Our team collected more than 1.3m words of first-person accounts of the English riots.
Photograph: Luke Macgregor/Reuters
This summer's social unrest in Britain was destructive and incoherent but, as our study shows, it was still a form of protest
At the beginning of August, in a fit of collective pathology,
thousands of young people across Britain took to the streets and started
breaking into shops, stealing and confronting the police. What
triggered this is a mystery. But whatever it was, it wasn't politics,
poverty, alienation or despair. That would be making excuses for bad
behaviour and imply a humanity to which the rioters had no right. For
the riots were not the work of mostly disaffected teenagers but a "feral", "uneducated" "underclass" who somehow managed to outwit the police
for the best part of a week using new technology. Venal, entitled and
irresponsible, they adhered to values entirely unfamiliar to the British
political establishment.
Beyond the growth of gang culture and
the demise of individual responsibility, no credible broader
explanations were offered for their behaviour. If the problem had been
rooted in politics and economics, the solution might have resided there
also. But for the government, this was the work of criminals; the only
effective remedy was punishment.
Four months later the absurdity
of the official response to the riots is painfully clear. It took a
while. Given the spontaneous, geographically diverse and inchoate nature
of these disturbances, there was never a credible single cause. Even if
there had been, there were few among the rioters who would have been in
a position to articulate those grievances. The journey from the margins
to the mainstream is a perilous one, which few make intact without
losing their voice.
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