The unfashionable truth about the riots

As the days slip by, the likelihood that anything will be learned from the recent rioting looks ever more remote. And with that suspicion comes the inevitable sense of déjà-vu. Because we have indeed been here before.

In 2011 England was engulfed by riots, originating in London but leading to copycat violence across the north of England. The ostensible cause that time was the shooting by police of Mark Duggan, a charming young drug dealer who was in possession of a gun. The initial unrest in Tottenham may well have started as a result of claims that police had shot an innocent man – and an innocent black man at that. But by the time Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool were going at it, the proximate cause for the violence seemed to have been forgotten.

The coalition government set up a panel to look into the causes of the violence, and as with most such government panels it was made clear from the start what the answers could not be. Indeed, after the report was released The Spectator published a minority report by Simon Marcus, one of the members of the panel, blowing the whistle on matters his fellow panel members refused to consider. These things included gang membership and ‘an epidemic of father absence’.

Equally interesting is to look at the few things that people were allowed to focus on back then. The 2011 riots happened in the aftermath of the great crash of 2008. Many government officials and wise heads in the media tried to understand the spate of lawlessness by looking at things through this lens. One of the few acceptable questions to ask about those riots regarded the correlation between deprivation and rioting. This was one of the fashionable things to fix on.