“So much agreement So much amity
They lie in their graves In permanent gravity...”
From What Are You Talking, Yar by Bachchoo

A crude British joke poses the question: “Why do dogs lick their genitals?” Answer: “Because they can!” The riots that started in north London and spread in a few hours to other parts of the capital and in 24 hours to Birmingham, Bristol, Liverpool, Manchester and other cities are testimony to this rule of possibility. The riots happened because they could.

Britain, its politicians and its population are deeply anxious and ashamed that the world now has evidence not of urban insurrection or some terrorist or revolutionary force in the heart of its cities but of a broken society. And this especially as the country prepares to host the 2012 Olympics. Ever the shopkeeper, Britain is anxious about the impact of this universally reported urban disturbance on the commercial viability of the Games.
The riots were enabled through a breakdown of the principle of Britain as a consenting society in which citizens keep the peace because they agree that it must be kept. They happened because a section of society saw that the risk of riotous behaviour was low enough for them to take it. The riots happened because they could.
In the “hard” enclaves of British cities, mostly in those areas that are the poorest and by definition house the black and Asian immigrant population, a gang culture has been growing for decades. The original black gangs of the Eighties and Nineties had very clear commercial purposes. They were formed to sell illegally imported drugs such as cannabis, cocaine, crack and, in the case of Pakistani immigrants, heroin from Afghanistan. Those gangs had clear networks and purposes. They used young men and sometimes women as runners, the foot soldiers of the multi-million dollar operation on which some smugglers, criminals and businessmen grew rich. Gang members of all ranks got their rewards. The young man who wore gold bracelets and necklaces, who had a couple of gold teeth, drove a BMW and wore Cecil Gee suits won the respect of the younger men who aspired to be in the drug gangs but were not recruited till they were absolutely needed.
A culture of easy money rather than one of hard work was given wide currency. Today’s inner-city gang culture was born of this wish. Young people formed these imitative gangs without the primary business of drugs to which they had no access. The gangs became territorial. Boastfully claiming and defending a patch, a council estate, a street, a chunk of the ghetto, but not being directly employed in the business with access to money their main preoccupation was rivalry against other gangs. Apart from thieving, mugging and the petty trading in drugs they had nothing better to do than to fight each other.
Over the last 15 years the tension has grown. The central fact of the urban ghetto gang in Britain is that it doesn’t feel British. It has no loyalty to any idea of a country, a history or a community. Neither has any concerted policy or unconscious growth or economic and social initiative of the government given these youths any sense of achievement or belonging and hence of responsibility to anything beyond the gang.
They have things in common. A culture of antagonism and defiance fuelled by the violence of rap lyrics and symbolised by the video games in which teams of miscreants with whom the player can identify destroy police stations and attack authority. They share the common heritage of urban Britain, which has through the last four decades developed a sub-class of unemployed, welfare-dependent sections of society.
The riots began with a tragic incident in which a police squad shot and killed a young man. The police allege that he was armed and dangerous and was killed in a confrontation in which he threatened their lives. An investigation was immediately announced. His family and supporters protested outside the police station in Tottenham.
Gangs of youths, some as young as 11, gathered in the High Street close to the police station and vented their anger by at first setting fire to street garbage bins and then to cars. The small police force was preoccupied with these disturbances and the breaking into and looting of shops began. The looters were summoned through messages on their Blackberries. They were using Twitter networks and other “social media” to announce where and when they would congregate and hit next.
Mark Duggan was killed by the police on Thursday. By Friday, London was burning. Masked and hooded youths were setting fire to cars in the street and then to random buildings and using the scarcity of police on the streets to break the glass frontage of shops and enter and loot them. Most of the stuff they looted was electronic gadgets, TV sets, computers, mobile phones and accessories, designer shoes and designer clothes.
When the looting was reported on TV and radio, it began to spread to other cities and became a Lootathon. That first night London deployed 6,000 police on the streets and the gangs, communicating with each other about police numbers and presence, hit where they could. It was unbelievably simple. One saw it unfold on TV as the camera crews got into low-flying helicopters and filmed the mayhem in the streets. Very many people gathered and stood by to watch, some of them recording the looting on phone videos. One saw hundreds of looters making off with TV sets and clobber and even some hooded and masked girls trying on trainers in the shops they had broken into before stealing them.
The riots lasted four nights. Prime Minister David Cameron, home secretary Theresa May and London mayor Boris Johnson cut short their August holidays abroad and flew back to London, called emergency strategy meetings with the police and reconvened Parliament.
Seventeen thousand police were drafted onto the streets of London. All over England more than a thousand people have been arrested on public order charges. The police have been equipped with tear gas, rubber bullets and water cannon. In Southall, a thousand Sikh men gathered at the main gurdwara resolved to act as vigilantes and keep their streets clear of any marauders. It worked. The looters stayed well away.
London is by no means normal and, if only in anticipation of the Olympics, some long-term strategy to contain urban violence will have to emerge. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men are on full alert.