This was the result in December 2011 after month of painstaking "research". The Guardian commissioned a report in conjunction with the LSE into the riots suggesting the cause was the rioters were not satisfied with the police service. According to the same newspaper 73% of those who were convicted for rioting had a previous criminal record.
So the "cause" of the riots is not straightforward criminality but the police attempting to enforce law and order. As one opined, “The police is the biggest gang out there.”
Even worse is Gary Younge's muddle headed rationalisation for the brutal, primitive and doltish resentments that the rioters used as a retrospective pretext for their crimes. Writing in The Guardian, Younge attempted to fit the riots in with a form of strangulated "protest" which was still "political".
"Given the spontaneous, geographically diverse and inchoate nature of these disturbances, there was never a credible single cause. Even if there had been, there were few among the rioters who would have been in a position to articulate those grievances"
That was because large numbers were semi literate idiots, a product of a dysfunctional education system, and clear they were not going to "articulate" their grievances any more than they were prepared to do a job that more educated Eastern Europeans were prepared to do.
Partly, this was the fault of "the system". A proportion of the rioters had further education but it was largely useless in the face of better motivated and educated Poles who did not lose their jobs in the wake of the economic crisis. But the left shied away from the question of mass immigration.
The riots were not a "protest" any more than the Nazis burning down synagogues in the 1930s were a "protest". If violence against property and people can be rationalised by merely taking at face value what rioters say and fetishise "alienation" then the same indulgence could be given to those in the EDL or BNP.
Younge continued to impose an ideological frame over the events by pretending it was the spontaneous outgrowth of a true 'cry of despair' as none of the elites cared about their grievances. "The journey from the margins to the mainstream is a perilous one, which few make intact without losing their voice".
The rioters never had a "voice" in the first place as this was not a "protest" but a set of vicious criminal actions expressing openly a contempt for law dressed up in the language of protest as a means for the rioters to feel justified in their decision to take what they already had decided they had a right to loot from the shops.
True, the violence was not primarily driven by gangs but the aesthetics and supposed "glamour" about taking on the police and fighting "da system" promoted by a retarded sub literate pseudo "culture" of gangsta rap and gaining "respect" through violence as a necessity for "survival" in the urban jungle.
In many ways Gangsta sub culture was the moral equivalent of neo-Nazi rock music. Except because it is black, the trend was pandered to as an authentic expression of streetwise youths by guilt ridden whites and those who saw it as "cool" rather than banal, bleak and largely barbaric in tone, language, meaning and expression.
These trends had been encouraged and patronised by youth and "community leaders" with an interest in being their spokesmen and who, naturally demanded "more resources" for youth clubs to prevent riots, no less than the middle class entrepreneurs who made money out of these fads and fashions.
Naturally, that was not up for discussion. Instead, scorn was poured on the Cameron government for even suggesting it was pure criminality, as if the looting, burning and mob violence was not just criminality and any leader would not make a show of denouncing the criminality of crime.
Obviously the society that had created it was dysfunctional but attempts to downplay the criminality in favour of seeing it as mere reflex action to an oppressive society were equally as mendacious.
"The government's narrative may have been ridiculous, but in the absence of a counter-narrative, many believed it plausible. The impression of unclaimed chaos and the shots of burning cars, devastated shopkeepers and hooded youth lent credibility to claims that this was nothing more than young hooligans running amok"
The reality of shopkeepers having their shops looted and livelihoods affected was not part of a "narrative". It takes a special form of pseudo intellectual to posit a post modern "it's all a narrative" when the reality is plain for all to see and reveal a new narrative in which what the rioters themselves say about why they did-"police brutality"it is accepted.
Along with the other idiot leftist canard, that economic injustice causes riots. In which case, a large number of those in Middle England would be rioting now should they feel that the economic crisis since 2008 was wholly the fault of the bankers and the state
"Poverty was clearly a factor. Ministry of Justice figures revealed almost two‑thirds (64%) of the young rioters lived in the poorest areas and 42% relied on free school meals. "There is nothing so dangerous as a man who has nothing to lose," wrote James Baldwin. "You do not need 10 such men. Only one will do." With youth unemployment rising to 21.9%, Britain is producing thousands".
No, it's poverty of ambition and not literal poverty, a sense that nothing means anything anyway other than consumerism and so, when the chance availed itself, there was no point not looting and stealing, not least if the bankers and people at the top are no different. This is still a point about moral collapse which Younge ignores he writes,
The general assumption, among those who believed political causes both existed and mattered, was that the driving force for discontent was economic. Everyone from the UN to Nick Clegg had predicted social unrest if the austerity measures were pushed in time of recession. Indeed, the government's high-handed moral pronouncements were particularly hard to take given the recent behaviour of our political and financial elites: a corrupt political class embroiled in phone hacking and expense scandals, and a disdainful financial sector where failure brought huge bonuses.
The immorality of the underclass is no different to the immorality of the elites but the rioters were merely reacting to circumstances the elites had caused and, so, the moral calculus becomes one where those reacting to those circumstances by using violence are somehow better than the violence and greed of those at the top:riots and looting are a form of "protest" after all.
This creed was a cliched form of 1960s radicalism in North America which flatly contradicted the claim he was not "romanticising the riots ". After all Younge threw in quotes by Martin Luther King-"A riot is the language of the unheard.- and James Baldwin, the Afrocentric black power fascist and quoting him was irrelevant unless trying to glamorise brutal and primitive impulses.
The cause most often cited for the riots was poverty (86%), but unemployment (79%) and inequality (70%) featured prominently too. Few guessed, though, that this tinder in the box was lit at least as much by the long arm of the law as the invisible hand of the market".
These statistics were largely meaningless. The poverty is all relative compared to the Eastern Europeans who were quite willing to work hard in awful jobs they were overqualified for. So either immigration had to be to blame or else the training system and welfare dependency that bred this mentality of entitlement, as the jobs were there prior to the economic crisis.
Younge continued to belt out the statistics in the report as though pure facts.
"Almost three-quarters of interviewees said they had been stopped and searched by the police in the last year; 85% said "policing" was an important or very important cause of the riots. Just 7% believed the police do a good job in their area".
This ignores the fact that most arrested already had a criminal record. Perhaps they are now "service users" of the police, with a consumer right to complain if policing is not to their satisfaction. Naturally, the fact the police failed to use the necessary force on the lawless mob to protect people and property incurred the further contempt of the law abiding and lawless alike.
What the August Riots did do was to bring into focus an increasingly dysfunctional society teetering on the brink of descending into a weird surreal dystopia. The riots frightened those who could no longer explain it in accordance with the old paradigms of "race riot" as in the 1980s or that it even had a motive that could be understood and dealt with.
It's possible to go beyond both the trite line that all the rioters were mindless criminals and that their actions were merely a reflex to poverty or "police brutality". Both explanations are fundamentally stupid and are ways of evading asking deeper questions about what is wrong with English society.
The right doesn't want to admit that consumer capitalism and greed was a factor nor the left that it was neither poverty nor inequality nor "the police".
The riots were a product the of nihilism created by the entitlement mentality bred by welfare dependency, debt fuelled something for nothing consumerism, a defective training and education system, the police obsessed with "community policing" and a a gansta rap aesthetic and boredom.
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