Raiding shops for technology and trainers that cost ten times as much as the benefits you’re no longer entitled to is another. A peaceful protest over the death of a man at police hands, in a community where locals have been given every reason to mistrust the forces of law and order, is one sort of political statement. Unquestionably there is far, far more to these riots than the death of Mark Duggan, whose shooting sparked off the unrest on Saturday, when two police cars were set alight after a five-hour vigil at Tottenham police station. The politics of a burning building, a smashed-in shop or a young man shot by police may be obscured even to those who lit the rags or fired the gun, but the politics are there.
Tonight, in one of the greatest cities in the world, society is ripping itself apart. Angry young people with nothing to do and little to lose are turning on their own communities, and they cannot be stopped, and they know it.
It is no way to talk about viral civil unrest. Speaking from his Tuscan holiday villa, Prime Minister David Cameron – who has finally decided to return home to take charge - declared simply that the social unrest searing through the poorest boroughs in the country was "utterly unacceptable." The violence on the streets is being dismissed as ‘pure criminality,’ as the work of a ‘violent minority’, as ‘opportunism.’ This is madly insufficient. Nick Clegg denounced it as 'needless, opportunistic theft and violence'. David Lammy, MP for Tottenham, called the disorder 'mindless, mindless'. That much should be obvious to anyone who is watching Croydon burn down on the BBC right now. In the scramble to comprehend the riots, every single commentator has opened with a ritual condemnation of the violence, as if it were in any doubt that arson, muggings and lootings are ugly occurrences. How the hell did this happen? And what are we going to do now? Britain is a tinderbox, and on Friday, somebody lit a match.
Politicians and police officers who only hours ago were making stony-faced statements about criminality are now simply begging the young people of Britain’s inner cities to go home. This is the third consecutive night of rioting in London, and the disorder has now spread to Leeds, Liverpool, Bristol and Birmingham. Last night, Enfield, Walthamstow, Brixton and Wood Green were looted there have been hundreds of arrests and dozens of serious injuries, and it will be a miracle if nobody dies tonight. The BBC is interchanging footage of blazing cars and running street battles in Hackney, of police horses lining up in Lewisham, of roiling infernos that were once shops and houses in Croydon and in Peckham. I’m huddled in the front room with some shell-shocked friends, watching my city burn.
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