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.
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