August riots: a coat of varnish

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/10/august-riots-year-anniversary-editorial

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There is a scene in A Coat of Varnish, the ponderous last novel by the scientist-writer CP Snow, where a bar in a posh London club is wrecked by vandals. Last August, diners at the Ledbury, in the plush London enclave of Notting Hill, must have felt an uncomfortable parallel when rioters invaded the Michelin-starred restaurant, a crime for which they received heavy sentences earlier this week: the slender margin between order and disorder – Snow's coat of varnish – had been dissolved. Twelve months on, the transformation of last year's festival of lawlessness into this year's festival of sport has been so complete it would be easy to suppose that August 2011 was a fleeting aberration, nothing more than a bad dream. Easy, but mistaken.

As far as David Cameron was concerned, the riots were about lawlessness and greed, stoked by a tiny group of dysfunctional families, a society with an overdeveloped sense of entitlement and a gang culture that recognised no boundaries. It was all of a piece with his election narrative: people took to the streets because Britain was broken. There was no purpose in a formal inquiry: there were no institutional grievances demanding a response. It is to Nick Clegg's credit that he won a partial inquiry, the Riots Communities and Victims Panel, which found a more complicated story about the devastating impact of the sense of powerlessness at the heart of urban communities.

But preceding that report, and continuing beyond it, has been the Guardian's Reading the Riots investigation. Hundreds of rioters, victims and police have been interviewed. The Met's commissioner, Bernard Hogan-Howe, and home secretary Theresa May have contributed to further debate, filling out a picture of powerlessness and resentment in some cities and a dysfunctional relationship with the police where neither side could understand the other's behaviour. It revealed the way young men were persistently stopped and searched in a casually disrespectful way. It uncovered failings, from the initial refusal to meet the family of Mark Duggan, whose shooting was the trigger for the first night of violence, to the sluggishness in calling in help from outside London.

The riots were not a homogenous, uniform event. Social media, which the government initially declared had such an inflammatory influence that Twitter might have to be blocked, turned out to have had some effect in some places, particularly in London, but not everywhere, and not at all in the first day or two. Nor was it Facebook or Twitter (whatever some judges thought), but Blackberry's encrypted instant messaging that was the medium of choice. There was some gang involvement, notably in Notting Hill, as this week's court case confirmed – but it was also notable that the gangs in question suspended hostilities to work together. Manchester was different from Salford, but Handsworth was similar to Hackney.

Yet despite all the careful analysis from non-government sources, despite the evidence of renewed efforts to develop community resilience – like those in Croydon where the torched remains of Reeves furniture store, restored, are newly decorated with optimistic messages from locals – the official narrative is unchanged. Although police are scaling down stop and search and there are community projects attempting to educate both sides about the other's point of view, institutional failure is not officially registered. Above all, there is a reluctance to understand the riots as a further episode in the history of postwar British urban unrest, a shout for attention from people who feel shut out, whose education was a catastrophe and whose job prospects are nil, who see the rest of the world – even in a slump – cling to advantage they can only dream of, in short, a response to a world where there is too little incentive to be law abiding. This is a failure of politics, and it threatens to return to haunt those who will not listen.