Slightly more than 28 days later

By Conor Pope / @conorpope

During the London riots a month ago, I was doing a week of very early morning delivery shifts at the shop I work in on Oxford St. Strolling down a deserted Oxford St in a bleary-eyed, dawn haze is an odd experience. Sorry I can’t come up with a better word to describe it than ‘odd’. Nothing else really seems to explain it; I toyed with ‘weird’, but that wasn’t quite right. ‘Uncanny’ is maybe better. It looks just like Oxford St but something is different. Vacant. Inexplicably wrong.

In honesty, I found the emptiness a little unsettling, which is definitely ‘weird’ considering how much I hate going down there when it’s busy. When I can’t get to sleep some nights, I often end up worrying that I might wake up and suddenly be a cyborg, but not realise until I get off at Oxford Circus tube station and all the colour suddenly drains from my vision and big red words flash across my eyeline saying “ENGAGING INDISCRIMINATE SLAUGHTER MODE”. Because that would definitely happen if I was a robot. I don’t want to murder these innocent shoppers, but I know it would happen. Bloody dawdlers, faffing about and getting in my way when I’m trying to get to work. It’s difficult to know whether I worry about turning into a homicidal cyborg because I’m lying awake at night, or whether I’m lying awake at night because I’m worried about becoming a homicidal cyborg.

The uncanniness certainly wasn’t helped by the fact that all the shop windows were bare. In an effort to put off any potential looters, visual teams in the high street stores had moved all the mannequins and clothes away from the windows. Perhaps the media had stressed that it was “youths” rioting so much that people had started to believe it was infants running amok, who would easily believe that there were no goods to be found if they couldn’t see them.

That week, as we unpacked boxes upon boxes of clothes in the windowless basement stock room, all we talked about was why the riots had happened. We came up with enough reasons, but, in the end, none of us really knew. We weren’t so much clutching at straws so much as inventing straws for us to clutch at.

With the Home Affairs Select Committee searching for answers this week, I could have been back in that basement. Politicians are in such a clamour to show they want to understand why the riots happened, that they are chucking reasons around with gay abandon, like bricks through a cornershop window.

Boris has backed up Ken Clarke’s hypothesis that the unrest was committed by a feral underclass, which is exactly the kind of sneering, snobbish pomposity that lead to the ‘Nasty Party’ nickname.

You might have thought Ken Livingstone, as the world‘s greatest detective, would use his sleuthing skills to get to the bottom of it all. However the dust had not settled, let alone been swept away, before he found himself on Newsnight blaming the cuts.

On the other hand, he has been going around London with his Tell Ken events, of which the sole aim is listening to people, but if his Twitter feed is anything to go by, he is fortunate enough to be told exactly what he wants to hear.

A society in the violent throes of a moral decay and the government’s austerity budget were both blamed in our basement too. Parents can’t hit their kids so they can’t control them. When you shut down the youth clubs, where do you expect these kids to go? To my ears, both sound equally preposterous.

But then, so does everything. Whether it’s an uprising of the proletariat, a simple case of opportunistic theft and mindless violence, the glorification of violence in rap music and video games, a culture of greed epitomised by MPs’ expenses, an attack against vilification by the meeja, a reaction against stop and search powers or justice for Mark Duggan, I’m afraid nothing quite seems to add up.

Alone, they are as scant justification as blaming the riots on people turning into cyborgs overnight without realising or a rage virus spreading across the country. Actually, with 20/20 hindsight (as Boris would say), I should have made this article a comparison to zombie films. Sorry.

Many of the reasons listed above may well have contributed to the riots (except for parents not hitting children, that definitely didn’t) but gobbing off about what you think caused it isn’t going to help. You might as well be in a stockroom basement.

Actually, I’ve changed my mind about all of this. Ignore everything. They are cyborgs.