Riot culture: let’s stop pretending there are any easy answers

I had a call from a researcher on the Jeremy Vine show this week to ask me to go on and talk about the riots. Would I be prepared to say that shopkeepers should not be closing their shutters early and that we should all be reclaiming the streets. I had a vision of being set up against a poor shopkeeper afraid of having his livelihood destroyed. So I used those words every radio and TV researcher dreads to hear: “I think it’s a bit more complicated than that.” I could almost smell his disappointment over the line. I explained that I wasn’t just a political journalist, I also ran a charity which had been running a pop-up shop in north London. Just that afternoon we had decided to shut early because we felt it was important to protect the staff and let them get home before the evening. At the same time, I said I thought it was important for people to show solidarity and that some sort of reclaim the streets march, as suggested by Sarfraz Manzoor, was something I felt I could sign up to.