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COLLEGE LIFE
Out of the Ashes
Britain after the Riots
David Lammy MP delivers
the Inaugural JCR Equal
Opportunities Lecture
David Lammy MP has represented his
constituency, Tottenham, since 2000,
when he became the youngest member
of the House of Commons. A stint as a
Constitutional Affairs Minister was followed
by service as Minister for Culture between
2005 and 2007. David later became Higher
Education Minister. More recently, David
authored a well-reviewed book on the 2011
riots, entitled Out of the Ashes: Britain
after the Riots.
‘An explosion of hedonism and nihilism’ was
how David labelled the 2011 summer riots.
Raised in Broadwater Farm (where Mark
Duggan’s August 2011 shooting sparked
the riots), and as MP for the constituency
which suffered most from the riots, Lammy
was uniquely placed to give an explosive
account on the state of contemporary
equality. He condemned the emergence of
a ‘Grand Theft Auto culture that glamorises
violence’, as symptomatic of broader social
degeneration.
This degeneration is linked, David argued,
to two fundamental twentieth-century
transformations: the post-war social
revolution, followed by an economic
revolution in the 1980s. The social revolution
brought broad equality and liberty centred,
in Lammy’s view, on Attlee’s Welfare State
and Bevan’s NHS. This equality was, however,
undermined by the development of a
‘subversive individualism’. That individualism
peaked during the period 1979 (after
profound sectionalism during the ‘Winter of
Discontent’ left British society deeply divided)
to 2008; its most destructive manifestation
being the economic crisis of the latter year.
For Lammy, the 2011 riots were the product
of a socio-cultural disenfranchisement
engendered by that second social revolution.
David repeatedly asserted that ‘juxtaposition’
was something that deeply interests him. He
had witnessed fundamental juxtapositions in
his own early years, contrasting his upbringing
on a council estate by a Guyanese singlemother,
to his admission into the ‘posh’ King’s
School, and Harvard. The edge-of-the-seat
tone of this inaugural lecture heightened the
excitement and optimism generated by David’s
ideas.
This marks a very successful beginning in
what I hope will be a long line of prestigious
and engaging speaker events for Catz
Equal Opportunities – bringing to light
the difficult questions to be asked about
contemporary equality, and drawing students
into a consideration of how these may be
confronted. n
Michael Livesey (2011, History) is the JCR
Equal Opportunities Representative.
16/OUT OF THE ASHES