Ted Cantle and Chuka Umunna are wrong - Britain is not getting more segregated

For many people in Bradford the 7th July 2001 is a date that brings back dreadful memories. Forget about the declining textile industry, the struggles of our city centre and our poor education system for a second - the one event that most damaged our city's image and reputation happened on that day. A small section of the City's population, in one relatively small part of the city rioted, looted, wrecked the livelihoods of local businesses and turned Bradford into a byword for segregation and racial tension.

And it was a small part of the city - from Westgate and White Abbey Road up to Carlisle Road, along Oak Lane and a part of Manningham Lane. I could walk you round the sites of that violent day, show you where the pubs and car showrooms were burned out, point to the shop that before that day was one of Bradford's oldest Polish delis and show you the spot where burning cars scarred the surface of the roads. That walk would take - with stops to reflect on this damage - perhaps an hour. Yet ask someone from elsewhere about our city and, chances are, that something referring back to that day will come up - perhaps a reference to our large Asian community, to crime, or drugs, racism or segregation. Even today, as the recent anti-semitism row shows, we allow the vocal presence of a large minority community - Asian Muslims - to dominate the discourse about Bradford.

There were two major reports commissioned into the riots, their causes and their consequences - one from Sir Herman Ouseley (Community Pride, not Prejudice) and one from Ted Cantle (which had a wider remit by looking at events on the same day in Oldham and Burnley). Cantle coined the term 'parallel lives' to describe communities in these places and, since Bradford was the biggest and most high profile of these riot-torn places, his characterisation of our city as a place divided became the basis for how elsewhere viewed Bradford.

From Cantle's work came the idea of 'community cohesion', a sort of catch-all phrase to cover working to reduce 'tensions' alongside the old concept of 'community development' and ideas around race, faith and integration. The premise of 'cohesion' is that it is an antonym of 'segregation' - cohesive communities are where different cultures not just share a place but live together in a place. Some people chose to see this agenda as a rejection of multiculturalism, arguing that integration is essential to cohesion whereas others took Cantle's argument as a case for embedding that multicultural agenda further into schools, workplaces and the wider 'community'.

When Bradford Council's Executive first sat down to consider the response to the riots - in a terrible irony on the afternoon of 11th September 2001 - we knew that our decisions would be subject to central government scrutiny and intervention, not least because we were then a Conservative-led authority under a Labour government. The Council's leadership (or which I was then a member) was not happy with either the Ouseley report - commissioned before the riots - or Cantle's 'parallel lives' report. We felt, and still feel, that the description of Bradford was limited, failed to acknowledge the wider city and ignored reasons for riot that were not about segregation at all but more to do with drugs, crime and racist policing.

This is a long context for a response to Ted Cantle's comments yesterday in The Guardian that suggest somehow segregation today is worse than it was back in 2001:

Speaking to the Guardian 15 years after he called for action to reduce polarisation following violent riots across northern England, in Oldham, Bradford, Leeds and Burnley, Cantle said he was alarmed by the direction the country had headed since then.

“There is more mixing in some parts of our society. But there is also undoubtedly more segregation in residential areas, more segregation in schools and more segregation in workplaces,” he said. “That is driving more prejudice, intolerance, mistrust in communities.”

Superficially the evidence for Cantle's argument is strong and is set out in the article - a growing number of electoral wards with a non-white majority, schools with a majority minority intake and 'segregated' workplaces. I fear that this tells us only part of the story, problematises race and provides justification for the race or culture based special pleading that is such a driver of division. There is another, more positive story. Here from the Centre for the Dynamics of Ethnicity (CoDE) at Manchester University:

Inner London has experienced a decrease in segregation for most ethnic groups, with an increase of 3% or less for the White British, Caribbean and African groups. The White British group saw their greatest increase in segregation in inner London, although this was very small at 3%. Outer London’s decreasing segregation is particularly notable for the Bangladeshi (-12%), Chinese (-11%) and Mixed (-8%) groups. Segregation has decreased in metropolitan districts for all ethnic groups except White British. The White British and Other White groups saw marginal increases in segregation in other large cities. For all other ethnic groups, segregation decreased in these urban districts, in particular for the African group, with a decrease of 20%. The picture is one of decreased residential segregation in urban areas. An important mechanism for this change is dispersal from major cities to suburban and rural areas, in particular by families.

What we have here is a very different picture from that presented by Cantle and others - rather than seeing the colour of people living in a place as a mark of division, we see the same process of dispersal from immigrant communities we saw for previous generations of immigrants. People from Indian, Bengali and Pakistani heritage, as more of them succeed in life, molve away from the dense urban places of their arrival (or, for many, birth) in the same way that the children of poor East End Jews moved outwards to Golders Green, Hendon and Mill Hill. These Jewish families did not lose their faith or culture but their otherness was diminished by the things they shared with their new neighbours. There is no reason to suppose that the same dispersal for Hindu or Muslim, Asian and Black communities will not result in greater rather than less cohesion.

The reason for those statistics and for the frightening agenda apparent from Chuka Umunna is that the past couple of decades have seen the most concentrated influx of immigrants to the UK in our history. Whatever we think about this fact - The Guardian reports 1.2 million into London alone (although these are defined as not "white-British" so could be white European I guess) - if we define the lack of cohesion by simply counting how many black people there are in a given place then we fall into company with racists. Moreover, we define people by the box they tick on an ethnic monitoring form (a pox on these things) rather than on what they actually think, do or say.

The South Asian population of Bingley Rural - the ward I represent - was 482 in 2011 (it has likely risen a little since then - so maybe 600) and was 164 in 2001. In a small way this illustrates this dispersal. This is around 3% of the population, yet we elected a resident of Pakistani heritage as a councillor this May. If I were to be blunt, I doubt this would have been possible in 2001. Of course there is racism, I met people who said they wouldn't vote for Naveed because of his race and faith but overwhelmingly people seemed to see beyond that fact to the person underneath.

The Guardian article - indeed much of what I read in the press about the affect or impact of immigration - fails to touch on the truth about integration. Just as people don't judge me as a Roman Catholic or my wife as Jewish (although we've some problems with this), we are beginning to stop judging people by their skin colour. We've a way to go with Islam - we still make assumptions about a woman in a headscarf, for example - but even there the extent of our experience and witness of what most Muslims are like is beginning to change how we view that faith.

The way in which Ted Cantle frames his argument - focusing on numbers and concentration rather than actual evidence of segregation - doesn't reflect the reality of immigration, integration and dispersal. There's nothing new about recent arrivals clustering together - this takes advantage of family links, community and faith institutions, and provides the necessary social capital to support the new community in a foreign environment. But every example of a new community has seen that concentration diminish as they become established. This isn't to say that there won't be continuing concentrations - Indians in Harrow, Jews in Alwoodley, Pakistanis in Heaton - but these places are no longer inward-looking ghettos but just places where a lot of the residents happen to be Jews, Hindus or Muslims.

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Why we're so agitated about 'gentrification' (and how London needs a 'Green Belt' review)

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As one of the self-important semi-rioters attacking the Cereal Killer cafe put it:

While I understand people’s annoyance at property damage please put it into the context of the violence of poverty, hunger and homelessness many thousands of Londoners are being subjected to. The cereal cafe was back open on Sunday morning while the destruction caused by gentrification continues - as will the fight back.

A veritable avalanche of concerned articles now tumble into the UK press - following in the footsteps of the same words about different places: Berlin, Sydney, Seattle and San Francisco. For some the criticism centres on the wealth of new arrivals or else on the mundane daily lives of those new residents - on the Google Bus.

But always and everywhere the thing that drives the attack on 'gentrification' is the cost of living in these cities and, in particular, the cost of housing. Even when people try to make it out to be more complicated by saying its "a complex, layered suite of intersecting measures" they end up talking about housing:

Given crippling student debt, rental costs that even those on “average salaries” can’t afford and the hyper-gentrification of previously affordable urban areas, even middle-class people have a right to be angry at an urban capitalism that is pricing them (and their children) out of the city.

So, given that it's housing that's the problem, perhaps we should ask why this is the case. Not my coming up with instant fixes like rent caps or rationing but by looking at the underlying reasons, which boils down to supply and demand. And especially supply:

By rationing land, urban containment policy drives up the price of housing and has been associated with an unprecedented loss of housing affordability in a number of metropolitan areas in the United States and elsewhere. Urban containment policy has also been associated with greater housing market volatility. This is a particular concern given the role of the 2000s US housing bubble and bust in precipitating the Great Financial Crisis that resulted in a reduction of international economic output.

And this exactly describes the situation in London. Elsewhere in England this doesn't apply - population densities for the London boroughs are, almost without exception, higher than anywhere else (even a place like Portsmouth that's constrained by its geography). For inner London these densities are three times greater than in Manchester or Bristol. There is little reason to change or review 'Green Belts' around Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds - other than the understandable preference for people to live in or near those 'Green Belts' - but for London, ending the policy of urban containment and densification is absolutely essential if problems with affordability and price volatility are to be avoided. Moreover, because London is so critical to the UK economy these decisions should not be left merely to the Mayor of London (or a collection of borough and district council leaders).

The consequence of failing to do something to address this problem isn't just more unpleasant rioters but a threat to the golden goose that is London's economy. Without a workforce able to access your jobs, the businesses will look elsewhere. We might hope this is Leeds, Manchester or Cardiff but it's just as likely to be Brussels, Frankfurt or Milan. Maybe even Cape Town, Djakarta or Lagos.

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Advertising doesn't cause riots, make people gamble or cause revolution!

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She said she was particularly concerned about gambling advertising before the 9pm watershed and went as far as saying that "excessive marketing" had been a factor in 2011’s London riots, when looters had gone in criminal search of expensive trainer brands.

Read that very carefully. What Helen Goodman (for it is she) is saying here is that some of society's problems - in this case gambling and rioting - can be laid at the the door of advertising. This is clearly illiberal, when it comes to gambling certainly judgemental, but worst of all is utterly ignorant of advertising and marketing and what it does.

It makes me incredibly cross that people like Helen Goodman (who is a leftie but not everyone who wants bans or controls on advertising and marketing is such) simply fail to understand that commercial speech is still 'speech'. And that it is as worthy of us defending it as any other form of speech. I know that Helen probably read 'No Logo' a few years back and has signed up to the Naomi Klein school, that "brands are the work of Satan" line, but the truth is that marketing communications are a tiny proportion of all the communications we receive every day.

If someone like Helen Goodman is going to stand up and talk about advertising, to propose legislative intervention of some kind, then the least we can expect is that some effort has been made to understand the business of marketing. Let's start with whether advertising increases aggregate demand, what we might call the 'false demand' hypothesis:

“The null hypothesis that advertising does not cause consumption cannot be rejected, but some evidence that consumption may cause advertising is presented.”

Unwrapping the academic language this research says that advertising doesn't (in aggregate) cause demand and may even be caused by consumption. Funnily enough us advertising and marketing folk have known this for years - most of our advertising isn't about creating demand it's about us not losing our bit of that demand. As I wrote a while ago:

Why should I spend my client’s scarce cash on making the market bigger – promoting sausages rather than Fred’s Grand Yorkshire Sausage, The Champion on Your Plate?

This isn't to say that an advertisement has never prompted someone to buy something they haven't bought before but it is to say that there isn't a strong connection between advertising and demand growth. To illustrate this, here's a graph of US cigarette advertising against cigarette consumption:

If you can find some sort of causal link here you're a better man than I am!

If shadow ministers (or government ministers for that matter) are going to pass opinion about advertising and marketing - rather than merely court a headline - then they really should start to understand what marketing does and how advertising works. And that it's as much a part of free speech as their address to the house or my torrent of tweets.

And if Helen Goodman wants to know about the revolution - it won't be televised you know!

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The riotous looters were delightful weren't they!

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From a report in Inside Housing:

Homeless people in London, Manchester, Birmingham and Liverpool were robbed and beaten, according to homelessness charities operating in affected areas.

In Manchester three rough sleepers had their bedding set alight, one rough sleeper was attacked and another was beaten and had his mobile phone, money and laptop stolen.

In Birmingham a rough sleeper’s jaw was broken in an assault, another was threatened with a knife and a third was forced to go looting by rioters but escaped because he was too slow to keep up with the mob.

In Liverpool homelessness outreach teams said they found rough sleepers with black eyes and cuts but that the victims would not identify their assailants. The city’s YMCA said it had homeless people coming in complaining of ‘violent threats’ from rioters.

Thames Reach, a London-based homelessness charity, said it had received reports of a rough sleeper being mugged in Lewisham.

Terrible stuff (although one wonders about a rough sleeper with a laptop and a mobile phone and about the truth of "being forced to go looting").

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Did you listen to what your mother said?

There’s that classic comment from Arthur Dent:

"You know," said Arthur, "it's at times like this, when I'm trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space that I really wish I'd listened to what my mother told me when I was young."

[Ford Prefect:] "Why, what did she tell you?

[Arthur:] "I don't know, I didn't listen."

And it seems that many of those debating sentencing policy weren’t listening to their mothers who, I’m pretty sure, will have said at some point:

“Two wrongs don’t make a right.”

Despite the efforts of all those mothers, this message didn’t sink in. Let me explain.

It is probably wrong that lots of wealthy folk, celebrities and such like who are guilty of crimes didn’t get the proverbial book thrown at them. Those fiddling MPs maybe should have been banged up for longer and perhaps celebrity druggies should be incarcerated in the deepest, darkest of dungeons.

But that doesn’t make it right to apply leniency to another wrongdoer in another circumstance. The failure to deal with one set of crimes shouldn’t dictate that we should also fail in our response to another set of crimes. So when magistrates give tough sentences to looters, we shouldn’t go about crying foul – those magistrates and judges only apply the rules given to them by parliament.

For my part, I do not think that the world out there thinks that tough sentencing is wrong – indeed most folk, as we found here in Bradford back in 2001, rather appreciate the thwack of tough justice on rioters.  If it was wrong to give bad MPs a lenient sentence and wrong to have a criminal justice system that petty thugs stick two fingers up at on a daily basis, then it must be right – and welcome – to see a little toughness for a change.

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Untouchable...

Not surprisingly, many from the left are praising Peter Oborne’s latest grumble about the corruption of Britain’s business, political and social elite – a continuation of his theme of the last several years:

Something has gone horribly wrong in Britain. If we are ever to confront the problems which have been exposed in the past week, it is essential to bear in mind that they do not only exist in inner-city housing estates.

The culture of greed and impunity we are witnessing on our TV screens stretches right up into corporate boardrooms and the Cabinet. It embraces the police and large parts of our media. It is not just its damaged youth, but Britain itself that needs a moral reformation.

Oborne’s thesis is that we face a moral crisis rather than an economic or political crisis – this suits the left’s world view since it suggests the need for moral leadership. Indeed left wing leaders of the past have taken the same position as Oborne – that what we need is a remaking of man rather than a reinvention of the state. It is part of socialism’s essence that man is perfectible and that leaders are needed to direct that programme – to manage the moral reformation.

But all those people Oborne scourges – fiddling MPs, millionaires taking their money overseas to reduce their tax burden and feral youth smashing and looting in London – are they not acting as rational individuals? Or are they swept along into some immoral maelstrom created by our leaders’ failures?

Unlike Oborne – and unlike the left – I reject the idea of man’s perfectibility. Or indeed that we are in need of a “moral reformation” – it is an economic and political reformation we require, a change to the order of things. It is not moral decadence that links the powerful to the rioter but a belief that they are untouchable, that the normal rules of society do not apply.

So rather than rant about the moral failings of such powerful men, we should instead ask how they might be made touchable – subject to the mores of England rather than to the decadent glitter of elite society. And the answer to that – in as much as we can ever free the world from corruption – rests in removing power not in moral lectures.

In my days as a marketer I used to describe the point and purpose of marketing as being the securing of monopoly – markets in a state of equilibrium are not profit-making so we must create dysfunction so as to achieve our business aims. Much of marketing – the bit condemned by Naomi Klein – is directed towards securing a monopoly of attention in the individual consumer’s mind. This is what all that advertising, all those carefully crafted brands are for – not selling you stuff but making sure my stuff is what you think of first.

But think for a second or two – if our marketing investment is directed to the creation of a monopoly we control, is it not quicker and probably cheaper simply to bribe the state into giving us that monopoly? Rather than directing our limited marketing resource towards the tricky business of building brand equity, we can influence politicians, newspaper editors, bureaucrats and broadcasters so they see the evident rightness of fixing the market in our favour.

It is this marketing effort that Oborne is attacking – because governments have assumed the power to interfere in, limit and even control important markets, the people making money from those markets are both the creatures and the controllers of government. It is a symbiosis of corruption, a cartel against the interests of the ordinary man. So when those on the left rail about how the banks dragged down the economy, they are right. And when their right-wing counterpoints blame government, taxation and regulation they too are right since that regulation, taxation and governance has been conducted in co-operation with those very bankers.

And when we peek a little further into this, we find other groups engaged in the system protecting and promoting their especial monopolies – in healthcare, in education, in the production and distribution of food and in the making of guns, planes and bombs. We see the same monopoly and self-interest prevail in the law, in accountancy and even in sport – rather than fight fair in a free, competitive market, the businesses, trade unions and professional bodies prefer to get government to fix the rules.

The reformation is simple – we should neuter government, take away from it the power to fix markets in the interests of those with the best lobbyists and biggest bribes. It is the overweening state that created the sinful world Oborne describes not some wider moral malaise.

The solution is in our hands. We probably won’t take it.

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A sensible suggestion...

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There has been a great deal made of evicting rioters from their council houses and I can see the point. But - unless a wholesale reworking of the law is pushed through sharpish - the process of eviction from social housing is long-winded and subject to inevitable vagaries of that law's interpretation by lawyers, magistrates and judges.

So I was pleased hear - from a woman called Lesley Pullman - on the Radio this morning a really sensible suggestion. Rather than trying to evict rioters (or indeed other anti-social tenants), change the nature of the tenancy. Mrs Pullman pointed out that the lifetime tenancy in social housing was prized by these people as it provides protection from eviction - indeed some cases take up to three years. By allowing councils and other social landlords to convert the tenancies of anti-social residents to a normal assured shorthold, you provide a strong tool as well as making any subsequent eviction far easier.

Sadly the Labour MP on the programme (New Puritan smokophobe, Kevin Barron) wasn't listening - but nothing new there!

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Not a good week for police leadership

 

We all watched numb and speechless as looters rampaged through the high streets of London, Manchester, Birmingham and elsewhere. And we rightly condemn those looters and say that there are no excuses for their behaviour - rioting is the responsibility of the rioter, no-one makes them do it.

But, like others, I was struck by the supine response of the police on the street. A response succinctly described by David Davis:

The single thing that has most astonished the British public was the sight of rows of heavily equipped police officers standing by whilst rioters and looters engaged in brazen acts of vandalism, arson and theft. A police officer called to the scene of a bank robbery would not park across the street and wait patiently for it to finish, so why were the Met’s riot police little more than spectators during the looting? 

We watched reports of the Wolverhampton hairdresser protecting her shop and confronting looters - while police stood by and watched. Yet the full order of riot police were deployed to respond to deal with 'vigilantes':

"...more than 1,000 officers battled with dozens of middle-aged men on the streets Eltham, south-east London."

More than 1000 police to deal with sixty men some of who appear to have committed the heinous crime or drinking some beer and singing "we love England". But police bosses really don't get it - those men, whether from the EDL or not - weren't about to riot, smash up shops or loot. It could have been handled with fifty coppers. But then the police don't like local people looking out for their own community, especially when those local people are white, male and working-class. And the top policemen still don't get it:

He said it was “ironic” that media pictures showed looting in areas where there were “no police available” while officers were being diverted to stop vigilantes elsewhere. 

Got that? The police deemed it more important to send 1000 officers to handle 200 men in Eltham who weren't looting or rioting than to send officers to deal with the actual looting? We'd watched the day before as the police ignored looting, standing mutely - clearly frustrated - because their senior officers were too scared to confront the rioters properly.

And who were those 'vigilantes' - here's a description from Enfield where 300 men took to the high street to defend their community:

On the train to Enfield, I had been reading dozens of tweets claiming the anti-riot patrol was a front for far-right organisations and an excuse for racist chants and violence. The reality was nothing of the sort. There were no weapons being carried and no violence erupted at all. Yes, the majority of people there were white and working class, but there was also a range of people from different ethnic backgrounds. Indeed I found, if anything, people on the patrol were overly awkward about the fact they were white. One guy told me he had been worried he'd be seen as a racist by taking part: 'There's no getting around the fact that a lot of the rioters are black,' he told me, 'but you can't just do nothing just in case someone calls you a racist.'

These are the people the Metropolitan Police leadership "can do without". Ordinary men with the gumption to protect their streets to act in the interests of their community - condemned for doing so by the leadership of our police.

This has to change. We can't allow the police leadership to fail us as they did on Monday night. As David Davis points out - amidst all the furore about police cuts - that there are more police officers employed today than at any time in our history. Which begs a question - where on earth were they all on Monday night?

We've always been told - as politicians - that we should have no say over the police's "operational decisions", yet we know that the decision-making by the Metropolitan Police over the past few days has been risible. And the leadership of the force should therefore be accountable - it was their decision-making that was wrong. It was not - in proximate terms - the fault of politicians.

When we had riots in Bradford, I didn't feel let down by the police - despite the poor tactics on the night. Lots of brave men and women faced a very angry situation and hundreds were injured. I suspect that many people in places hit by looters felt let down by the police. Certainly, we don't pay thousands in personal and business taxes to pay for a police force that doesn't protect us.

If one change comes from all this it must be a more accountable, more local police force. We have to move away from ever larger forces, from concentration of operations into huge, impersonal barracks and from the disconnection between the police and the communities they serve. This isn't about political control of the police - although elected police commissioners will be welcome - but about the police being of and from the community. Not "community policing" as some form of operational tactic but a real community police force - one that would welcome people who stand up for their community and not treat them as unwanted "vigilantes".

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In which I wish the Joseph Rowntree Foundation would take its prejudices elsewhere than Bradford

Although the Joseph Rowntree Foundation does some good research it is sadly blind to the reality of its ‘poverty-mongering’ in Bradford. Over the past few years, JRF has run a “Bradford programme”:

Working in partnership with others to make a positive difference to the people in the city, and improve our understanding of issues in a diverse community.

All very worthy and so typical of JRF’s approach but I worry that, by beginning with a prejudice about the city and by immersing itself in the places and people that reinforce that prejudice, the charity do the City a disfavour.

So what is that prejudice JRF open with? It comes in three parts:

1.       Caricaturing Bradford as a place dominated by and fractured by issues of race and cohesion. JRF’s assumption is that they are “challenging existing stereotypes” when, in truth, they reinforce the stereotype of a racially-divided city

2.       Defining the city in terms of its victim status – its poverty, its crime and its struggle. This is the mindset that transformed a confident city into what we have today, the view that others – governments, business, ‘leadership’ – are responsible for the problem and that its resolution lies not in enterprise but in “getting our fair share of resources”

3.       Ignoring, absolutely and complete, the city’s suburbs and the villages that surround the urban core. JRF do not venture in their work to explore the lives of ordinary people in Queensbury, in Sandy Lane, in Baildon or in Apperley Bridge. Indeed, at times these people seem to be view as suspicious bystanders rather than contributors to the wealth and success of Bradford

None of this is to say that JRF’s work is ill-meant but it is to observe that, despite the years working in Bradford, the charity has clung limpet-like to its initial prejudice regardless of the evidence that it is a false description of the City. Evidence of higher rates of business creation, increased levels of self-employment and rising community aspirations are pushed aside as they do not fit with the predetermined view of Bradford as a victim, as a place of poverty.

JRF also remains wedded to qualitative research placing greater emphasis on the remarks of residents than on the gathering of data. Nowhere within this multi-million pound set of studies can I find robust, quantitative research conducted to look at Bradford’s problems. Rather than seeking to measure and assess – as good researchers should – JRF can only see to ‘participate’ and ‘engage’.

Such research methods – embedded deeply into the place studied – are not without their value if what we’re about is understanding culture, values and behaviours. But if, as JRF proclaim, they are seeking to guide the City towards better policy-making then we are navigating by asking random people for directions rather than using a map.

And just so you don’t think I’m making all this up, let me show you the evidence of the first caricature of Bradford – the pathology of racial politics – from a JRF funded project, JUST West Yorkshire: (this is from a e-mail bulletin – the website is very out-of-date)

As the disorder spreads to other London boroughs, residents of Bradford, Oldham and Burnley are probably reliving the divisive legacy of the Northern disturbances which strained community relationships and created a breach between the police and Asian communities who metaphorically sold their shares in the police as public confidence dipped.  If we are to draw any lessons from Bradford’s 2001 Disturbances then it must be that an effective policy response will not be found through recourse to simplistic rhetoric – whether it be about parallel and segregated communities in 2001 or about the increasing gun and knife ‘criminality’ among African-Caribbean youth in 2011 - but by sustained engagement with multiple and complex social problems.

This comes from the latest of this organisation’s left-wing diatribes and, in a sort of Trotskyite conclusion these folk say:

The rioters in Tottenham have just sent out their own message from the 'social market index' trading in public trust and confidence: between them, swingeing public sector cuts and Big Society tokenism have all meant the government has already defaulted on its obligations to the people of Britain. The big question is whether the government will be able to hear this message over the chatter between Wall Street and the City and – even if it does – whether it is capable of abandoning its ideological fixation with zombie neo-liberalism and, instead, invest in fostering the bonds of community. If it fails to do so then the hot money must surely be on the further growth of the already massive deficit in social harmony - and the consequent emergence of the Big Bad Society.

I suppose JRF will claim distance from this nonsense but for my part I want them to take responsibility for the prejudice they spawn. Maybe, Julia Unwin is happy to support those who would excuse away riot, violence and looting as some form of legitimate protest, but I would rather she took JRF’s cash and spent it elsewhere than Bradford.

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In the end riot is the fault of the the rioter...no-one else

“The fact that we were all safe as kittens under a cookstove did not, however, assuage in the least the fine despair and the grotesque desperation which seized upon the residents of the East Side when the cry spread like a grass fire that the dam had given way. Some of the most dignified, staid, cynical, and clear thinking men in town abandoned their wives, stenographers, homes and offices and ran east. There are few alarms in the world more terrifying than ‘The dam has broken!’ There are few persons capable of stopping to reason when that clarion cry strikes upon their ears, even persons who live in towns no nearer than five hundred miles to a dam.”

So it is as James Thurber explained. Once the hue and cry is out nothing – no reason can contain the progress of the mob. And, just as Columbus residents charged to higher ground because some poor fool had told some other poor fool the dam had burst – and the second poor fool had believed the first, we find the cry will be out for something to be done.

But we should consider carefully before – in the passion or pain of the moment – we commit to do things. The consequences of those commitments might prove more dangerous and intrusive that the things we are using them to prevent.

So to riots. Firstly, we’ve had riots before and shall have riots again. Such disturbances are a feature of urban living – not a good one but a feature nonetheless. This isn’t to say we should simply bow to the inevitable nor is it to excuse the act of riot but it is a necessary precursor to the judgments and decision we make about reducing the risk of such behaviour recurring.

In understanding this we have also to understand that, when people on the left speak of ‘poverty’, ‘social exclusion’ and ‘deprivation’, their words contain a grain of truth. It is poor places that, in the main have riots. Yesterday there were no riots (so far as I know) in Kingston or Sutton, in Pinner or Ruislip. I haven’t read reports of disturbances in Purley or looting in Richmond. The places worst affected – Tottenham, Hackney, Brixton, Peckham – read like a listing of London’s most troubled places. 

So, while drawing a causal relationship between poverty and riot is an insult to poor people who don’t riot – which is most of those poor people, we cannot simply dismiss those socio-economic arguments, to say that these matters are not a factor.

However, we must not stop at this point – as too many on the left are wont to do – or worse start seeking to link our vested interest (“it’s the cuts that did it you know”). Instead we need to add some of those things us on the right speak of – the problems with criminality and a criminal sub-culture within these places.

I recall canvassing round The Showfield in Keighley in the run up to the 2001 General Election. This is a tight little area of small terraced housing just north of the town centre. Its population is overwhelming Mirpuri, although there’s a smattering of Bengalis. I’m with a young lawyer brought up in the area – his dad was an important local man (a community leader, I guess we’d call him) – and he was introducing me to local families.

Walking down one street we saw, leaning on a new-ish Subaru Impreza, two smartly dressed young men. My friend the lawyer turned around and walked the other way. In response to my inquiry as to why, he explained that these were drug dealers and he didn’t want to be seen talking to them since ‘everyone’ knew him and them.

Except it wasn’t everyone – I was then told that the families of these men were proud of them. They were doing so well, nice car, smart clothes, nice presents for mum and for their sisters and plenty of money to help what was a poor family out. The families either knew and turned a blind eye or else had no idea where the money came from.

But then neither economic hardship nor criminality or a ‘gang culture’ fully explain. Part of the rest of the answer lies in the Thurber story – we are inclined to follow, often without really applying our brains so as to assess what we were doing. After the Bradford riots, in court appearance after court appearance, young men were unable to explain just why they had done the things they did. This doesn’t excuse that behaviour but it perhaps begins to explain how it is that people of otherwise good character get involved in riot and in looting.

The next reason, I believe, is a failure of policing. This was evident in the riots in Notting Hill back in 1976, at Brixton in 1981 and in Bradford ten years ago. And central to the problem of policing is the disengagement of the police from communities. Despite all the rhetoric of “community” that police use today, their actions and organisation belies this tale.

I look at modern police stations, great stone barracks with narrow windows, often barred – looming over poor communities. In Bradford we see these great lumps at Toller Lane, Dudley Hill and the new one, Trafalgar House.  These do not give off the signal of an involved, community service but of something akin to an occupying force. And when, as we see in these London places, the gang culture fertilizes a distrust and dislike of the police, the result in a complete disconnection between those charged with maintaining order and the “youth”.

And yes, the failings of policing and the disengagement of those charged with enforcement also plays its part. But still we are stuck with the incentive to riot, to loot – the view that you won’t get caught and if you do the ‘sheep’ defence, especially linked to race, with serve to minimise any consequence. 

In the end though there is no excuse, there can be no exoneration for the rioter. To appreciate the terror of the innocent caught in a riot, I always think back to 7th July ten years ago:

Ilyas was captured on police cameras wearing an Afro-style wig and throwing burning cardboard through a broken window of Manningham Labour Club while 23 people were inside.  The club was burned to the ground after petrol bombs were thrown by a group of Asian youths.

The 23 people inside were eventually led to safety after hiding in the club's cellar to avoid the flames. Police described the incident afterwards as the single most serious incident of the riots.

This is the truth of riot, not the romantic idea of revolution, not some sort of punishment meted out on the ‘rich’ or on the ‘government’. No, riot is the terrorising of innocents – men and women like those cowering in the cellar of a club while it burns above their head.

There is nothing grand or clever in all this – whatever your explanation for riot may be. However much we must attend to the economic, political and social factors helping contribute, in the final analysis the riot is the fault of the rioter.

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Theresa, can we get a little perspective please?

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We had some riots. A few people were injured but probably fewer than are injured on a typical Friday night in Leeds or Manchester. There was some offensive but temporary damage to a couple of statues as a result of students being a brainless and stupid as students have been wont to be down the years. And the Duchess of Cornwall had a stick prodded at her.

As far as I know, nobody's dead. No-one's been abducted. Normal life - or what purports to be normal life continues. It's no big deal. There will be another protest sometime with much the same result - more froth and bother than anything of substance.

So can I make one thing very clear....

We do not need water cannon.

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Nick "Crazy" Clegg loses the plot

I am stocking up the extensive cellars at Cooke Towers with essentials – canned foods, batteries, dried mushrooms, red wine and so on. I intend to be ready for the future that is facing us. The great sage, Nick Clegg has warned:

The Liberal Democrat leader said he feared "serious social strife" if an administration with minimal support raised taxes, laid off public sector workers and froze wages.

Taking his cue from St Vince “Jeremiah” Cable, young Nick is predicting riots, looting and thousands taking to the streets to protest.

Now I don’t know about you but this reads to me as the utterings of a man wholly unfit to be put in charge of anything – let alone someone who should be allowed anywhere near any sort of lever linked to even the remotest outpost of power.

If there are to be any riots – and I doubt this somehow – they’ll be because smug, euro-fanatical greenies like Nick Clegg have clobbered ordinary people once too often. It will be the price of petrol – or something similar – that will send people onto the streets not that a few thousand diversity managers, five-a-day co-ordinators and climate change policy officers have lost their jobs.

Sadly, Nick and Vince are so desperate to get jobs, big offices and fancy cars after the election that they’ve swallowed Labour’s hung parliament strategy hook, line and sinker. Don’t you understand Nick – Gordon knows Labour can’t win and wants a hung parliament so he can keep his mitts on the keys to Number Ten!

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