I’VE covered so many riots, I’ve lost count. Back when I was a green cub reporter, I nearly got murdered when I made the mistake of venturing into the no-man’s land between police and rioters at night in Belfast.
That’s one lesson riots taught me: don’t get caught in the middle. But there be have been many other lessons, of much graver import. First, a riot is like a living thing, an organism. Rioters advance and retreat as one. It’s a terrifying, mysterious phenomenon, as if those involved have surrendered individuality, become immersed in some group consciousness. The madness of crowds, perhaps.
Secondly, a riot is like an x-ray, an acid bath: it anatomises and reveals the dysfunctions of the society in which it takes place. Riots are never truly without meaning, even though the violence may seem meaningless and mindless. The most lumpen of riots - the football riot - can say something about a society’s flaws, even if it’s just a reflection of the darkness, and the desperate empty need for group identity, which lives inside far too many men.
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Riots don’t happen in a vacuum. Somewhere there’s a root, a rhyme and a reason. The trouble is, we often don’t want to go digging for those roots, or listen to that rhyme, or acknowledge the reason, as it’ll all say something rather awful about ourselves and the society we’ve collectively created.
Most riots have at their heart a few causes. Poverty and discrimination of one form or another - usually race and religion - tend to be high on the checklist. But so is a sense of abandonment, of youth who feel they’ve got nothing to lose. If you’ve ever wondered why rioters burn down their own neighbourhoods, that’s why: if you’ve nothing in your life, it doesn’t really matter if you torch the local shops. Nothing will come from nothing, as the saying goes.
Now, the disturbances in Scotland on Bonfire Night didn’t amount to rioting on a grand scale. No lives were lost, there wasn’t mass carnage. But self-evidently, for the folk who live in the neighbourhoods affected, and for the police who had to contain the violence and be subjected to violence, it was bad.
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Petrol bombs were thrown at police in Edinburgh. That should concern us all, deeply. The petrol bomb symbolises a society gone very badly wrong indeed. Fire crews were attacked across Scotland. When kids turn on their own emergency services, once again that’s a red flag waving frantically. Police were pelted with fireworks, and officers injured. There was disorder in Glasgow and Dundee, but it was Niddrie in Edinburgh which was most troubling. Adults there were seen directing attacks on police.
Scotland stood out across Britain for the level of disorder on Bonfire Night. There were also disturbances in Manchester, but nobody was lobbing Molotov cocktails at cops.
This isn’t a one-off. Last year in Scotland at Bonfire Night police and firefighters were attacked with petrol bombs. Two officers in Edinburgh were hospitalised with head injuries after a brick was thrown at their car. A motorbike gang raced around Edinburgh terrorising people. Kids rampaged in Dundee, where disorder meant drivers had to turn back from fires blockading the road.
Now some folk - bloody idiots, frankly - dismiss this all as fun and games getting out of hand on Fireworks Night. It’s not. There is plenty of appalling violence on every other day of the year. For pity’s sake, we’ve even had videos posted on social media of gangs attacking people with machetes in Scotland in broad daylight.
Anyone who’s surprised by this needs to get out on the streets of our most forgotten neighbourhoods. There’s nothing for kids. Public services have rotted away. Jobs are precarious and low-paid. If middle-class kids are ruined by university debt and crippled by rent, put yourself in the shoes of children from low-income homes. Deprivation breeds unrest. When hope dies, anger follows. Childhoods were ruined by Covid, along with the mental health of kids, and we barely talk about it.
Now, this isn’t a bleeding-heart liberal plea to hug-a-hoodie. Not at all. If some thug sends a cop to hospital, well, they should go to jail. But equally, our politicians have a duty to address the social dysfunction which causes such violence. This has happened on their watch. An inquiry into rising youth violence would be a start. So would acknowledging the effects of austerity. While the Conservative Government bears most responsibility, in Scotland the SNP must also carry some blame.
Public services and policing are the Scottish Government’s responsibility. Officer numbers are already down from 17,234 to 16,600. Budgetary constraints mean numbers will only get worse. Officers aren’t sticking plasters, nor Aunt Sallys there to stand in the street and be assaulted.
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Anyone who knows a cop is aware of the pressures on the rank-and-file officer. Sure, there are bad cops, plenty of them, but most are decent and in the job for the right reason. Their average day is a combination of mental health nurse and drug support worker: they pick up the carnage society leaves behind, the broken and the addicted. They’ve barely time to investigate crime. And then they have to put themselves in harm's way as well. Evidently, the parents of rioting kids should examine their souls if they haven’t strained every sinew to keep their child on the right side of the law. Everyone should empathise with poverty and the loss of hope; nobody should sympathise with bad parenting. Raising a child is a duty that needs taken seriously.
Of course, the greatest responsibility lies with the rioters. They should look into their own hearts, confront their own behaviour, but that won’t happen, will it? When someone grows up utterly detached - not just from society, but from themselves, from what it means to be a decent citizen - "change" isn’t easy, and it requires an input from society, in care and money, that we’re clearly not prepared to give.
So that means we bear responsibility too. Sure, we can blame parents and politicians, and kids, and even cops, but this society is our society. We all need to take a long hard look at what we’re doing.
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