The coalition can’t ignore the Tottenham riots

As the early 1980s is recreated before our eyes, we now have a fully-fledged retro riot. Various Conservative commentators have been tweeting and blogging away about this today, including Nile Gardiner on the Telegraph blog and Iain Dale.

They are right to warn against a knee-jerk reaction to the situation in Tottenham today. Clearly these riots were not caused by Tory cuts, which have only just begun to bite on the ground. There is certainly an argument that many of the cuts in services in Haringey are the result of mismanagement by a notoriously dysfunctional Labour council.

But David Cameron needs to show some leadership here. Having admitted that there is such a thing as society, it will not be possible to distance himself from this tragedy. Haringey is a microcosm of our divided society, with the wealth of Highgate and Muswell Hill (Guardian country) in the west divided from the poverty of Tottenham and Wood Green in the east.

Despite all the good work done to rebuild the community in the wake of the Broadwater Farm riots, David Lammy’s constituency remains one of the poorest in the country, with some of the highest levels of unemployment.

As I have written before, this government is fast losing the youth of this country. The combination of an increase in tuition fees and the scrapping of the Educational Maintenance Allowance and the Future Jobs Fund means that young people could be forgiven for thinking they were being punished for the mistakes of an older generation.

Tim Montgomerie instructed me on Twitter this morning that “politicians should set strategic direction, not get immersed in operational matters. Trust the professionals”.

I agree in principle. But this government has no youth strategy. Who are the professionals here? A demoralised and discredited Met or the youth workers who have been warning about the tactics of the police in Tottenham?

I have been worried, even since I set up New Deal of the Mind to help young people back to work, that a disproportionate number of school and university leavers from the ethnic minorities were coming through our doors (our early evaluation shows the figure is about 70 per cent). Communities such as Tottenham have been plagued by high unemployment since long before this government came to power. But there comes a tipping point when worklessness, poverty and high crime lead a community to the point of desperation.

The Tories may not be to blame for the Tottenham riots, but they will be if they fail to deal with the aftermath.