There were, thank God, no riots to speak of last night. Instead there was a unity rally in Walthamstow which attracted thousands of people in a demonstration of social solidarity. Is it safe now to talk about the end of the riots? We can at least say that, for now, they are not happening, except possibly in Belfast; the foreign TV news crews are returning home; and, as some pundits have observed, the imminent return of the football season may give the rioting hooligans an alternative outlet for their energies.
It’s remarkable, isn’t it, what being banged up can do for the animal spirits? There was something quite old school about the way a man who punched a policeman was sentenced to three years without the option of bail, with other violent offenders going down for two and one and a half years. Thugs may be called mindless but few are quite so mindless as not to take on board the realities of summary justice. Indeed, it makes you realise what the state can do in the way of expediting the criminal justice system when it puts its mind to it.
We may now have established that setting fire to refugee hostels and throwing bricks through the windows of harmless small shopkeepers isn’t on.
So, good for Sir Keir Starmer for his tough on crime approach. And good for the Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, for finding capacity within the prison system for jailing offenders who’d been dealt with by the courts, notwithstanding the crisis in prison capacity.
Our laws are sufficient to deal with violent affray — we do not need new legislation
I would say good for the Met Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley too for his force’s effective show of strength in London, which must be one reason why small shopkeepers can function in peace, but his extraordinary petulance in throwing the microphone of a Sky reporter to the ground for asking about two-tier policing is hard to square with the conduct we expect of a grown-up, let alone the country’s senior copper.
But, if we have indeed got to the point where we can learn lessons from the riots, there are a few that come to mind. The most important, I think, is that there is room for complacency. The laws of England are sufficient to deal with violent affray. We do not need new laws or anti-hate legislation, as in the awful Scottish example. Existing laws against incitement to violence are quite enough; all we need is to enforce them.
The second is that riots happen periodically in England and we must simply be prepared for them. The Archbishop of Canterbury scolded the rioters in a radio interview this week by telling them that their behaviour was un-British, that it’s not what the English do. Poor man. It’s exactly what the English have always done. It’s why we used to have the Riot Act, introduced in 1715.
You don’t have to go back just to the 2011 riots after the police shooting of Mark Duggan. Consider the anti-papist Gordon riots of 1780 which were the most destructive London has ever seen.
The third is that if we’re tough on crime we should be tough on the causes of crime. At some point we may have to consider factors which may underlie the social discontent the violence has revealed. And we should beware of assuming that the rest of the country is just London writ large. There isn’t always a correlation between social deprivation and social violence but it’s worth pointing out that in the northern towns which saw real disorder the unemployment rate is around a fifth. The mystery is why the disorder didn’t spread to the southern coastal towns where there’s actual economic depression. That chimera of Boris Johnson’s, levelling-up, never really happened.
Those northern towns have seen ethnic tensions before: Rotherham, where rioting took place, was just one town scarred by the scandal of the systemic abuse of white girls by men of Asian background, which the police ignored.
And then there’s the question of immigration which underlies much of the present discontent. The Tories presided over net immigration levels over the past couple of years in the region of 700,000. It is palpably unsustainable, an obvious cause of social tension and a self-evident factor in the housing shortage which has led Angela Rayner to impose building quotas on local communities. Yet the Home Secretary has reneged on measures such as raising income thresholds for migrant families — which might reduce numbers.
The initial cause of the riots, let’s remember, was the malicious lie that an asylum seeker was the suspect in the murder of three little girls in Southport. That was revealed to be false when the judge took the sensible decision to name the 17-year-old suspect. Lesson four: the answer to fake news is real news.
For now, we must be grateful that the riots are suppressed. But it’s not too early to learn what we can from them.
