Toby Young Toby Young

Beware the wrath of middle-class homeowners

‘The educated bourgeoisie has developed an irrational fear of civilisational collapse, thanks to films like Mad Max’ (photo: Alamy)

‘Apocalyptic’ food shortages, gas and electricity bills soaring, wages not keeping pace with inflation… it’s beginning to look like we’re heading for major outbreaks of civil unrest this summer. As a resident of the London Borough of Ealing, which witnessed some of the worst rioting in the capital in 2011, I’m getting a little concerned. Not for myself and my family, you understand, but for the muggers, car thieves and burglars who prey on the middle-class residents. Will they be all right?

The educated bourgeoisie has developed an irrational fear of civilisational collapse, having been taught by books and films like The Road and Mad Max that gangs of marauding thugs will rule the roost in a post-apocalyptic universe. We’re told again and again that the moment law and order breaks down, our nice, leafy neighbourhoods will be transformed into Hobbesian hellholes. If bespectacled soy-boys like me aren’t killed for foolishly trying to defend our homes, the best we can hope for is to become indentured labourers while our wives and daughters are carried off on motorcycles.

We agreed we’d come with whatever weapons we had to hand – cricket bats, hammers, iron bars

But as I discovered during the disorder of 11 years ago, it is not middle–class property owners who have the most to fear from the breakdown of society, but the propertyless. This revelation hit me during a long day in August 2011 that began with a trip to Ealing Broadway, the site of the worst rioting the night before. It’s about a two-mile walk from my house, and as I made my way along the Uxbridge Road I could see exactly where the rioters had got to the previous evening, like a tideline in the urban landscape. On one side of the line it looked as it always does – the usual hotchpotch of restaurants, coffee shops and newsagents along the main road, with quiet residential streets behind – whereas on the other there were broken shop windows, burnt-out cars and upended bins, as if the area had been engulfed by some terrible destructive storm.

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