Is mayhem the sign of things to come?

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Author and social commentator Owen Jones says we must try to understand underlying reasons for the riots or there will be no reason why they will not happen again

Published: August 11, 2011

FOR nearly all Londoners, the riots that began on Saturday were a deeply unwelcome bolt from nowhere.

A complex mixture of emotions is spreading through the capital – confusion, terror and fury. Those areas worst affected are people living in some of the poorest working-class communities in Britain, never mind London: places like Tottenham, Hackney and parts of Camden.

It wasn’t just major chains that came under attack: victims of the looting included small family-owned businesses.

In Stoke Newington, crowds of Turkish men bravely defended their restaurants and shops from attack. “It’s poor people like us who suffer because of these riots,” one young woman told me in Mare Street – where the worst of Monday’s rioting in Hackney took place – her obviously shaken child clutching her leg.

Amid all the understandable anger, it has become almost impossible to try to look at what lies behind these disturbances.

Any attempt to do so is – in the view of many, probably even most – an attempt to justify mindless vandalism.

A YouGov poll shows a large majority in favour of sending the army in; one in three supports using live ammunition against looters.

Twitter and Facebook are full of poisonous language about “feral youths” and a “lazy” underclass.

But unless we attempt to understand the underlying reasons for these riots, there is no reason why they will not happen again.

Indeed, with a barrage of cuts that have yet to be implemented with all the resulting economic and social dislocation they will bring, we may well have witnessed a dark foreshadow of far worse to come.

Firstly, there is a youth jobs crisis in this country. One in five 18- to 24-year-olds is without work. A study by the Prince’s Trust in December 2009 found that unemployment at such a young age has profound emotional consequences, including depression, feelings of rejection, insecurity, and even suicidal thoughts. With the disappearance of well-regarded, middle-income, skilled jobs – particularly in manufacturing – what jobs there are on offer for many working-class kids are in the low-paid, low-prestige service sector, like supermarkets and call centres.

There’s also a major problem with economic insecurity. In the years between 1999 and the economic crash, half of all men claiming Jobseekers’ Allowance last did so less than six months previously.

In other words, a significant group of people live their lives in a cycle of benefits and low-paid work.

Again, that’s not a justification for acts of vandalism. After all, the vast majority of young unemployed people would never dream of engaging in this kind of criminality. But it only takes a very small proportion of people who feel they don’t have a future to put at risk to cause mayhem on the streets of London.

Poverty is another factor. One in two children grow up in households below the poverty line in Tottenham, the site of the initial riots. Again, it’s not an excuse: but we already know that crime is more likely to occur in poorer communities (with poor people more likely to be victims, of course).

In boroughs like Camden and Hackney, the differences between how people live their lives are stark: some of the poorest live practically next door to pockets of huge affluence. Young people live with daily reminders of what – in all likelihood – they will never get. It sounds like a Guardian-reading, muesli-eating thing to say, but most would accept that we live in a consumer society where our status is partly determined by what we own. The looting could be seen as one perverse manifestation of this.

Of course, some of those looting and rioting did so for kicks, to brag about it, or simply because “everyone else was doing it”. But I doubt they would have done so if they felt they had a future to look forward to.

There will be little appetite in the weeks ahead to understand what really happened. But, as angry and scared as many of us are, it is crucial that we do – if only to stop it from ever happening again.

• Owen Jones’s new book Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class was published in June.