Wild in the Streets

“It was all that bloody bear’s fault, coming up here mauling local youths, the white bastard,” twenty three year old Tottenham resident Doug Frottle told The Sleaze. “I mean, I didn’t see it myself, but I heard it on the news. One minute some kids are being chewed up by a bear, next thing riots are breaking out up here. It’s obvious what the cause was!” Frottle is one of a growing number of North London residents firmly placing the blame for the mass civil disobedience blighting Britain’s capital on the anti-social activities of a polar bear. “I mean, he was white, them kids were black – it was obviously racial wasn’t it?” he opines. “Of course people are going to get out on the streets after that sort of thing! Of course they’re going to get angry with the police – they don’t do nothing about these racist bears coming up here and causing trouble.” Despite media reports claiming that the Tottenham riots – which quickly spread to other parts of London – were motivated by purely criminal intent, with rioters focusing on looting local shops rather than protesting, Frottle is adamant that they were a response to the alleged bear attack. “Them rioters they showed breaking into shops and stuff, they were going after anything bear-shaped, “ he insists. “I saw it with my own eyes – they were smashing windows and snatching teddy bears and stuff, before burning them. That’s how all the fires started.”

Another local resident, twenty year old Jamelia Runtz agrees that the riots were instigated by the activities of outsiders to the area. “What was that bear doing up here, anyway?” she asks. “Everybody knows his sort don’t live round here – he usually lives down Bermondsey way. Everyone knows that, he drives a minicab down there.” The reasons for the bear’s calamitous excursion North of the river last week aren’t clear, but locals in Tottenham agree that he appeared to be in a foul mood and seemed to be looking for trouble. “The way I heard it, he was well narked that some financial geezers had downgraded the ursine credit rating,” says Frottle. “It all had something to do with dodgy dealings in the bear market, or some shit. Like all those racist right wing dudes, he reckoned it was all a Jewish conspiracy, which is why he came up to Tottenham.” She also believes that the police response to the bear attack exacerbated the situation. “I heard they shot him in his minicab when he tried to get away, even though he didn’t have a gun, just teeth and claws,” Runtz says. “As soon as they heard, all his bear mates came up here, running wild, looting and burning shops.”

However, Professor Bob Mincer, Head of Media studies at the Leyton Correspondence College, believes that people are confusing several entirely different news stories to create a completely fictitious conspiracy theory.. “It’s something I fear we’ll see more and more of – information overload,” he muses from a gutter outside the Ruptured Badger in Leyton. “There are just too many media outlets, blasting too many stories at us simultaneously these days – people just can’t assimilate it all properly and become confused. Their minds’ attempts to make sense of all these fragments of news results in bizarre rumours of this kind of bizarre rumours, which quickly gain spurious credence as they bounce around social networks.” Both Frottle and Runtz reject such allegations. “No way man, we’re not stupid, we know what’s what,” responded an angry Runtz. “We followed it all on Twitter and Facebook – people from all over were tweeting and posting about bear attacks, credit ratings and stuff.”

Even when it was pointed out that none of the TV news footage of the riots showed any bears participating, Frottle refused to be moved from his story. “Course you couldn’t see any – they was wearing hoodies and masks to hide their faces, man,” he sighs, clearly exasperated by such scepticism. “Look, local people had no choice but to get out and try to reclaim their streets from these vicious bear bastards! I mean, the police were doing nothing to stop them – just look at their arrest figures for the riots! No bear arrests recorded!” Frottle is convinced that this simply demonstrates the inherently racist nature of the Metropolitan Police. “I can guarantee that if they was black bears rather than polar bears, they’d have nicked the lot of ‘em,” he says. “It’s just another case of whitey looking after his own!” Like many Londoners affected by the civil disturbances, Runtz is keen to know what the government is proposing to do about the situation. “I heard that as soon as he got back from holiday, David Cameron had a meeting with a cobra,” she says. “What good are snakes against bears? They’d have to be bloody big snakes to do any good – the bears will just bite their heads off! Lions – that’s what the government should be sending out onto the streets! They’d do for the bears, no problem!”

However, Runtz has so far been disappointed, with the Prime Minister apparently ruling out the deployment of lions, or any other big cats, for that matter. “Deplorable though the behaviour of these criminal elements has been, I don’t think that setting wild animals loose on the streets will help calm the situation,” a bemused looking Cameron told Runtz, when she accosted him during a walkabout in Hackney, before denying that he knew anything about the involvement of polar bears in the riots. “Bears? What are they, some kind of ethnic hoodie gang? Or some sort of street slang for drugs smoked by poor black people?” Following this encounter, Runtz is now convinced that there is an official cover-up with regard to the bears. “It’s like it never happened – they want to blame it all on poor black youths instead,” she says. “It’s all a conspiracy – those white bears were sent in deliberately by the police or the BNP or someone, to stir up trouble so as to discredit the local communities!”

Despite her disappointment, Runtz at least fared better than Frottle in getting a reasonable answer from a leading politician. His attempts to get answers from London’s Mayor during a Croydon walkabout, were met with hostility. “Look, there are no bloody bears looting shops or driving minicabs in London! The bear attack was in Norway for God’s sake and the victims were posh white boys! How can that justify rioting in Tottenham?” Boris Johnson angrily snapped, in response to Frottle’s shouted questions about bears. “And it was the US that had its credit rating reduced, not the bears! What’s wrong with you bloody people, why can’t you grasp these simple facts?” A visibly flustered Johnson finally confronted Frottle, wagging his finger as he admonished him for his alleged foolishness. “This talk of bears doing the looting is quite preposterous! What were they stealing from shops, eh? Honey? Picnic baskets?” Johnson blustered. “It is time that people who are engaged in looting and violence stopped hiding behind fairy tales about bears…” At which point he was forced to hurriedly exit, pursued by a bear.