Tottenham Ten Years On
On 4 August it will be 10 years since police shot dead Mark Duggan in Tottenham Hale (Conditions that led to 2011 riots still exist today, experts warn, 30 July). It is true that things have changed since the shooting and the events that followed it. Tottenham became a centre for craft beer and London’s only urban cheesemaker. New multi-storey flats surround my central Tottenham abode, very few affordable for existing inhabitants.
But none of that, as David Lammy argues (A decade after Tottenham burned, social alienation means riots could happen again, 30 July), is of much use to those – far too many – who have to rely on food banks to get by and whose future job opportunities look difficult at best.
When Boris Johnson, as the then London mayor, finally returned from a holiday and visited the area some days after, I shook his hand, as president of Haringey Trades Union Congress*, and pressed him on the need to invest in people and jobs. But a decade on, there is no sign of the now prime minister’s “levelling up” agenda in this area.
Riots are unpredictable, but as I noted in the Guardian at the time (Tottenham riots: missteps in the dance of police and a frustrated community, 5 September 2011), there is still a general pissed-offness and anger at a system that delivers for the few but certainly not for the many.
Keith Flett
Tottenham, London
Guardian 4th August
*a Grauniad typo. It should be Haringey TUC- Trades Union Council
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