Who were the rioters?

Ken Clarke reveals today that three-quarters of convicted rioters aged 18 and over had previous convictions. Hence his term about a “feral underclass” – strong language, which politicians usually reserve for describing the media.

But is this the whole story? One of the reasons that I wanted an inquiry into the riots, as Ed Miliband suggested, is that we could learn more.

How many of those convicted finished school? How many were brought up in a workless household, how many by a lone parent, how many in one of London’s welfare ghettoes? Did their racial composition match that of their neighbourhoods (I suspect it did, and that race is not a factor in the riots). How many are deemed to have belonged to a hardcore, and how many swept along with the mood?

It would not have been hard to collect this data, and it could have led to a far better informed debate about the causes of the riots. Instead, as Emily Maitlis said, everyone will be repeating whatever they thought before but louder and referencing the riots. This is not the way that lessons are learned.