Ironically, given that this sense of hopelessness was undoubtedly amongst the root causes, the riots themselves appear to have been fuelled by a sense of possibility. The rioters weren't a demographic, they were a psychographic, mobilising and self-reinforcing through networks - they knew their collective power as a mob and felt the collective weakness of society.
But as the flash mobs bearing brooms the next day showed, London society isn't weak. It's strong. We just have to work harder to demonstrate it, to reinforce it and to show people their positive place in it.
Some of that work involves stronger policing and enforcement of laws and regulations to show that society does have standards. It also means massive and unapologetic intervention in broken communities, through education, social work and funding for community projects. It means taxpayers having to spend lots of money on people whose personalities and behaviours scarcely merit it. It also means - god help us - listening to the likes of Iain Duncan Smith when he points the finger at family breakdown. It means a more Reithian (and sometimes tediously worthy) cultural agenda. In other words, it means doing lots of things that will stick in the craw of just about everyone of every political persuasion. The alternative is to live with this underclass for the next couple of centuries, as we have the last.
The challenge is not without some precedent.
In the wake of EURO 2000, Brockley Central's day job involved working with England supporters trying to purge the national team's following of hooligans. In a typical crowd a small proportion were really, really nasty people, without the intelligence or empathy to function normally. Most were just muppets, who took vicarious pleasure from being around danger. The sort of guys who would run forwards a few yards, then back a few yards - if they felt safe, they might chuck a plastic chair from distance. And then there were the apologists. A much larger group, not involved themselves in trouble, but always on hand to offer an excuse to legitimise the action - 'the police were looking for trouble', 'the other fans started it' and on, and on. Often, there was truth in what they said, but how they said it stoked tensions and energised the trouble makers. You can see a lot of same behaviours in the riots as you can in football violence.
The approach taken to change behaviour at England games required a whole range of measures. Primarily, these were:
- tougher policing and bans on travelling
- social engineering through a ticketing policy that encouraged new people including more women and children to follow England - and if you had the wrong type of criminal record, you didn't get a ticket. Tough.
- celebrating, rewarding and facilitating positive behaviour, whether that was through contributing towards positive fan initiatives or helping the media to find and interview fans who had something to offer other than nihilism
- it even meant building an online community forum, where fans could bitch about the moderator (us) in much the same way as they do on Brockley Central today - we told you the precedents were uncanny
To pay for all this, people's membership costs went up, as did the subsidy from The FA. Everyone paid and no-one liked it very much.
But the result was that - while things are still far from perfect - we went from riots in Belgium to congas in Japan within a decade.
