Mayhem in Middlesbrough
The recent horrifying car crash on the A66, which took seven lives, has shone a light on the community in Middlesbrough and its conditions. Five young men and boys and two police officers lost their lives, when the young men – in a car with cloned plates – tried to avoid police pursuit by going the wrong way on a dual carriageway at three o’clock in the morning. The two officers had not been involved in the chase, they were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.
After the smash, it became clear that wider criminality had been involved, with the police swooping down and arresting 12 people on various organised-crime charges. Another car had been rammed into the house of the father one of the boys, and there is a suggestion that they took to the roads in response to this.
The immediate response was one of outpouring of sympathy for the dead officers. A suggestion by local MP, Anna Turley, that all of the victims be remembered was met with politicised rage. The right-wing hate machine of X (formerly Twitter) began by making suggestions that the five were from a traveller community, then quickly pivoted to calling them underclass scum when it turned out that they did not belong to any ethnic minority.
Instead, calls for the police or the army to be sent in to sort them out and remove them from the community became the agreed line (the machinery of social media bots and trolls is a swarm learning system that tries various tacks until if finds something that works and gets traction and responses). This line then fed into the response to the families of the five beginning to commemorate their loss. They held ‘balloon releases’ to remember their lost loved ones. The fact that the grieving families were themselves innocent of killing the policemen was lost in the vituperation of those who demanded a form of damnatio memoriae for the five.
When their funerals were held, the case became a national controversy, as local schools closed because of the perceived risks to the children from the disruption they may cause. Young men on quadbikes and motorbikes formed part of the funeral corteges. At one of the funerals, a sort of Viking send off of burnt stolen cars was arranged. Some of the friends of the five maintained that the police had killed them.
In the 1990s, it was commonplace to find burnt out cars on school playing fields in Middlesbrough. The twockers, as they were called, sometimes avoided charges of theft by giving back the cars they ‘took without owners consent’ (the origin of the word twoc). Burning them destroyed the evidence of who had taken the car for a joyride. Any large carpark around Teesside could become a venue for handbreak turns and reckless driving. The young men who did that then are the spiritual (if not biological) fathers of those who died on the A66.
Middlesbrough is a community in visible decline. Linthorpe Road, once an arterial row of useful shops has become a long stretch of fast-food outlets: the larger department stores have closed down. The industries upon which the area was built – steel and shipbuilding – have disappeared. Whilst it retains a lot of brownfield space recovered from its industrial past, which is useful for building new industries, any new activities are far from labour-intensive.
It is a feature of the wages system that whilst some are subjected to arduous toil, others, necessarily, are condemned to idleness. A reserve army of labour is required for several reasons. The reserve provides recruits to work when necessary and holds down wages. The threat of being thrown on the scrapheap serves as a visible reminder of what can happen to anyone who challenges the rule of capital. It can also serve as a source of political shock troops.
The more enterprising and energetic of the long-term unemployed can show an entrepreneurial flair by turning to crime, and finding means of getting hold of money that doesn’t involve themselves becoming employees. There is a plausible case that the young men in the car had themselves been ‘groomed’ into criminality. We’re a long way from getting to the bottom of what exactly happened.
The knock-on effects of long-term decline are a spiral of lack of incentive to educate or get educated, much less to try and integrate into a society that seems hell-bent on controlling people it sees more as a problem than as fellow citizens. It’s not a wonder that many of the young men see the police as a hostile force. The neglect begins early, and the children’s services on Teesside are overstretched and dealing with multi-generational neglect.
It shouldn’t be overlooked that there was serious anti-immigrant rioting in Middlesbrough, and there will be an overlap between that and the current wave of disorder. The people without access to the high-skilled jobs market, left behind by the current system and in an insular community, will have been easily incited to campaign about in-comers.
The objective effect of last year’s disorder and that around the funerals will be as if there has been a form of collective bargaining by riot, the public authorities will try to buy social peace, while at the same time putting more resources into policing. Far-right opposition will rail against giving anything to those who cannot even be seen to be useful to the labour market ‘surplus population’, while there is little prospect of attracting any new industry that could absorb (or make it worth training) the available labour pool.
Technological advances on a global scale means that an area built on mass industry has had to reassess its identity and the way in which it organises itself. Instead of writing off whole areas and the individuals within it, we can end the wages system and enable free co-operation instead of idleness characterised by police and criminal organisations.
PIK SMEET
Next article: If god is capital all wars are holy (who cares who wins) ➤