A quick thought on Burningham…

Not sure of the road situation last Tuesday, I decided to cycle to work, cycling down the Pershore Rd, Birmingham was calm, the past few days have been upsetting to say the least for Brummies. Culminating in the pointless deaths of three young Birmingham men, Shazad Ali, Abdul Musavir and Haroon Jahan.
I arrived in the markets area around 5.30 am, cycling down Edgbaston Street, I was confronted with a sea of clothes hangers, where people had thrown away the evidence. On a stall nearby was a bunch of clothes hangers and a half-eaten take-away, if it wasn’t so sad, I’d laugh.
If Birmingham City Council can’t see the situation with the young people of the city now then they only have themselves to blame. I look around my place of the work, the Bull Ring Open Market, and I see reflected in both the faces of my co-workers and people who shop in the market, these same youth that may have looted and broken into the city in which they live. And I wonder, when these young people who work on the market, who often haven’t finished secondary education let alone gone to University, no longer have a job, and these other young people who use the market as an ecconomical way to get their fruit and veg for the week no longer have a market to go to, what will happen? When Birmingham City Centre is only for those that ‘have’ and those that ‘have not’ can stay in their ghettoes – what will have become of our city that was built on trade and markets? To exclude and invisibilise these marginalised groups even further from the centre of Birmingham will only breed more discontent and anger.
My story is personal, my father ran his own business for many years, until he died. He never really went to school, he didn’t have any qualifications, and in my opinion was dyslexic and was never given the attention he needed to flourish in the education system. The system didn’t give him a chance, but a trader on the Bull Ring Open Market did and gave him a job when he was about 14. He worked hard and eventually they gave him the pitch. The pitch that I run today. So, what if that chance hadn’t have been there – I can pretty much guarantee that my dad may well have been one of those young people grabbing a piece of a city and a consumer culture that isn’t available to them usually.
I, along with countless others, don’t condone the violence on the streets of my city, or any other city but I have to put my hand up to feeling some sense of shame that these young people feel so desperate, excluded and marginalised that they just don’t care or feel that they have a share in their own future.

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