Manchester is better than that.

By Chris Hughes / @ChrisDHughes

Two wrongs don’t make a right.

On Tuesday, I could only watch as thugs attempted to break the very spirit that has rebuilt Manchester since the IRA bomb. With teary eyes, I looked on as vandals, of all ages, run rampant through the city centre; smashing windows of all the small, already struggling independent businesses that make Manchester so unique. These people weren’t politically driven, they were simply criminals.

Though the horrific scenes were heartbreaking, they were not spirit breaking, not to us Mancunians. Through Twitter and Facebook, a community clean up event was organised for the very next morning. So along I went, with my enormous hoodie and broom in hand, on the bus to the city centre, secretly not wanting to see what those vandals had done to the city I love. I got off the bus and frankly, I looked around in confusion.

Windows were already boarded up, streets had already (more or less) been cleaned and people were going about their daily business. I walked up to meet some of the comrades and we joined the masses with their brooms and gloves and bags and we were all told that the council workers had worked through the night to clean the majority of the mess up. We were told to proudly sweep up the remains and show them what true Mancunians were made of. One of the local bars (that was also broken into) gave out free tea and coffee to all volunteers.

There were around 1500 of us. The solidarity of Mancunians on that day made me even more proud of my city. I love Manchester.

The way Manchester reacted was amazing. I couldn’t write a blog post on the events of the past few days without expressing my great admiration for the efforts of Greater Manchester Police. With reduced numbers, they tackled the problem head on. Unlike the Metropolitan Police, they didn’t let crowds gather in large groups; they split people up before they could cause much damage. It may have been a game of cat and mouse, but it worked.

It seems the riots may have calmed down, so this next argument may be obsolete, but…

Shipping in water cannons and using rubber bullets as a deterrent to rioting is, for starters, inhumane. Water cannons blind people and rubber bullets can seriously injure, if not kill people. We are not Syria, we are not Libya, we are not an inhumane country. Tactics like these are disgraceful and should never be used.

On Wednesday afternoon, a friend and I heard the news that Manchester City Council and Salford City Council could possibly evict families from social housing if a member of said family had been involved in the riots. This news made us slide down the wall in the hall and put our hands over our faces in disbelief.

What does that solve? For one, they’d be making possibly thousands of people homeless and massively increase poverty…and we all know people don’t cause a fuss about such things in this country… It’s an absolutely disgusting idea to suggest. How would this solve any underlying social issues? How could two Labour Councils suggest such an idea?

Rant over…