At first, I thought he was the site foreman. He was in his mid-40s, well-built, standing in front of a building site on Madeley Road in Ealing. This leafy suburb in west London, which is about two miles from my house in Acton, was the scene of some of the worst rioting on Monday night and I had cycled over there the following day to try and help with the clean-up. I took a detour via Madeley Road on my way home.
On closer inspection, the house I’d taken to be a building site was just an ordinary home — or what was left of it — after a gang of thugs had tried to smash their way in the previous night. The man standing at the front gate, arms folded like a bouncer, was the householder.
‘There were between 30 and 40 of them,’ he said. ‘They were out here for about 15 minutes, smashing windows, setting light to cars, mugging people who walked past. Then one of them had the bright idea of trying to break into my house. A group of them tried to kick my front door in. I was stood on the other side of it, leaning against it, trying to stop them getting in. I’ve got two kids, aged three and four, and they were screaming their heads off. I told my wife to take them into the back garden in case they got in.’
Miraculously, the man kept them at bay and, in their frustration, they started hurling bricks through his ground-floor windows. Even then, they didn’t manage to break in and eventually they gave up.
‘How long did it take before the police arrived?’ I asked.
‘Put it this way,’ he said. ‘I called them at 11.30 last night and I’m still waiting for them to show up.’
Until this point, I’d been planning to spend Tuesday night patrolling my nearest shopping street with a group of local tradesmen and householders, following the example of the Turkish shopkeepers who saw off a mob of rioting teenagers in Dalston on Monday night. Indeed, setting up this vigilante squad had been my idea. Like many people, I’d become increasingly angry watching the scenes of lawlessness on television the night before and was determined to protect my neighbourhood. But after my encounter with the Lion of Madeley Street I had a change of heart. If gangs of youths were targeting people’s homes on residential streets, then my chief responsibility was to protect my family.
When I got home I persuaded the local Neighbourhood Watch coordinator to convene an emergency meeting at 6 p.m. and, thanks to the events of the previous night, quite a few people turned up. I presented them with a proposal. If anyone tried to break in to any of our homes on Tuesday night, we would dial 999 then set off the burglar alarm. That would be the signal and as soon as we heard it we would all rush into the street, waving baseball bats and making as much noise as possible. I’m happy to say that this was enthusiastically endorsed by everyone in the room. It was all for one and one for all.
There followed a tense night in which I sat in front of the TV, flicking between Sky and the BBC, and monitoring the local gangs on Twitter. At one point, it was rumoured that Acton was about to go up in smoke, a fear compounded by a report from a neighbour who witnessed two boys filling a jerry can with petrol at the local garage. But as of the time of writing, nothing’s happened. Dawn is now breaking and I’m going to put my baseball bat back in the cupboard and take myself off to bed.
These outbreaks of violence and disorder have been a catastrophe for Britain. It’s hard to know what percentage of fatherless teenage boys are involved, but at times it seems as if an entire sub-section of the underclass are criminals. More worringly, they’ve discovered that if they act in unison there’s very little the police can do. I fervently hope that the widespread unrest of the last few days is an isolated episode, but the chances of it not being repeated are slim. Gangs of teenage thugs have discovered just how easy it is to take control of our city streets, and unless we massively increase police numbers, members of the public will have no alternative but to take the law into their own hands.
Toby Young is associate editor of The Spectator.
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