The riots in Britain, could they happen here? What the papers say.

The Volkskrant has rounded up a number of experts to ask them if the Netherlands could see rioting on a British scale. Paul Schnabel, head of the government’s macro-economic forecasting agency CPB, thinks the Dutch shouldn’t be complacent: ‘It would be silly to say it couldn’t happen in the Netherlands.
Social differences
It’s unlikely, however ‘because there are many structural social differences’, maintains Schnabel. ‘There is more poverty in Britain, housing conditions are not as good, there is high unemployment and rampant urbanisation. We forget that Paris and London have a population that is half that of the Netherlands. It’s a huge concentration of people often living in dire circumstances’.
According to Rob Witte, who works for policy and advice bureau IVA in Tilburg, the Netherlands has learnt from past experience. ‘At the start of the seventies a Dutch family in Rotterdam was expelled by their Turkish landlord. An angry mob went to Turkish boarding houses and restaurants to do damage. The Turks tried to defend their property. The police only intervened when trouble spread and then it acted disproportionately. Anger was then directed at the police’
Eyes and ears
Witte explains that police now have ‘eyes and ears’ in problem areas and work closely with social workers, churches, mosques and schools. ‘In Britain these networks don’t exist, they have only just started with local policing’.
Cultural exclusion
Iliass el Hadioui studies social exclusion of youngsters at Erasmus university in Rotterdam. He compares Dutch youngsters with their British counterparts: ‘Here, most young people have access to work. They get grants, there is student housing’. According to El Hadioui, it’s not economic exclusion but cultural exclusion that is the problem in the Netherlands. ‘That hurts just as much. I have food and drink and an iPhone but I see Wilders on television rejecting my culture’.
It’s not just youngsters with a different ethnic background who feel excluded, El Hadioui says. ‘Society is changing so fast that many youngsters have trouble identifying with it’. For now, the cultural conflict is fought out on the internet but it could easily move to the street, El Hadioui thinks.
All experts agree that the Netherlands is moving towards to a more repressive, British policy. Schnabel: ‘Repression never works’.
Bias against youngsters
In the NRC, Willem Schinkel, senior Sociology lecturer at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, also comments on the increasingly repressive stance of the Dutch authorities, especially towards the young. VIP (‘very irritating police’) treatment and dispersal orders are gaining ground among the preventive measures taken against trouble makers. These are nothing compared to Britain, however. Schinkel cites research done in Manchester where curfews, shopping bans and no-go areas have long been in place in order to prevent youngsters from congregating. All preventive measures have a bias against youngsters, the researchers state.
The measures tend to criminalise youngsters and create anti-police sentiment among youngsters, including those who have no intention of making a nuisance of themselves.
Schinkel also warns against the tendency not to put these and other street riots in a political context and merely look at the youngsters as people with ‘a political alibi for looting.’
‘Amateurish’
Trouw focuses on the way British police handled the riots. ‘Almost amateurish’, its headline says. The paper is quoting professor of General Law Studies Jan Brouwer who feels the British police could learn from the Dutch Mobiele Eenheid, or riot police. ‘The British policemen are engaged in one-to-one fighting. That would never be contemplated here. The Dutch police force acts as a unit and depends on force of numbers, if it comes to fighting at all.’
The British police force doesn’t seem to have developed a strategy to prevent violence, says Brouwer. ‘Here violence is avoided as much as possible. Only when things get out of hand the ME is deployed. The men wear flat caps to start with. When things get tough they put on helmets and the truncheons come out. Police dogs and horses keep the crowd from scattering. Meanwhile, officers keep talking to the people. Often that helps. But if the worst comes to the worst, Dutch police act much more forcefully than their British colleagues have done up to now.’
Brouwer thinks it’s wise that the number of policemen deployed has been increased. ‘Force of numbers works. It would be disastrous to send in the army. It would antagonise people even more.’