Ok, I'll admit when I first read a headline not so long ago that Riots may be controlled with chemicals, I got the wrong end of the stick. Or should I say baton? I thought that given their humiliation on the streets of London, Manchester, Birmingham and Liverpool last summer, the police had decided in future to spray rioters into a drug-induced stupor. In fact the article referred to a riots-fuelled frenzy of research and spending as they go on a shopping spree for new weaponry with which to project CS gas, pepper spray and something called 'skunk oil' at the nation's unruly youth.
What they and their colleagues in the political class have singularly failed to do, however, is to project their authority. Hence the stockpiling of ammunition in a vain attempt to shore it up. Ken Clarke admitted in the wake of the riots that 'the system was briefly caught unawares'. As were we all. The riots were, he said, 'part of an outburst of outrageous behaviour by the criminal classes'. Clarke argued that reforming the criminal justice system would not be enough. The 'social deficit' needed to be addressed by changes in 'education, welfare and family policy too' - by implication the latter bringing into question not only the authority of state institutions but of teachers, communities and families. While I don't agree with his solutions the justice secretary at least understands the gravity of the problem. Which is why, a year on, we need to revisit the riots.
And we can't start by questioning the stale old assumptions used to explain them away at the time. Doing some projecting of their own were the left-liberal commentariat supported by no end of hastily hashed together reports finding - surprise, surprise - what they were hoping to find all along. Eagerly taking the reins of their favourite hobby horse, the first to echo the excuses of the rioters were the authors of a Guardian-LSE study.
In their initial conclusions they acknowledged that many looters admitted to being opportunists. But hostility toward the police and 'a range of political grievances' vaguely to do with economic disadvantage were also to blame, they concluded. As did the other reports. But what's new? Why did the riots happen when they did, why did they spread so quickly only to die down again? Why the need to write so many reports to discern the 'political grievances' of what looked so randomly destructive to the rest of us?
No more insightful was Brian Paddick, former deputy assistant in the Metropolitan Police and recurrently hopeless London Mayoral candidate, who claimed that the failure to hold an inquest into the death of Mark Duggan - whose shooting is said to have 'triggered' the riots - will somehow lead to 'another riot'. Similarly one of the police officers interviewed as part of the Guardian-LSE study was in little doubt that all it will take is 'bad economic times, hot weather, some sort of an event that sets it off'. What ... like the Olympics?!
I am no fan of the revolting rioters who trashed their communities only to be indulged as poor victims by ventriloquist apologists. But surely even their actions are not so easily determined by the official response to an incident that, in the end, had as much to do with the riots as the assasination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand had to do with the outbreak of the First World War. Never mind the bloody weather!
Everybody concerned needs to grow a backbone. From the police and the politicians, to the young people, families and communities that they, not to mention the academics and commentators more interested in confirming their own prejudices, are so busy patronising. In fact we should all be getting to grips with what were extraordinary, disturbing and quite unprecedented events but may well come back to haunt us if we don't.