italy, a section of society would rather see Rome burn than accept the continued rule of their philandering and self-interested Prime-Minister.  Canadians and Americans are waking up to the fact that regardless of which party has formed their governments, they are facing a fourth consecutive decade of erosion of social services and increases in wealth and income disparity.  The populations of all these nations are watching their governments pay less and less attention to the will of their people, and more and more money to security and prison firms, policing and domestic surveillance initiatives.  Many view this as evidence that the protests such as we have seen in the past weeks in London and Rome, and this summer and Toronto are fruitless.  However, I’m afraid to imagine what shape the world would take in the total absence of such protests, should we proud inheritors of western democracies, whose freedoms and institutions were paid for in blood and revolution, become wholly subservient and meekly offer a carte-blanche to those who would take it.

More reading:


London's Fees Protests
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/dec/12/riots-fire-anger-defining-political-moment
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/footage-shows-protester-dragged-from-wheelchair-2159570.html


Riots in Rome
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1338461/Berlusconi-win-sparks-violence-Rome-survives-just-THREE-votes.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/14/silvio-berlusconis-confid_n_796566.html#s207347


Toronto G20 protests
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/toronto/story/2010/07/10/g20-rally-toronto-independent-review.html
http://littlealexinwonderland.wordpress.com/2010/06/29/report-toronto-police-molested-female-g-20-captives-video/
http://www.g20justice.com/

Increasing Canadian Income Disparity
http://www.policyalternatives.ca/publications/reports/rise-canadas-richest-1
http://www.obj.ca/Canada---World/2010-12-01/article-2008311/Canadas-wealthiest-breaking-new-frontiers-in-income-disparity%3A-report/1