London Riots

I wouldn’t be a proper Londoner if I didn’t say something about this, even though like, most of the city, I suspect I’m not sure what I want to say.  So, I’ll try and keep it simple.

In the last 24 hours, hundreds of people all across the city have taken to the streets and smashed things.  Certain characteristics are obvious; the riots have trended towards being in more deprived areas and there doesn’t seem to be any sort of political or social intent behind them.  They are purely about rage, violence and in a lot of cases, greed.

With my Londoners hat on, I therefore entirely support the police, who are doing their utmost to protect us and our streets; I entirely support the ambulance and fire services who must also have had quite a night, and I entirely condemn the rioters.

Rage is something I can understand, and we’d be stupid if we didn’t ask some questions – why is this happening, why are so many of the rioters young, what caused this, what fuels it, what could we, as a society, do better to prevent things ever getting this bad?  As anyone who regularly reads this blog knows, my politics are strictly liberal, and I imagine over the next few weeks there’ll be a debate across politics, the media and of course those strangely new powerful forces, facebook and twitter, as to the nature of how we respond.  Tighten crime laws?  Tag potential offenders, harsher sentences, stricter laws?  The temptation will be to regard this as a sign of a weak society, of a society in which thuggery is tolerated and the police are powerless.  But naturally, as an afore-mentioned wishy-washy liberal, I would raise the question of what lies behind the riots.  What have we failed to provide, how have we reached this state, and what can we do, more, better than stripping away yet more of our freedoms, to stop it happening again?  Knee-jerk reactions fuel knee-jerk reactions; retaliation fuels retribution and so, when the embers have cooled and the smoke has faded, let’s hope London picks itself up and gets back on the road again in a smarter, better way; doing so would be the real stand against the madness of these riots.