‘Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’ comes closer than David Cameron has to providing answers to the riots. But after a decade of investment, even this may be lacking.

Like wars, no riots are ever the same as the last ones. And like the British army in 1914, the police seemed unprepared for the outbreak of violence that despoiled parts of London and the centres of Birmingham, Salford and Manchester. At first, thin blue lines of police, armed only with truncheons and shields, faced numerically superior mobs. At times, they could only stand back and watch. By the time proper riot police, with armour and horses, had been called up, the rioters’ tactics had changed to small-scale hit-and-runs and use of side streets for cover. As 16,000 police were deployed on the streets of London, looting and arson broke out in Manchester and Salford. It felt, at times, that the rioters’ tactics and communications technology was at least equal to that of the police, if not slightly better.

Like military strategy in the early years of the first world war, the political analysis during and in the aftermath of the riots has also been hopelessly out of date. If you stare hard enough into the confusing picture of the events of August 2011, you will see whatever you want to see. For Iain Duncan Smith, it is proof that the breakdown of the nuclear family is society’s primary malaise; for David Cameron, it vindicates his thesis of a ‘broken society’; for the Socialist Workers’ party it was proof of a proto-revolutionary spirit among the oppressed ‘lumpenproletariat’. For David Starkey it was the opportunity to unleash the inner racist, and ensure a swift transition into early retirement.

For Labour, the calibration had to be inch-perfect. In 1981 and again in 1985, much of the Labour party proved its unfitness to govern in its reaction to the inner-city riots in Toxteth, Brixton, St Pauls, Handsworth, Moss Side and on the Broadwater Farm estate in north London. Local council leader Bernie Grant, later the MP for Tottenham, said: ‘The youths around here believe the police were to blame for what happened on Sunday and what they got was a bloody good hiding.’ His remarks, taken out of context, reverberated around the media, and reinforced the ‘loony left’ label which had been successfully adhered to the Labour party. It was not just Grant. The general Labour party view of the riots in the 1980s was that it was the fault of the Metropolitan police, or Margaret Thatcher, or imperialism, or capitalism, or just about anybody except for the young people with their bricks and machetes. Labour’s purely sociological approach was mirrored by Thatcher’s purely bourgeois reaction to the riots. For her, the rioters were merely criminals, smashing up shops and attacking the police. Norman Tebbit famously compared the rioters to his own father in the Depression, who ‘didn’t riot, he got on his bike and looked for work’.

Then, as now, the riots have their roots in both sociology and criminality. Intergenerational unemployment, deprivation, the absence of father figures, gang culture and nihilistic popular culture played their part. So did criminal gangs, directing the looting and coordinating the rioting. So did individuals deciding to perform criminal acts of theft or arson in the belief that the rewards outweighed the risks. So did cack-handed policing, and the death of Mark Duggan. No individual act of criminality can be divorced from the context in which it is committed, any more than can an act of civic virtue or individual kindness. But that should not prevent the courts coming down hard, or councils enforcing their tenancy agreements.

Ed Miliband has achieved the pitch-perfect response that events demanded. He was right to point to complex causes, albeit at the cost of an easy headline. His idea for a commission to investigate both the riots, and the conditions that spawned them, has much merit and was again one step ahead of the government. Labour’s approach should be driven by a slogan that many misunderstand: ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime.’ The New Labour formula recognised both individual responsibility, and a wider social context. This wider social context is what Labour attempted, but ultimately failed, to transform. It proves what a catastrophic mistake it was for Gordon Brown to scrap the Respect agenda in 2007 merely because it was the brainchild of his predecessor.

The heartbreaking thing about many of the places which experienced rioting was that so much money and effort had been invested in them. This was no revolt of the ghettos. The rioters were burning down bustling high streets and looting busy shopping centres. The hard question for Labour is that if the riots were not a revolt against the police, nor the cry of the dispossessed (no one with a BlackBerry is dispossessed), nor spurred by interracial violence, then what were they all about? The under-25s rioting grew up with new school buildings, low NHS waiting lists, more university places, and extra police and PCSOs on the streets. Yet still they burned, looted and murdered. For Labour, retreat into the old sociology will be as dangerous as using a bayonet against barbed wire.

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Photo: Alan in Belfast