IT WAS 10 years ago on August 4, 2011 that police shot dead Mark Duggan in Tottenham Hale. A gun was not found on him and there is no evidence that he fired one at police.

Numerous inquiries and court proceedings have followed but as so often the matter remains unresolved – not least for the family, but also for the wider community.

Two days later a local protest march went to the police station in central Tottenham. Such protests remain common, with incidents of racist policing still an issue. Usually the police engage with protesters who peacefully disperse. On that Saturday evening, August 6 2011, the police did not engage but tried to push back the protest. It sparked a riot — and that riot sparked others across the country.

At its core was frustration and anger at society where racism is endemic, many struggle to get by and prospects are — at best — limited for great numbers of people.

It is true that 10 years after, some things have changed since the police shooting and the events that followed it. Tottenham became a centre for craft beer and London’s only urban cheesemaker. New multi-storey flats surround my central Tottenham abode, very few affordable for existing inhabitants.

But none of that, as local MP David Lammy has argued, is of much use to those who have to rely on food banks to get by and whose future job opportunities look difficult. Tottenham continues to have several of the wards with the highest poverty in England and after the last 18 months amongst the highest of numbers who are either jobless or were furloughed.

When Boris Johnson, as the then London mayor, finally returned from a holiday and visited the area on the Friday after the riot, I shook his hand, as president of Haringey Trades Union Council, and pressed him on the need to invest in people and jobs. But a decade on, there is no sign of the now Prime Minister’s “levelling up” agenda in this area.

The new Spurs stadium on Tottenham High Rd, which is more impressive unfortunately than the performances of the team who play in it, is the outcrop of a related “renewal” project which was developed by an earlier Labour council after the events of 2010.

The plan was to redevelop the area around Spurs and build new housing in conjunction with developers. That would have involved the displacement of existing local residents. A community and union focused campaign stopped it and a more progressively minded Labour council was elected.

Now some council housing is again being built and efforts to redevelop the Latin American market at Seven Sisters have finally been dropped, again after a long-running community campaign.

Even so as veteran campaigner Stafford Scott wrote in the Guardian, the continuing instances of racist policing in the area still have the ability to provoke the conditions for another riot.

Riots are unpredictable, despite what the Kaiser Chiefs sang about predicting one, but as I argued at the time there is still a general pissed-offness and anger at a system that delivers for the few but certainly not for the many.

Ten years is too soon for the history books, but there is a provisional history to be written and remembered here. Of how people fought and continue to fight against racist policing and allied that with successive broad-based campaigns to sustain and develop a local community free of efforts by developers to replace people with profit.