C’est l’économie, stupide – the real reason why the cars of Paris burn

David Aaronovitch The Times Times Online: "FRANCE, EVER the innovator in matters insurrectionary, follows its gift to the world of the barricade and the thrown cobble with la voiture brûlée. At the current rate of fiery attrition the Periphérique should be almost manageable by the weekend. Just be careful where you park.
Provided that the car that’s being torched is not yours, it almost looks like fun. One thing that everybody forgets (or suppresses) in a situation like this is just how enjoyable rioting can be. Lord, the things one might do if there were enough of you to do them, and the forces of the law were unable to stop you or catch you. Break the windows of snooty neighbours, burn the school down, overturn trash cans, strike romantically surly attitudes. This is one reason why, when stuff like this starts in one place, it can soon spread. After a while it begins to make everybody, including the families and girlfriends of the rioters, fed up, the authorities begin locking people up and the numbers fall. We in Britain, after all, have been here before, more than 20 years ago.

But amusing though it is to hurl bottles at the flics, entertainment is not usually the main factor behind these kinds of riots. If it were, they would be happening as much in the bourgeois parts of France as in the blighted banlieues outside the main cities. And here we have to begin to sift through the various theories to see if they make sense. Is it a problem of immigration? Of failed integrationism? Of racism? Of unassimilable Islam? Or is it mostly the fault of Nicolas Sarkozy, the ambitious Interior Minister?

In a way the proximate cause, the electrocution of two fleeing youths in the Parisian suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois, is unimportant in itself. It is the symbolism of the event that matters. Youth + police = death was the equation, and there are a zillion ways in which it could have happened.

And the idea that Sarkozy’s description of urban hoodlums as “rabble” (or “scum”, according to translation) was what motivated copycat car-burners to create street bonfires all over France is far-fetched.

In Lozells, Birmingham, recently the casus belli was the rumoured rape of a young Jamaican woman by Asian men. One man was killed. In October 1985 the death from a heart attack of Cynthia Jarrett during a police raid was the immediate reason for the Broadwater Farm riot in which PC Trevor Blakelock was hacked to death and another officer was shot. At the time a senior police officer told the BBC: “This is not England. This is just madness. My men are being used as target practice.”

It could be that these deaths themselves, because of their dreadfulness, helped to bring the disturbances to an end. Perhaps that is what will happen in France.

So we should look for longer-term reasons for the violence. Excessive French encouragement of multiculturalism is hardly a plausible candidate: the insistence in that country is mostly on integration at all costs.

Nor, given our own experience, does piling the blame on Muslims seem very credible. These riots would, I’d suggest, be happening even if every Arab and African youth in the suburbs had been brought up Catholic or Wiccan.

Ten years ago a young film-maker called Mathieu Kassovitz directed a film called La Haine. It won lots of awards for its description of what the writer Rod Kedward called the “violent, funny, tragic, angry, bored, racist mix of the banlieue”. La Haine showed mostly unemployed, mostly second-generation immigrant youth in a constant battle with a rather racist and distinctly arbitrary police force. All the raw material for a big burn-up was there. Then France won the World Cup with its team of blacks, browns and whites and the nation imagined, for a while, that it had discovered la vie en bleu. Until 2002, that is, and Jean-Marie Le Pen’s surprise showing in the first round of the presidential elections.

It’s not that France hasn’t agonised about helping people in the banlieue. But watching a French MP being interviewed on Newsnight last week reminded me of Britain circa 1982 and the defence of the hated sus laws, or of how some people reacted so strongly to the idea of institutional racism after the murder of Stephen Lawrence.

The man was all talk and no listen. He had nothing to learn. Currently France has very few black or North African TV presenters, and all the mainland deputies are white.

And France seems to be, on the whole, more Oldham than London. The refusal properly to discuss and admit the existence of minorities, the physical separation of races and beliefs, and the determination to talk about France and Frenchness as a defensive and exclusive proposition seems to cast people out of society rather than allow them to join. It’s the French fear of the Polish plumber again. When there’s the choice between open and closed, the French preference has been for closed. Thus the absurdity of the hijab ban which, for whatever the good secular reasons it was introduced, could only be construed by many Muslims as an act of denial.

But even these problems would not matter so much, I think, if it hadn’t been for the problem of unemployment. Here in Britain we’re pretty blasé about joblessness now, to the extent that the Chancellor’s continued determination to put us all to work is often characterised as being a weird Calvinist eccentricity. Most of our inner-city riotous episodes, however, happened at the peak of Britain’s unemployment crisis.

Nothing — and here Gordon Brown has been absolutely right — excludes people so much as not being able to get a job. In France unemployment is double what it is in Britain, youth unemployment is higher still and youth unemployment in the suburbs still higher. Forty per cent is one estimate I’ve seen for Clichy, where all this kicked off. And the unemployment is long-term, eroding the capacity of individuals to get back into the job market, and acting as a serious drain on public finances. If I had to put my vulgar, materialist finger on any one root cause of the present spate of burnings, then that’s the one I’d pick.

This is not the place for a discussion of how France might cure itself of its economic malaise. It could be a coincidence that French companies pay the equivalent of 28 per cent of the average salary in payroll taxes, compared with 9 per cent in Britain, but one doubts it. Though it may be comforting for the victims of the current riots to reflect from their hospital beds, that — for the moment at least — the standard of treatment they are getting is higher than it would be in Britain.

Somehow France has to rediscover its economic dynamism and to give its suburban youth something useful to do. In the meantime it may need to learn some of the awkward lessons about policing and consent that Britain picked up in the 1980s and 1990s, and which some Conservative politicians, in their complaints about police form-filling and political correctness, seem to want to unlearn. "