As a member of the Riots, Communities and Victims Panel, I believe that we failed to address the deeper causes of last summer’s violence
Will the riots happen again? That was the question many people asked after last summer. As one of the appointees to the government’s Riots, Communities and Victims Panel, set up in the wake of the riots, I think I know. But a number of my conclusions differed from those of my fellow panellists, and some of the politicians who set us up.
We spent six months travelling around the country speaking to people about what happened. Those who spoke to us cited many issues, including poverty, inequality, consumerism, entitlement, policing, discipline and ‘the X Factor society’. The panel rightly addressed many of these in its report. But more striking — I regret to say — were the things that we failed to address.
I also learned of more sinister agendas. The day after the Tottenham riots, the smouldering ruins of the carpet shop were being demolished, along with the homes of people who lived above it. Nearby, far-left activists were handing out leaflets calling for more riots. Weeping families and burning homes seemed not to bother such people in their celebration of disaster.
As founder of a charity that works with excluded teenagers in Tottenham and Hackney, angry young men, street violence and burnt-out cars were not new to me. I have seen gang culture dominate areas, observed how the disintegration of the traditional family has devastated poor communities and watched our broken welfare and criminal justice systems further demoralise and fracture our society. Yet a local government culture of psychobabble, ideology and self-perpetuating bureaucracy remains in denial about these major underlying causes of the riots. They are an ‘inconvenient truth’ for the left-liberal establishment that has been asleep at the wheel for a generation.
Many have fixated on the obvious correlation between deprivation and rioting. Yet the vast majority of those affected by poverty and unemployment did not riot. In many poor areas where there was little or no rioting, such as Tower Hamlets, Southall and Bradford, there seemed to be less family breakdown, less father absence and more faith groups — but the Youth Offending Service didn’t keep sufficient records to explore this correlation. There were other serious counter-theories which proved impossible to investigate due to lack of records and data. I wanted to know how long unemployed rioters had been claiming for (if many had been on benefits during the boom years, it might be indicative of a broken welfare system). Sorry, I was told, we don’t have those records either. An audit of the social and financial costs of serious repeat offenders returning from soft sentences to terrorise law-abiding citizens? No chance.
And that denial went everywhere. Around the country, for instance, high-ranking police continually refused to accept that the riots were in any way gang-related. After one such occasion, we were handed a compilation of riot photos full of hoodies in looted streets making gang signs with their hands at the cameras. This was no surprise — for years the beleaguered front-line police who know have told me that parts of our cities have been lost to gang influence.
Once in a panel meeting, a group of youth leaders in a riot-hit area particularly impressed us with their forthright views. However, I sensed the discomfort in the room as they spoke about absent fathers, family breakdown and the extent to which an over-generous welfare system had become part of the problem. In many riot-hit communities, social services professionals spoke of ‘parent-carers’ and ‘significant others’, while most children spoke of families, mums and dads. There sometimes seemed an iron curtain between the politically correct local government elite and the people they are meant to work for.
Yet behind the smokescreen, real facts exist which should trouble everybody regardless of political bias. For instance, in 1979 in England and Wales 11 per cent of births were to unmarried mothers; today the figure is 47 per cent. Last year a study found that 37 per cent of unmarried parents living together when their first child was born were separated by the time the child was five; for married couples this figure was 6 per cent.
Over recent years our country has witnessed an epidemic of father absence. Gang violence and child poverty have followed. This may not be the case in the middle-class suburbs where extended family and a good income can still give a child a decent start. But it is the case in poorer areas. The result has been the creation of a ‘ghetto’ where family breakdown has left a vacuum which is now filled by gangs. Such gangs provide the security, identity, loyalty and role models (not to mention income) once provided to young people by their family. Teenagers in this world are introduced to an inverted reality where fear is power, violence is authority, taking a bullet for a friend is responsibility and being a ‘soldier’ is identity. Young wannabes talk, walk, dress, act, think and hate the police like the gangster-rappers they aspire to be. Their musical heroes recite a creed of shooting, stabbing and drug-dealing to get money and power. Many may be in denial of this reality — but in many parts of our country this culture now owns the streets and last August it simply did what it says on the tin.
I was told ad nauseam that the riots were not gang-related because only 19 per cent of those convicted in London were known gang members, and 13 per cent in the country as a whole. This vastly mistook the facts. It is enough of a percentage to have caused the riots in certain areas, and I doubt that teen gangsters would offer their name, rank and number on arrest. I would suggest that in some places more than half of those who looted and rioted are subject to what I would call a gang culture.
This awful reality is compounded by the failings of our soft criminal justice system. Fully 76 per cent of convicted rioters had previous convictions and nine out of ten were known to the police. Even more shockingly, 84 had committed 50 or more previous offences. Those 84 criminals should end their lives in prison. But there again lies an ideological blockade. I was shocked by the number of public servants we spoke to who simply chanted the mantra ‘prison doesn’t work’. My job rehabilitating young borderline criminals looking for a way out is made so much harder if repeat offenders or gang leaders return emboldened after short sentences to provide role models, leadership and ownership of an area saturated with drugs, guns and knives.
Business people in one riot-hit area angrily told officials that they had been scared in their own shops for years. Yet the response seemed to be that the community’s fear of crime, rather than crime itself, was the problem. The officials simply did not seem to care that the end-result of their ideological fallacy was that law-abiding people are forced to share the streets with criminals with more than 90 convictions.
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In a country obsessed with child safeguarding, the system allows hundreds of thousands of teenagers to live in fear of gang violence, yet many parents who gave evidence to the panel were scared to show any discipline to their own children. Those bureaucrats who want to make it illegal to smack children should speak to the class of teenagers I met the other week who voted about 60 per cent to 40 per cent to bring back the cane, or indeed to any number of teachers, parents, and well-behaved children in poor areas who feel government has taken discipline out of their hands.
The net result of these denials and bad thinking is that our society is sending out a set of deeply negative messages — and they are being picked up on. When criminals feel there are no consequences, the moral is they will break the law. When our society says that children know best, the moral is that adults have no authority. When we tell people they cannot succeed because of elitism, poverty and inequality, the moral is that there is no point in trying: someone must do it for you. When we encourage people to blame society for everything, then they need never take responsibility for their own actions. When we teach people to hate authority and despise the police, then breaking the law becomes a good thing to do. Society has become one big moral hazard and the brakes on human behaviour are off.
There is much in the final report that is good, and I do not regret remaining within the panel even though much that goes to the heart of broken Britain was left out. It now falls to outside organisations, like the Centre for Social Justice, to marshal complex scientific evidence that many of our discarded traditions, structures and institutions used to work. They are reinventing the wheel and discovering it to be round.
Of course, in private, many hard-working public-sector employees realise that the system that they have propped up is failing. But they dare not speak out against the vast political Ponzi-scheme whose social statistics are the dodgy accounts that ‘prove’ it works. It is time they did. We should no longer accept denials based on political ideology. Last summer should have been a wake-up call, but many have deliberately failed to learn the lesson. Around the country people sensed the riots were a symptom of ongoing collapse, but they also knew what the solutions were. They talked about morals, values, family and community. They were disgusted by the greed of bankers and politicians as well as of benefit scroungers and rioters. For many, poverty led to heroism and pride in community and the armies of volunteers who cleaned up the riots proved the moral compass of the British people.
But our politicians need to replace words with action. Reforms in education and welfare are a beginning. We need to declare war on gangs, accept some people cannot be rehabilitated and sack public employees who refuse to improve. But the moral majority also needs to break the stranglehold of political correctness and justice must be seen to be done. Denying prisoners the vote and expelling hate preachers would be a good example. It means shaming and stigmatising those who harm society and voting out politicians if their views are dangerous. It may mean you are shouted down in public and even discriminated against. But the best way to begin to turn around our struggling, crime-ridden, fatherless communities — and the only way to save the futures of terrified, miserable children — is to acknowledge the facts and policies that brought us here. If we do not then August 2011 will be seen not just to have been a warning, but a taste of the Britain to come.