In recent weeks there has been youth rioting in Greece and Spain. The reasons were clear: the drastic austerity cuts. No doubt they were also a factor in the English riots, but David Cameron does not wish to say so. For him, the riots were not about cuts, poverty or race. They were due to a “broken society.” He said he would review government policies and speed up plans to deal with “problem” families, improve parenting and education.
Reports from England suggest that there was something profoundly puzzling about the riots. The graph above is not very helpful. It is striking that there is no gender balance among the rioters – au contraire! – but what does that mean? Some middle class kids were among the rioters. Apparently, there was no looting of luxury stores: it was not simply an uprising of the poor against the rich.
The slums of Glasgow, the worst slums in the U.K., remained quiet. In London, a teacher and his students were charged. The victims of the looting were often modest enterprises. There was considerable evidence of mindlessness, of people joining in the looting for the fun of it.
But you don’t burn down houses for the fun of it. Many of those charged have records of prior convictions but one could imagine that this is stressed by the authorities to make it seem that ordinary criminality was a major cause. That would be relatively easy to deal with.
In a speech at his old school in north London, the Leader of the Opposition, Ed Miliband, warned against “knee-jerk gimmicks.” “The politician’s instinct – reach for new legislation, appoint a new adviser, wheel out your old prejudices – will not meet the public’s demand for real answers and deep rooted, lasting solutions,” he said. “We’ve heard it all in the last few days, water cannon, supercops, a daily door knock for gangs and today, more gimmicks. A prime minister, who used to say the answer was to hug a hoodie, now says the answer is to reform our health and safety laws.
“Day by day the prime minister has revealed himself to be reaching for shallow and superficial answers, not the lasting solutions the country needs, based on the wisdom and insights of our communities.”
Source: BBC News
Eric Koch’s book, The Weimar Triangle, is available at Indigo-Chapters and in your local bookstore. 
Nice statistics, comments & questions.
CBC news today (17 Aug) is full of a UK-accented commentator in Canada, contrasting the creation and management of prosecutions in the Vancouver “riots” against those in London. His tenor, and CBC’s, is that the street-by-street pre-existing video surveillance of public spaces in London has made identification & prosecution much more efficient there than in Canada. Almost NO discussion of what was happening and why.
But the intersection of demonstration and prosecution is not the event – it’s the stage. It’s where social forces erupt into public view. It’s a presentation. Let’s try to recognize symptoms. We need current analysis and state-of-the-art diagnosis much more than we need atavistic prescriptions.
I hope for a panoply of perspectives. Who can offer them? Who can use them?