Riots, the aftermath: I predicted a riot

The government called the riots sheer criminality. Some local youth leaders condemned them as 'nothing more than a thief's mentality'. These descriptions may capture the acts seen over the previous seven days in British cities, but they irresponsibly make no attempt to understand them. Without understanding the motives for crime, we cannot hope to prevent it — and we will move deeper into a cycle of simply locking more people up. When we are talking about mass civil unrest, something much more serious is at stake. Only a fool would write recent events off as criminality and leave it there.

The warning signs have been present for some time. In October 2010, the Head of the National Children's Bureau, Sir Paul Ennals, warned that cuts to youth clubs would cause young people to become 'progressively disengaged from their own communities'. The Coalition disregarded those warnings. Haringey Council, where the riots began, has closed eight of its thirteen youth clubs. It would be reductive to assign blame to service cuts alone, and it would be wrong to suggest these closures condone the riots — but the message such cuts send to young people in inner-city areas is harsher than the cuts themselves. If the younger generation is being pushed to fend for itself amid reductions in youth services, education and employment programmes, it should not be surprising that anger results — especially when the economic crisis has made plain that those in charge of government and business are capable of far more costly and damaging mistakes.

Martin Luther King said that 'riots are the voices of the unheard'. A 15-year-old from Haringey said simply: 'there's nothing to do here.' A 19-year-old from Tottenham told a local reporter that people feel pressure to join gangs when they have nothing better to do. We are at a critical point in determining our country's future. Water cannon and imprisonment cannot be the best answers available. If we remove the channels through which young people can direct their energy, especially in cities, we create conditions where tension builds until an opportunity presents itself. This is what we saw — an opportunity to go crazy, to take something back, and in the process to send an unmistakable message to those in positions of responsibility: it is time to listen, and time to change.