Almost four months after rioters transformed Broken Britain from metaphor to reality the hand-wringing, soul-searching and blame-dishing is still going on.
Last week's interim government report on the riots was followed this week by the publication of a data-driven study by the Guardian and the London School of Economics. Pronouncements have been made by members of the Royal Family and opinion pieces penned by archbishops. Shelves in bookshops have been cleared to make way for hurriedly written books by sociologists, behavioural psychologists and politicians. A play was commissioned, written, rehearsed and is now being performed daily - and twice on Saturdays - at the Tricycle theatre. Blame has been scatter-gunned by those on the left and the right at numerous targets including policing, government cuts, poverty, greed, inequality, boredom, race relations, gang culture, moral decline and sheer criminality. But has any of this really helped us to a deeper understanding of why the riots took place?
Whilst the importance of comprehending the causes of the riots is vital if we are to take the steps necessary to prevent them from happening again, I'm not entirely convinced that the acres of newsprint, reams of reports and hours of debate have left us that much the wiser. On a personal level, the thing that gave me the clearest understanding of how and why the riots occurred was not a piece of analysis but an experience I had this summer at a music festival in the heart of the British countryside.
I was in a sunny field standing with friends outside the Somerset Cider Bus. My eye was drawn by a ten-year old boy who was clearly eyeing-up a full pint on a nearby table. After glancing around, he picked-up the drink but instead of indulging in a bout of underage binge drinking the little tyke emptied it onto the grass beneath the table. Strange behaviour you may think but this festival, like many others, offered a small refund on plastic glasses. At 10p the refund do not provide incentive enough for most adults to return their glasses hence the festival was filled with battalions of children weaving through the crowds, their wobbly stacks of plastics protruding like shark fins.
Whilst the activities of these mini-entrepreneurs - eschewing face-painting in a field or story-telling in a yurt in favour of earning hard cash - may be dismissed as a harmless if depressing sign of the times, the actions of the boy at the cider bus offer something more. There was nothing inherently bad about the boy. He had not grown up in a moral vacuum and was perfectly aware that what he was doing was wrong. He almost certainly did not begin the day tipping out full pints of cider but instead probably started collecting empty glasses with rosy-cheeked enthusiasm. But as the day went on he became more avaricious and his boundaries began to shift. It is this shift in moral boundaries and the circumstances under which it happens that hold the key to understanding where societies go wrong.
By pouring away someone else's £4 pint in order to get 10p in his pocket the boy showed similar instincts to the bankers who maximised their profits, heedless of the damage being caused to the global financial system. He showed similar instincts to our politicians who flipped their housing allowances and stretched their expenses claims. He showed similar instincts to journalists hacking phones and corporations exploiting our planet's natural resources regardless of environmental and human costs. He showed similar instincts to governments who prop-up brutal dictators or wage wars of aggression for the sake of power and profit and to the rioters who looted and torched the high streets of our cities.
This is not to say this boy had somehow "taken his lead" from those around him or that the corruption at the top our society mysteriously trickles down. Instead it illustrates how the baser elements of human nature will emerge and flourish in certain conditions. The conditions in this case are an unregulated free-market within a materialistic, consumer-driven culture. For bankers risky sales were incentivised with enormous bonuses, and bad debt was insured against with credit default swaps. Originally blamed on a few "bad apples", phone-hacking has been exposed as part of wider and more deep-seated culture of graft coupled to sense of complete impunity. The rioters, like the bankers and the phone hackers thought they could get away with it. Or perhaps at the time they did not think about the consequences of their actions at all.
In the weeks following the riots, thousands of rioters were indentified and arrested. Those charged received severe sentences intended as both punishment and deterrent. In contrast, noone has been prosecuted for the criminality which precipated the 2008 financial meltdown. If I could step back in time I wish I had confronted that boy outside the cider bus. I wish I had told him that the pint he had just tipped away was mine. I would have liked to have seen his embarrassment at being caught and his discomfort at having to hand over four of his hard-earned pound coins. Perhaps he might have learned a valuable lesson instead of skipping off across the field looking for someone else's pint of scrumpy to pour into the grass.