When the elites loved rioting

Britain’s political and media elites have rightly condemned the riots that have caused such destruction and distress across towns and cities in England and Northern Ireland over the past week. Prime minister Keir Starmer has said that this ‘violent thuggery’ has ‘no place on our streets’. Liberal broadsheets have denounced the disorder as ‘an assault on the rule of law‘. Pundits have fallen over themselves to express their disgust, especially with the riots’ racist dimension.

These are strong words and welcome sentiments. But they’re strong words and welcome sentiments that ring more than a little hollow. After all, many of those now outraged by the sight of violent crowds chucking bricks at cops, attacking public buildings and looting shops have spent much of the past couple of decades justifying and even extolling the virtues of rioting mobs.

Think back to the London riots in August 2011. On Saturday 6 August, a crowd gathered outside Tottenham police station, in protest over the fatal police shooting of Mark Duggan, a young black man. By the evening, what had begun as an angry demonstration against the police had morphed into a dark carnival of destruction. Homes were torched, local businesses looted and the police pelted with bricks and firebombs. Over the next few days, as the police retreated, the rioting spread through inner and outer London and into other towns and cities across England. Crowds of largely young people raided shops, set fire to cars and turned buildings into flaming tributes to nothing very much.

After five days of rioting, the tragic scale of the destruction soon became apparent. Over 200 emergency workers and members of the public were injured, five people lost their lives and dozens were left homeless. One fatality, a 68-year-old man, was attacked while attempting to put out a litter-bin fire in Ealing. The authorities put the financial cost of the riots at £500million.

Many in authority certainly condemned the riots. Then prime minister David Cameron branded it ‘criminality, pure and simple’. Yet, at the same time, there was another rather more disturbing take emerging among Britain’s liberal, leftish elites. They seemed determined to see something else, something almost positive, in the emptied- and burnt-out shops and homes. A message in the rubble. A progressive meaning to wanton destruction.

This became painfully apparent even as the fires were still raging. Labour’s former London mayor, Ken Livingstone, claimed the destruction was a response to ‘the economic stagnation and cuts being imposed by the Tory government’. Arch-Guardianista Polly Toynbee painted the rampant looting as an impoverished echo of the ‘neoliberal amoral creed’ of ‘winner takes all’.

Sympathetic bordering on justification, this response marked a significant shift in the way in which large swathes of the liberal-left elites might once have responded to violent displays of anti-social behaviour. Until then, the type of rioting and looting we saw during those hot few days 13 years ago would have been seen for what it was: a symptom of a community’s moral and social decay; a sign of people’s estrangement from public institutions, authority and even their own neighbourhoods – hence their willingness to trash them.

Some on the left would undoubtedly have tried to understand the causes of the unrest. They may once have tried to read the rioting as the ‘language of the unheard’, as Martin Luther King had it. But that’s not what happened in response to the London riots. Too many among our political and cultural elites did something else. They began to justify the act of rioting. To see it as some sort of virtuous end in itself, an act of righteous political protest, even when there was no political motive whatsoever.

In the months and years that followed, the middle-class left effectively endorsed the London riots. Academics conjured them up as some sort of inchoate rage against austerity. Playwrights gave the destruction a positive gloss on the London stage. Labourite journalist Paul Mason presented them as part of a ‘global revolution’ against a corrupt ‘political elite’. (Mason is currently bashing out long threads on X, about how the current riots justify sweeping censorship of the internet.)

It was all fanciful absurd stuff, a product of political ventriloquism rather than an actual analysis of what happened. But together all these op-eds, studies and books had a profound effect. They helped to legitimise the act of rioting as a political end in itself.

The extent to which our political and cultural elites – on both sides of the Atlantic – have since embraced the act of rioting, justifying and investing it with politically correct meaning, was brought home during the Black Lives Matter riots in America during the summer of 2020. This explosion of street violence after the police killing of George Floyd caused 25 deaths and a billion dollars’ worth of damage. Yet, in America itself, many on the post-class, bourgeois left practically celebrated the devastation. Writing in the Atlantic in June 2020, one academic likened the riots to America’s War of Independence. Elsewhere, a self-styled agitator called Vicky Osterweil gained widespread acclaim for a silly book called In Defense of Looting, in which rioting was presented as a thrilling, virtuous act, freeing people of ‘the general laws that govern society’.

While many of the sensibles among Britain’s political and cultural elites didn’t go as far as Osterweil, they certainly struggled to condemn the lethal street violence that was then ripping through several American cities that summer. Indeed, while the BLM riots were at their peak in the US, Labour leader Keir Starmer and his deputy, Angela Rayner, decided to express their solidarity with BLM by ‘taking the knee’, rather than seeking to distance themselves from the movement associated with the riots. Meanwhile, the UK’s liberal broadsheets were awash with praise for BLM’s actions in America.

By the early 2020s, the act of rioting was widely and frequently being endorsed, or insufficiently condemned, by far too many among the political and media classes. They were effectively licensing street violence. Praising the destruction of property. Chill about the looting of businesses.

This decadent elite posing is certainly not the primary cause of the horrific rioting of the past week. But it has slowly but surely sent an undeniable message – that laying waste to your own neighbourhood, setting fire to your own town centre, shitting on your own doorstep, is sometimes okay.

It’s all very well seeing politicians and pundits now busily condemning the sickening scenes of the past week. But until they reckon with their own role in approving and even celebrating other equally sickening scenes of street violence in recent years, very few will take them seriously.

Tim Black is a spiked columnist.