London, Aug. 16: New evidence of the ferocity of the English riots emerged today as the police charged a 16-year-old boy with murder following the death of a 68-year-old retiree attacked during the turmoil as British leaders across the political spectrum manoeuvred for position.
The boy's 31-year-old mother, arrested at the same crime scene, was charged with seeking to pervert the course of justice, according to state prosecutors. Under British judicial rules, the boy's identity was kept secret.
He was charged with murdering Richard Manning Bowes, who died on Thursday after being assaulted during unrest that swept through the west London district of Ealing on August 8. A post-mortem examination showed that he died of head injuries. He was the fifth person reported killed during the convulsion of arson and looting that left many Britons stunned and challenged the country's leaders to explain why it happened and what should be done to avert more violence.
With neighbourhoods across a wide array of English cities and towns still resounding with the clamour of clean-up crews and with police reinforcements cautiously drawing down yesterday, politicians found a political landscape profoundly altered by last week's rioting and offered competing prescriptions that seemed to rupture an uneasy consensus that has prevailed in British politics for a generation.
Radically different speeches by Prime Minister David Cameron and Ed Miliband, the leaders of the Conservative and Labour Parties, appeared to set the stage for the kind of gloves-off, Left-versus-Right politics Britain has not seen since Margaret Thatcher's heyday in the 1980s. Both in their early 40s and both previously characterised by cautious efforts to command the centre, the two men signalled that the riots had girded each of them for a new battle that could determine Britain's future for years.
Today, Cameron toured the north London neighbourhood of Tottenham, where the four days of rioting started after a peaceful protest about the death of Mark Duggan.
, a 29-year-old man of Afro-Caribbean descent who was shot and killed by a
police officer under circumstances being investigated by the police regulator.
Mr. Cameron visited a leisure center used by some 200 people made homeless by
fires that tore through their apartments after rioters burned the stores below. At
the same time, Theresa May, the home secretary, who is responsible for the police,
told a meeting in central London that the police might be given powers to impose
curfews. But Ms. May again rejected demands by senior police officers for their
forces to be exempted from the government's deep cuts in public spending, inspired
by the country's debt crisis.
"Under existing laws, there is no power to impose a general curfew in a particular
area," she said. And while the movements of individuals could be restricted by
curfewlike regulations, "there are only limited powers to impose them on somebody
under the age of 16."
"These are the sort of changes we need to consider," she said.
For his part, Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrat junior coalition partner,
went some way toward meeting opposition demands for a public airing of the
grievances and passions that led to the violence, but rejected demands for a
formal inquiry. Mr. Clegg said an independent panel would be established.
"It won't be a public inquiry, it won't be established under the Inquiries Act,
but it will serve as a way in which victims and communities can have their voice
heard," he told a news conference.
On Monday, Mr. Cameron promised an uncompromising across-the-board reworking of
the social policies he blamed for "the slow-motion moral collapse" across Britain
in recent generations, while Mr. Miliband assailed the government's punitive
approach, saying "tough action against gangs" and other steps favored by Mr.
Cameron needed to be complemented by action to "show young people there's another
way."
The mood was captured by a headline for a column on the left-of-center Guardian
newspaper Web site, proclaiming that Mr. Cameron's effort had heralded "the return
of the nasty party," meaning the Conservatives of the 1980s and 1990s.
Conservative-supporting columnists responded in kind, saying Mr. Cameron had at
last spoken up for a majority in Britain, addressing moral issues too long avoided
by politicians.
"Social problems that have been festering for decades have exploded in our face,"
Mr. Cameron said in a speech in his home constituency in rural Oxfordshire on
Monday. "Irresponsibility. Selfishness. Behaving as if your choices have no
consequences. Children without fathers. Schools without discipline. Reward without
effort. Crime without punishment. Rights without responsibilities. Communities
without control. Some of the worst aspects of human nature tolerated, indulged,
sometimes even incentivized, by a state and its agencies that in parts have become
literally de-moralized."
The "responsible majority" of Britons, he said, were "crying out for their
government" to confront these issues. Accordingly, he said, his government would
set out over coming weeks to "review every aspect" of social policy. "On schools,
welfare, families, parenting, addiction, communities, on the cultural, legal,
bureaucratic problems in our society, too; from the twisting and misrepresenting
of human rights that has undermined personal responsibility to the obsession with
health and safety that has eroded people's willingness to act according to common
sense."
Mr. Miliband spoke at his boyhood school in north London, a state school in a
working-class neighborhood, as if to accentuate his differences with Mr. Cameron,
who had attended the exclusive Eton College. He spoke derisively of the prime
minister having chosen the "easy and predictable path" by blaming "criminality,
pure and simple," words Mr. Cameron used at the height of the looting and
pillaging, and condemning him for suggesting, in reply to those who pointed to
social deprivation as the cause of the disorder, "that to explain is to excuse."
The speech took more direct aim at Mr. Cameron and his top ministers, who have
announced an array of tough new measures to deal with the rioters and encouraged
the courts to hand out stiff jail terms. "A new policy a day, knee-jerk gimmicks
rushed out without real thought, will not solve the problem," Mr. Miliband said.
"We've heard it all in the last few days. Water cannon. Supercops. A daily door
knock for gangs. And today, more gimmicks."
Mr. Miliband called for a "national conversation" on the causes of the riots that
would "give people a chance for their voices and views to be heard." While the
government has set out plans to evict rioters and their families from
state-subsidized housing and to strip convicted rioters of welfare benefits, Mr.
Miliband said weaning young wrongdoers from crime was "harder when support is
being taken away."
The implications for British politics were far reaching. Mr. Miliband was staking
out ground that has strong support on the left wing of his party, if less among an
older, traditionalist Labour bloc as incensed in many ways by the rioting as
traditionalist Conservatives. Many of those who work with underprivileged youths
have also spoken strongly against the kind of retributive measures Mr. Cameron and
his ministers have advocated, and they have pressed for the continuation of the
redemptive social policies that have prevailed for decades.
They have spoken out strongly, too, against round-the-clock courts that have been
in session in London and other cities, sending 60 percent of the 2,500 people
arrested in the riots to jail pending trial. The national average for those jailed
while awaiting trial for criminal offenses was 10 percent before the riots. The
courts have also handed down harsh jail terms even to the lesser offenders,
including a five-month sentence in London to a 22-year-old single mother of two
who was given a pair of shorts by a friend who had looted a local store.
But for Mr. Cameron, another political calculus was at work. He spoke of his
determination to break with the conventions that have governed mainstream politics
since the demise of Mrs. Thatcher's my-way-or-the-highway approach in 1990, when
she resigned. "We have been unwilling for too long to talk about what is right and
what is wrong," he said. "We have too often avoided saying what needs to be said,
about everything from marriage to welfare to common courtesy." But now, he said,
"the party's over."
The prime minister's new hard-line approach is not likely to sit well with the
junior partners in his coalition government, the left-of-center Liberal Democrats,
who have been increasingly restive about the impact of the harsh public-spending
cuts demanded by the Conservatives. If they were to quit the government, that
could force a new general election.
But with opinion polls since the riots showing strong support for a law-and-order
crackdown, and support for the Liberal Democrats at a nearly historic low, Mr.
Clegg may calculate that they have little choice but to stay with the
Conservatives, bowing at least part way to Mr. Cameron's new right-of-center
impulses.
John F. Burns reported from London, and Alan Cowell from Paris.
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