I once made the mistake, in front of a friend who comes from Tottenham via Accra in Ghana, of referring to "the black community". I can still see him now, leaning back in his chair and laughing uproariously. "There ain't no such thing as the black community", he said. And of course when you think about it, it's true. Just as there's no such thing as "the angling community" or "the mountaineering community".
It's funny then how in the wake of the Mark Duggan inquest "community" is one word I think I've heard more than any other. That and "justice" perhaps. And with "community" comes the word "leader". "Community leaders" tend not to be elected people like parish councillors, but the self-appointed who like the sound of their own voices. They are often encouraged by government and local authorities, desperate to find some way of getting a purchase on the part of the population which doesn't have the same skin colour they do.
Usually "community leaders" are mediocre and self-serving people of the Bernie Grant or Jessie Jackson type who prefer the attention and money which being the link between authority and the huddled masses confers to a low wage job somewhere in the service industries. I guess you can't blame them.
Community leaders have been much in evidence in the last 48 hours. I heard one of them, Stafford Scott, say that the inquest verdict was a joke, that "everyone knows what's happening to this country" and that David Cameron was to blame. Really?
What you didn't hear community leaders saying was, "Mark Duggan was a bad man. He wasn't carrying a gun to hand it in to the police. The community is better off without him". Why is that? Well partly perhaps because their own status and position depends on articulating the fears and prejudices of their peers. Understandable, but not exactly leadership. But also because part of community leaders' function seems to be to perpetuate a narrative of victimhood.
I heard one poignant vox pop post-Duggan on Wednesday night. It was a young black man who said, "There ain't nothing up here. No jobs. Nothing". Now I lived in Hackney for four years and in London for sixteen. As I recall Tottenham Hale tube station is about seven stops from Oxford Circus. That's about fifteen or twenty minutes travel at the most.
Recent visits to London suggest the capital is booming. The people who serve you in pubs, restaurants and coffee shops are overwhelmingly from Europe or Eastern Europe, confirming anecdotally what figures show to be true, namely that we imported a workforce during the Blair / Brown years instead of getting British people, many of them with brown skins, off the dole.
But you can't just blame European immigration. "Community leaders" contribute to a narrative of helplessness. Complaints that no jobs are available a twenty minute tube ride away from the centre of the richest city on earth outside North America are utterly ridiculous. The truth is that jobs are there, but starting working life for little money in an unglamorous circumstances is at odds with "the community"'s self-mythology.
A culture which glamourises guns, violence and wealth, with the occasional detour denigrating women along the way, is not going to encourage young people to wait tables or serve behind a till. A culture which legitimises absent fathers is not going to give young men decent role models. The problems of places like Tottenham are complex, but they start from within.
