England has suddenly exploded with rioting. It's happening as I type this. One of my friends has been evacuated from her flat because a police station down the road was petrol-bombed. It is grotesque and terrifying that law and order can break down so quickly and comprehensively, that so many people suddenly resort to violence and looting with seeming impunity. It is genuinely difficult to comprehend the seriousness of what is happening. The last riots of any comparable scale happened before I was born.
I've been following the media and twitter coverage closely. The Guardian, Telegraph, and BBC have impressively thorough 24 hour feeds, delivering a stream of images and anecdotes to illustrate the mayhem. The sheer shock and horror at rampant arson, vandalism, and theft naturally breeds an urge to understand why. Why is this happening? How has it escalated so dramatically? And why now?
The impression I've got in the last few days is that it is simply impossible to answer those questions at the moment, and attempts to do so are largely interesting for what they reveal about the commentator. As ever, the wider the generalisation, the more likely confirmation bias is to be at work. Compare for yourself:
Two utterly different views from the Telegraph: Philip Johnston and Mary Riddell.
Camila Batmanghelidjh in the Independent
Richard Littlejohn in The Mail
Nina Power in The Guardian.
For international flavour, Doug Saunders in the Canadian Globe and Mail
From bloggers: Penny Red, Winston Smith, The New Economics Foundation, and Rosamicula on livejournal.
The main point of difference between commentators seems to be the allocation of responsibility; society vs individual and state vs market. Despite this it has surprised me to what extent there is overlap, despite variations in tone. Bringing party politics or even distinctions between right- and left-wing into consideration of the riots seems somewhat artificial, and has happened in the press less than it could have done. The violence is more sudden and uncontrollable than anyone expected, right or left wing, and it is therefore difficult to explain with standard right vs left political narratives. There seems to be more use of such narratives on Twitter, probably due to its inherent difficulties with complexity. Nuance cannot adequately be conveyed or statements properly qualified within 140 characters.
Speculation is rife as there is simply very little data at the moment. We don't know who the rioters are; images in the news suggest predominantly poor teenagers, but there are also reports of adults. We don't know how many there are. We don't know the full extent of what they've done and may still do. Most importantly, we don't know their pretexts for embarking on this illegal, destructive, dangerous course of action. Factors that have been suggested include: rising inequality, weakness in the penal system, amoral individualism, family breakdown, lack of trust in the police, endemic unemployment, consumerist popular culture, drugs, failures of the education system, lack of respect for authority figures, cuts such as the abolition of Education Maintenance Allowance, absence of aspirations, and violent video games. All of these and more could apply; the foolish thing at this point would be to rule anything out for ideological reasons.
It would of course be very convenient for my personal opinions if I could blame the riots solely on the coalition government's cuts and wider economy-centric, rather than people-centric, policy making. But there isn't enough evidence to support or undermine that view. I believe that those two factors are significant, however I could be wrong. For something this big and bad to happen, there cannot be a single simple explanation. Once the police have re-established order and the dust has settled, it should become clearer why the riots occurred, and then we face the more difficult task of doing something about it. The mindset and circumstances that led people to riot will need to be tackled somehow, otherwise there is bound to be more violence to come.
