On a cool night in late May 2001 - I was getting ready to make my way to bed when the pager buzzed. That’s how we rolled in those days, strange to think that at one point pagers seemed very futuristic.
The pager had buzzed because I was on call that day, the team of journalists I was part of took it in turns to take ‘the pager’ home. At the end of a working day, and worse still at the end of a working week, our newsdesk landline was redirected to a paging service. On this particular night that un-looked-for privilege was mine. I could be called at any time, and have to respond to whatever job was coming in - a tragic death, a major incident, a breaking piece of news… whatever it might be.
When I examined the pager’s small digital screen the number that appeared was familiar, a reporter for one of the national newspapers who I had dealt with before on a number of occasions. A smart operator. Because it was my job to do so, I rang him.
“Can you head down to Oldham for us?” He said, “we’ve heard that it’s all going to kick off there tonight.” I agreed, of course, I had no real choice in the matter. But I wasn’t convinced, certainly not convinced enough to get changed out of the sweat pants I’d been wearing. I just pulled on a warm jacket, kissed my six months pregnant wife (at the time doing her university finals) goodbye, and grabbed my notebook just in case. As it turned out I didn’t come home for about thirty six hours.
The rioting that broke out in Oldham that night, and which subsequently spread to other towns and cities across the UK in the following days, was later described as having been ‘ethnically motivated’. To use another term, much bandied about at the time, these were ‘race riots’.
I was the first and only journalist to be on the scene in Oldham when the bricks and petrol bombs started flying. For some time I remained the only one, only joined later in the night when word began to filter out. As I chased the action, determined to document it as best I could, I drove my silver Ford Ka through a makeshift barricade; got a stern telling off for following a convoy of police vans when they took a ‘no right turn’ towards a confrontation; was hit on the leg by a piece of thrown masonry; watched as an officer shouted ‘serials advance’ and a line of riot police marched towards a group of masked men; I dodged past burning police vans - I would do whatever it took to follow the story.
Before long I was joined by the on call photographer, he’d banked on a quiet weekend and had naughtily sneaked off home - he was more than seventy miles away when he got the message to join me, he broke several speed limits to get there. He also knew we had to follow the story. His pictures were everywhere in the days to come.
Covering the rioting was, to be honest, partly frightening, and partly exhilarating. Much of my reporting up to that point had been run of the mill stuff - not the stuff of dreams and hardly anything that was likely to make a front page ‘splash’ - the words that appeared on the front pages of the nationals for the next few days, however, owed an awful lot to the eyewitness testimony found in my syndicated copy. I gave live interviews to broadcasters; I found a senior news correspondent - familiar from the TV, huddled in a darkened doorway and helped him find a way into the story; I was, for a short time, a kind of expert, because I stuck to following the story.
I became fascinated, during this spell of high drama reporting, with the cause of the riots. I began to speak to lawyers and police sources to try and dig into the identities and history of some of the leaders of the far right groups which were agitating for trouble in Oldham, Rochdale and other places. Among the key ringleaders was a shaven headed convicted gun runner and senior National Front organiser, he’d previously been caught trying to smuggle sub machine guns to loyalist terrorists in Northern Ireland, the weapons had been hidden inside the door panels of his car. He was also a man, I observed, who carried multiple mobile phones.
There were others, too, who I found myself investigating - men (all men) with very troubling biographies - who seemed intent on fermenting and taking part in violence, and on depicting particular groups, religious and ethnic groups, as being ‘the problem’ in society. In fact it was these men, I became convinced, who were the real problem - if only they had never existed, somehow, perhaps none of this would have happened. I was naïve and had by this point forgotten my maxim, I had stopped following the story.
This short, but dramatic and formative, period of my journalistic career flashed back into focus, over the last few days, as rioting or in some cases ‘street violence’ (rioting has a technical definition which has insurance connotations) broke out again in various places across the UK. One of those places was Hull - as I was being ordained as a minister in a church in West Hull, crowds were on the rampage just a mile or so away.
“The problem with many theologians,” someone told me once, “is they are obsessed by ‘first cause’.” In other words, those theologians often want to get back to the beginning - and get a definitive answer to the question: “how did ‘things’ start?” The idea of ‘first cause’ is based on the sense that every ‘effect’ has a ‘cause’ - only God alone, the theological argument might go, has no beginning or end. Everything else has a point of origin, a starting place, which can, ultimately, be identified.
It’s not just theologians who get caught up in the search for cause when looking at effect, bound by the idea that all things have a beginning and an end and if you trace back far enough, you can work out where it all began. Journalists are the same, or at least they are in my experience.
“Who is to blame for this, that’s what we want to know, just find out who’s to blame,” one of my early journalistic mentors explained. That made a sort of sense to me then, it makes me shudder now. Following the story then meant identifying someone who could be blamed.
The truth is, though, always far much more complex than this way of thinking would make it seem. Found within any single supposed ‘cause’ are a myriad of other causes. The idea that ‘Hitler caused the second world war’ for instance, is painfully over simplistic. The root causes of that dreadful conflict, and the appalling devastation it caused, are found in the histories of the European nations in the centuries preceding it. They are found in the life stories, experiences, misunderstandings, and mental health of the individuals who helped to shape it. They are found in a myriad of momentary decisions in the lives of ordinary people that together, somehow, caused something much bigger, and arguably far worse, than the sum of their parts. Cause and effect are not clear cut. In her examination of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann Hannah Arendt discovered the ‘banality of evil’ - the very ordinary choices which go to make up the very worst behaviour.
The criminal individuals I painstakingly researched over twenty years ago were key in stoking ethnic tensions in 2001, certainly, but none of them alone could really be pinpointed as ‘the cause’ of the violence. Their behaviour, and thinking, is in no way justified or justifiable, but still there is no single ‘smoking gun’ which started the rioting then, just as is there no single mastermind or agenda that we can hope to single out now.
That doesn’t let people off the hook for their actions - some people have deliberately shouted ‘fire fire’ while maliciously spraying petrol and tossing matches. People have deliberately tried to kill and injure some of the most desperately vulnerable folk in our world. Nevertheless, they alone, or even taken together, aren’t enough to ‘cause’ this. They didn’t ‘cause’ themselves, after all. As inconvenient and at times uncomfortable as this reality is, all of this is part of a much bigger irreducible process, a knot of stories and experiences, of anxieties and encounters; it is all part of a deeply complex, and interwoven, set of stories and circumstances.
How then do we address it? How do we even begin dealing with the problems that led to the appalling terrorising of already suffering and traumatised people? How do we begin to understand why people would decide to smash their way into places that seek to help the most marginalised members of our society? And how do we prevent it happening again?
I suppose I still think that some of my Oldham instincts were right - we have to follow the story. That means, though, that we have to do the hard work of listening to what people are saying - no matter how much we might revile it. We have to learn about their lives and their ways of seeing the world - even if that’s horribly unpleasant and deeply painful. We have to try to understand the way they have been shaped by the circumstances and experiences of their lives - not to excuse their inexcusable behaviour, but to recognise that these things are deeply complex and infinitely multifaceted. There is not always ‘someone to blame’ without whom none of this would have happened, neither is there always ‘a cause’ which we can fix to resolve the problem. The truth is far more devastating, and complicated, than that.
What a brilliant reflection. It takes me back to the 80s and my journalistic days during street violence in Nottingham. Thanks for sticking with the story and being our eyewitness. Watching, asking and listening affords us a way through the mess and a route to transformation. Possibly, your ordination was the Father's sublime timing.