Condemn the rioters? Of course but don’t think that’s enough

By Anthony Painter / @anthonypainter

Three young kids – two boys and a girl – sat next to me on a train recently. They boarded at Gatwick Airport and were heading to Clapham Junction. They hadn’t returned from a long weekend getaway. They were just ‘cruising’ the train – presumably jumping barriers at each end. The oldest of the three was 15 or so at a guess and he was bullying his ‘bitch’, basically tormenting and humiliating her. His phone would go off from time to time and a short, aggressive, affected gangster two-way would ensue. It was all about deals and whereabouts. But then something very strange happened.

He turned to the third kid and asked him, after about twenty minutes of the journey, how things were with him. The other kid replied, not so bad, but still tough. He was staying with his gran that night and had been for a while but previously he had been living with his brother. His brother was about to have a kid with his girlfriend and he didn’t know where that left him. The oldest kid – let’s call call him ‘Ginger’ – asked whether his Dad’s new girlfriend was nice to him. “She was to begin with. Now not so much.” Suddenly, things had shifted from deliquence to pathos.

As they were getting off at Clapham, the pattern of the verbal and physical bullying of the ‘bitch’ continued as Ginger quickly put away the empathy. We were back to actually quite scary deliquence again.

I have to say, the thought did cross my mind that ‘Ginger’ could well have been involved in Clapham on Monday night. The other two may have been sucked in too. Either way, their futures are bleak as they give each other support of sorts and are left to drift by their families. Their schools would have given up long ago.

A couple of years back, I was asked to do a talk in Lewisham library on Obama at a Black History Month event. All went well at first. A good audience turned out and then we had some questions. Something strange then happened. The audience took over and started to talk about how envious they were of America and its ability to move on from its racial past (that was the not really accurate perception they had.) The memory of the Brixton riots was still fresh. There was an angry mistrust of the police and educational institutions. Stop and search was completely corrosive as an issue, seen as the modern means by which the police humiliate certain communities.

Just a few days later in another similar event, in Hackney this time, I raised the issue of stop and search and asked if the kids had experience of it. Pretty much all had had a direct negative experience of being stopped and searched, and were angry about it. A number of the kids even got out stop and search forms that you are given when you are stopped, so recently had this occurred. (I have one of these in my possession as I was once stopped while driving on Embankment – the police officer told me he had to stop a number of white people to balance out the numbers, filled in the form and didn’t bother with the search.)

The one story that stuck was a black kid who said he was walking down the street with his two white friends. He was stopped and they were not. I asked his teacher about it. She said she was shocked that he would have been targeted as there was absolutely nothing to suggest he was anything other than a model student. After all, he had come to a lunchtime lecture on politics and history!

These riots have wiped out livelihoods, extinguished hope, caused physical harm, and torn communities asunder. I have no special knowledge about community relations, gang culture, criminality, or the actions of the police – virtuous or otherwise. But I can’t help thinking of these stories that by chance and circumstance I ended up hearing. They seem connected in some way to what we have seen: children treated like unwanted pets; anger and mistrust between the police and the communities they serve; educational divides; and nothing seemingly on offer but the pack, the gang, the anger, the violence.

Once the violence has stopped, the guilty arrested, charged and convicted, then it’s not enough to simply condemn and moralise. That’s the easy thing to do. It’s also easy to grind our political axes and score political points. We must learn. It is not about making excuses. It is about creating a different future.

It is about the Left saying clearly, yes authority does matter and these kids have been let down by their parents and others. Stability matters. It is about the Right understanding that ever more noisy moralising without help and hope will fall on deaf ears amongst those who it is targeted at. It is about the government realising that – even before the bulk of the cuts are implemented – that they have sent a message to whole swathes of urban Britain that they don’t care about them. Remember, the t-shirt didn’t say: “Big society supported by strong government.” You are in it for yourselves.

I don’t care whether the coalition or the mayor take a political hit or not from this. I just hope they realise that you can’t just leave whole areas of urban Britain prey to an angry stories of rejection and despair; myths owned by those who profit from anger. And we can’t allow lives to be ruined because too many young kids were never cared for in a way that gave them a chance or even a sense of empathy – a basic skill that too many of the ‘suicidally uncaring’ are left without.

Those directly or indirectly involved should be punished for this orgy of crime. And our thoughts should always focus on the innocent victims whose lives, homes and business have been destroyed by the mob. But then let’s turn our eyes to those who managed to stay away from this – perhaps through chance as much as wisdom. And let’s think about the next generation who will be in the same boat unless we act. Big society, common good, good society, whatever. It’s about kids like ‘Ginger’ and his mates having something else in their lives: hope and belonging.