I do not know why anybody was surprised by the riots of August 2011. You had to be deaf, dumb and blind not to see the power of the G20 protests and the effect on the police of the death of Ian Tomlinson. Then, of course, came the student riots just before Christmas which copied so much that happened at the G20. They made full use of the leverage that violent protest can exert on a society unprepared for such things. I would not remotely suggest that every student or their associates who took to the streets intended there to be pulses of violence in the centre of London. Nonetheless, there were certainly individuals among the organisers of the protests who had exactly that intention. The effect was clear to see. The violation of the Cenotaph, the vilification of the Royal Family and repeated uproar in the heart of our capital made the government sit up and pay attention. Why would anyone else with a grievance not employ such methods? We should not, therefore, have been surprised by the events of early August. Nor should we have been surprised by the way the establishment rounded upon the fraught, benighted police force that was meant to deal with it.
Moreover, I am with Peter Ackroyd, who claims that rioting has been a tradition in London for centuries. I would go even further than that. Rioting has long been a way for the British people to express their feelings about things throughout the country – and whilst it cannot be condoned, it is nothing that we should not expect. Just as the students took to the streets to protest against the government’s changes to university funding, the crowd that burnt down Nottingham Castle in 1831 to oppose the Reform Bill was acting on very similar impulses. Similarly, a quick glance at the history of the regiment to which I belonged, might serve as a useful reminder of just how often the British have resorted to brickbats over the last couple of centuries.
When there was no coherent police force to do the job, the army had to fill the gap. While the 45th Nottinghamshires saw no more and no fewer punch-ups than any other regiment, their experiences make for illuminating reading. For example, just after Victoria came to the throne they put down an armed insurrection just outside Canterbury in 1838 after two constables had been sabred to death and a crowd of several thousand gathered. They fired into the mob killing nine people and lost one of their own officers in the conflict. The following year they had to take the bayonet to Welsh Chartists in Newport, South Wales.
There is an eye-catching frieze in Newport that commemorates the bloodshed of November 1839. It is fascinating to see that the same town suffered probably the first British race riots in 1919, and again in 1920. Newport witnessed trouble in 1981 and was on the brink last August. But I suppose a place that raises a monument to insurgency can hardly be surprised when the trend continues. In other words, all over the country our history is littered with these sorts of incidents, most of them dwarfing what happened this summer. Indeed, so frequent are they that they have been given pet names to distinguish them: Bawdy House Riots, Gordon Riots, Rebecca Riots, Peterloo, Skeleton Army Riots, Brown Dog Riots, Liverpool Dock Riots, Brixton Riots and so on. There are literally dozens of such examples sprinkled down the years, yet we seem to be surprised when a wholly predictable phenomenon is repeated.
People also seem to have been amazed by the way this last wave of violence spread across the country. They attribute it to social media. I can remember the summer of 1981, however, when much the same happened – long before the existence of mobiles, Twitter, Facebook and other assorted means of communication. It is worth looking at this in a little more detail. Nobody quite put these two facts together, but I was in Northern Ireland at the time and the press was full of pictures of the chaos that followed the death of the hunger striker, Bobby Sands. For about three weeks Northern Ireland was pretty well ungovernable. It took not just the Royal Ulster Constabulary but almost every soldier stationed in Northern Ireland to restore control. Hard on the back of this, starting in Brixton, riots engulfed the country. Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol and even such unlikely places as Cheltenham and Chester erupted in quick succession.
Strangely enough, the circumstances were remarkably similar in August. Widespread protests during the Arab Spring had dominated the news.
As already noted it was clear how much influence and fear the violence in central London had wielded at the end of last year. The context was surprisingly similar: in 1981 times were hard financially, it was fine weather and the schools were on holiday. Both August 1981 and August 2011 added up to prime conditions for discontent. It is worth remembering that the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 also took place in August.
Naturally enough, people are asking how such disturbances should be dealt with. There are some useful parallels to be drawn between the phenomena of violent protest and terrorism. Clearly, they are different, and neither is new, but in the same way that 11 September 2001 made us think again about how to deal with terrorists, perhaps we should borrow some of those ideas and apply them to both the social and physical conditions that caused the latest riots. Things went wrong with the execution of our counter- terrorism policy – pre-charge detention, control orders, Guantanamo Bay and so on. However, if we take the intellectual content out of this for a moment, there is much we can adapt. To expand, in the wake of ‘9/11’ the authorities developed a strategy known as the four ‘Ps’: Prevent, Prepare, Protect and Pursue. I was Shadow Minister for Security at the time when flesh was being put on the bones of this idea. Without conflating the concept of pure protest with that of pure terrorism, let us see how this strategy might be adapted for the conditions surrounding the riots.
Firstly, prevention is better than cure. A great deal of thoughtful work has already been undertaken by Iain Duncan Smith and his team. I do not intend to go into the enormous subject of mending ‘Broken Britain’, of stamping out gang culture, of returning prosperity to deprived areas, of helping families to survive as units and the host of other measures that would entail a lengthy essay in their own right. If nothing else, the depth and severity of these riots have hoofed the body politic out of its complacency. They have made many people realise how urgently we must mend our society’s hurts and prevent things from getting worse.
Any attempt to look at how we might prepare for the future will have to address the mentality of our law keepers led, of course, by the Metropolitan Police. I have the greatest of respect for our police officers but we cannot ask them to deal with widespread violence and disorder unless we trust them to use their judgement and allow their commanders to command. For instance, at the start of the riots I heard many different people suggesting that the police should become heavier handed, and criticising them for being slow to react. While policing is not about heavy-handedness but delicacy and empathy with the population, if there are individuals who choose to flout the law and burn down buildings, loot shops, threaten and take the lives of innocent people then delicacy must yield to efficacy. In my experience, once an individual elects to become violent there is no solution other than meeting him or her with overwhelming but controlled and proportionate violence in return.
By way of example, in the many riots in which I was involved as a soldier in Northern Ireland, I came across some misanthropes who were intent upon one form of destruction or another. In this situation the only way to stop them was to use force. Plastic bullets and judiciously applied batons were often the only way to convince these people that violent disorder was wrong. Yet, as soon as the police started to be more robust in August, they were criticised – vide Greater Manchester Police using their batons to control a looter, which drew instant criticism.
You cannot have it both ways. If you want a police force that can switch, at the drop of a warrant card, from telling you the time to protecting life and limb, they have got to be confident that they will not be hung out to dry once the bricks begin to fly. In short, our politicians must be prepared to back the police.
To bend the analogy a little further, how should we protect people and property? Interestingly, in one part of this country the police hardly hesitate in using water cannon, plastic bullets and exceedingly robust tactics to deal with rioters, and are seldom criticised when they do. For some reason, a completely different set of rules applies to Irish rioters rather than English ones. In the middle of the riots on the Mainland, the Police Service for Northern Ireland was expecting trouble on the anniversary of Internment on 8 and 9 August. They were fully ready to use whatever means were needed to deal with it. Yet, in Scotland, Wales and England, baton rounds have never been used, despite the fact that our police officers are not only equipped with such weapons but are also fully trained in their use. It makes me wonder whether the corporate nervousness that seems to have overwhelmed our police forces as a result of heavy criticism after, say, the G20 riots, has made them risk-averse. Perhaps the Ulster experience of protest slipping into violence and armed terrorism has meant that the PSNI understands the consequences of disorder all too clearly.
Furthermore, and to my amazement, in August some apparently rational people were suggesting that the army should be called out to help the police. Even if we had the number of troops available to do this, I cannot think of a worse idea. Whether it be helping the police logistically, driving them from place to place in military transport or actually supplanting them when it came to dealing with riots, what sort of message would it send? I understood the need to use the army in Northern Ireland at the start of the last Troubles but I could not see why so many soldiers were kept for so long in a situation that in fact required a different form of policing, with some military support rather than all-out army control. To put men with bayonets into our cities is not only abhorrent, it would, I suggest, raise every hackle that has bristled in the British psyche since Oliver Cromwell’s time. On top of that, the timing of August’s riots was deeply unfortunate in terms of next year’s Olympics. What sort of message would soldiers on our streets have sent to the rest of the world?
Lastly, how should rioters be pursued? There is an element of pursuit in the physical breaking up of disorder, but much more importantly it is a question of how the courts should deal with it. There have been howls of outrage in the media regarding some of the swingeing sentences that were handed down by magistrates and judges across the country. It was suggested that this was a ‘knee jerk’ reaction – poor decisions being made whilst the blood was hot. It is hard to see what else our courts could have done after Charlie Gilmour received sixteen months for swinging off a flag attached to the Cenotaph. In my view, there is nothing knee jerk about long sentences being given to those who burn down shops and homes, shoot at the police, murder citizens and smash the peace. What else can a responsible government possibly do? The only difficulty is, of course, that stiff sentences may not be upheld on appeal and that we may not have the prison capacity to deal with all of those who are convicted.
The violent events of last month were some sort of aberration. There are plenty of precedents for this sort of thing, but unless we are very careful people will learn that rioting works. So, let there be fresh thinking and let our politicians have the courage not only to back the police but also to make brave words turn into bold deeds.