Leading article: Britain’s riots: burning issues

When David Cameron returned from holiday on Tuesday to find volunteers cleaning up the mess left by the riots and shopkeepers making plans to protect their property at night, he did not dare mention the Big Society. Perhaps he should have. The Londoners who organised a clean-up — using the same technology as the thugs used for organising their looting — perfectly illustrated the point the prime minister has so often tried to make. Government has its limits and it is the action of ordinary people, on their own or working with others, that makes Britain tick. But it is the government that should protect the public from crime, educate the poor, and deter the wicked. On this, it is failing badly.

There have been enough riots around the world in recent decades to give us a fair idea about what causes them. Poverty and political discontent are rarely the primary triggers. Riots are, most of all, about a calculation of risk and reward. In Britain this week, the risks have seemed minimal and the rewards, in loot, considerable. The BBC interviewed a looter in Manchester who put it succinctly: ‘The prisons are overcrowded, so what are they going to do? Give me an Asbo?’

He will not know the statistics: for instance, that just 24 per cent of those convicted of indictable offences are given custodial sentencesmeaning that it is statistically as difficult for a felon to get into prison as for an A-level student to get into Oxford University. But the young men can learn from what they see around them. A would-be criminal can ask himself a series of straightforward questions: what are the chances of getting caught? What are the penalties? And if the government is reducing prison numbers, does that make incarceration more or less likely?
Another factor in these riots is, of course, joblessness: young men living in workless ghettos, who have no qualms about vandalising the local neighbourhood because they do not feel part of it.