London

Wednesday

David Blackburn

London slept as violence spread across England

The presence of 16,000 police officers in London deterred looting, but violence spread in provincial towns across England, with tragic consequences. Riots in Birmingham left three men dead after a car ran them over; police are treating the incident as a murder. There was also disorder in Salford, Manchester, Gloucester, West Bromwich and Nottingham. Each separate incident was characterised by the same pattern of events: looting, muggings, arson and confrontation with the police. Once again, the Molotov Cocktail was a favoured weapon, and one assumes that the deprived rioters stole the expensive fuel required to make them. Considerable criminal damage has been suffered by councils and local businesses, and the

Tuesday

Maurice Mcleod

When the underbelly roars

When the first riots hit Brixton, I was 12 years old. My mates and I came from south London council estates and, while we were no angels, we certainly couldn’t be described as bad kids. I can’t pretend that I had any real grasp on why people were rioting but I knew it was against the same police who would stop and bug us constantly — even though none of us had either the balls or inclination to commit crime. It may sound like a tired cliche but the police didn’t feel like our protectors. They felt like more like an occupying force. And why? There were countless incidents to

Emma Soames

Joining the clean-up operation

It was 8am this morning when I first saw Sophie and Ella’s clean-up call trending on Twitter. I duly trotted down to Clapham Junction to find the whole area wreathed in smoke and in lockdown. With only four of us there so far, and the police busily trying to restore order, there wasn’t anything we could do at that moment. And so I ventured down there again later in the morning, joining a procession of locals carrying brooms and bags in wheelbarrows. Dress code: hoodless tops, Marigolds and brooms. I spent a cathartic hour with two other girls cleaning up the streets behind Debenhams. We bagged scores of coat hangers

Peter Hoskin

Cameron announces that Parliament will be recalled

So far as its tone went, David Cameron’s statement just now was firm and unyielding. He did express his sympathy for the victims of the riots; the emergency services, the shopkeepers, the fearful. But the major emphasis was on bringing the culprits to book. His “clear message” for the perpetrators of this destruction was that “you will feel the full force of the law”. He preceded that by describing their actions as “criminality, pure and simple — and it has to be confronted and defeated”. There were no excuses nor prevarications, and rightly so. As for the content, it seems that the government is eager to keep this a police

Andrew Petrie

Last night in Peckham

This was what Peckham High Street looked like at about 6.45 last night. I had heard that a bus was petrol-bombed although I neither saw nor heard evidence of that. There was no confrontation between police and the public and I didn’t see any arrests. Mostly it was just a case of people standing around wondering what, if anything, to do next.

Peter Hoskin

The Met is struggling to cope — it needs support

It’s a gloomy sort of morning ritual, posting on the riots of the previous night. I’m sure CoffeeHousers have seen and heard the specifics already: further burning and looting in parts of London such as Ealing, Croydon and Hackney, as well as bursts of violence in Birmingham, Liverpool and elsewhere. Businesses and livelihoods have been obliterated, areas set back years. Among the few mercies is that no-one, so far as we know, has yet been killed as a result. One thing that’s becoming clearer through the smoke is that the Met Police are overrun, unable to properly deal with criminality at hand. The arrest figures tell a story by themselves.

Monday

Peter Hoskin

Cameron to return to London as the riots spread

There we have it: David Cameron is to return to London tonight, and chair a meeting of Cobra in the morning. There was an inevitability to the decision even earlier today, with the news that both Theresa May and Boris Johnson had curtailed their own holidays. But the fact that the riots have spread — starting in Hackney this evening, and erupting even in Birmingham — served to underline the point. It is the right decision, in any case. Cameron’s ability to control the situation may be limited, but his continued absence might only have inflamed things further. There are a lot of people scrabbling around for a grievance to

David Blackburn

Syria and Libya overshadowed by London riots as Boris comes home

President Assad’s tanks are still doing murder on the streets of Syrian, but the dictator’s isolation grows. After weeks of prevarication, several Gulf States have closed ranks against the Syrian regime. Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Jordan and Kuwait have all recalled their ambassadors from Damascus, and King Abdullah of Riyadh has led the Arab League’s condemnation of Assad’s ‘death machine’. Better late than never, the international consensus says. Compassion for the oppressed is not a familiar trait among Arabian princelings, but their reticence on this occasion was particularly surprising given that Assad’s Syria is no friend of the Arab League, preferring to side with Iran in most things. Still, today’s diplomatic gestures will add to the

Peter Hoskin

The politics of our discontent

Even by the normal standards of Monday mornings, this one reeks. Just sniff around you. That burning smell, it’s either coming from the global stock markets as they strain against the US downgrade, or from those places in London where the rioting spread last night. Although the destruction in Brixton, Enfield, Walthamstow and Waltham Forest didn’t match up to that on Saturday in Tottenham, it still involved fires, missiles and clashes between rioters and the police. Reading the reports and watching the footage online, looting appears to have been one of the most popular sports of the evening. In terms of the short-term politics — as opposed to the slightly

Sunday

Fraser Nelson

Twitter had the riot covered

The revolution may not be televised, but the riot was tweeted pretty well last night. I was up at 3am (don’t ask), and BBC News hadn’t even interrupted their normal programming. But turning to Twitter, it was all there. Specifically, via two reporters: Paul Lewis from the Guardian and Ravi Somaiya from the New York Times. They behaved like instinctive reporters: picked up (on the news or, more likely, on Twitter) that a riot was underway, then went out and reported it. And they did so with pictures and observations that were well-judged and informative, never hysterical or futile. The presence of a TV camera, with the bright lights, have

Peter Hoskin

Tottenham smoulders

London has become used to protest recently, but there was still something terrible and unexpected in the images emerging from Tottenham last night. Here we had firebombs, missiles, riot police, burning vehicles, smashed-in shops, looting and other criminality — and it has left eight policemen injured, as well as others in hospital. The cause of the rioting was, apparently, the fatal shooting of Mark Duggan by police on Thursday. The effect was scenes reminiscent of Brixton or Broadwater Farm in the 1980s. There will be fresh attention paid to Tottenham — one of the poorest areas of one of London’s poorest boroughs — by politicians now, and rightly so. But

Saturday

James Walton

Don’t blur the lines

Did you know that on the Central Line’s maiden journey to Shepherd’s Bush, one of the passengers was Mark Twain? Or that The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Sign of Four were both commissioned by the same publisher at the same London dinner? Or that Harrods dropped the apostrophe from its name in 1921, a full 19 years before Selfridges followed suit? My guess is that you probably didn’t — which is where Walk the Lines comes in. Did you know that on the Central Line’s maiden journey to Shepherd’s Bush, one of the passengers was Mark Twain? Or that The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Sign of

Wednesday

Peter Hoskin

Boris to the fore

Politics has a big, blond hair-do today, with Boris wiff-waffing all across the airwaves. The Mayor of London has already, this morning, called on George Osborne to do more to cut taxes, specifically the 50p rate and national insurance. And he will be leading a series of events, throughout the day, to mark the fact that the Olympic Games are exactly one year away. The Aquatic Centre will be baptised, the medal designs revealed, and general celebration staged across the city. It’s difficult not to see all this as part of Boris’s re-election bid, and perhaps as a marker for his wider ambitions. Although London’s Olympics have not been an

Saturday

Ian Thomson

Talking about regeneration

Iain Sinclair, the London novelist and poet, is always on the move. From the industrial sumplands of Woolwich to the jagged riversides of Gravesend, he rakes unfrequented zones for literary signs and symbols, locations of forgotten films and other arcana. His previous book, Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire, revealed that Joseph Conrad had been a patient in the German Hospital in Dalston. Whenever I drive past that hospital (now converted into private flats), it resonates with the presence of the Congo-sick Polish author. Typically, Sinclair explores London on foot, gathering all kinds of off-piste detail as he does so. The swimming pool in Jerzy Skolimowksi’s raw coming-of-age film Deep End, for

Wednesday

David Blackburn

Gearing up for another European drama

Away from the amateur dramatics in parliament this afternoon, the government is fighting yet another battle with the European Commission over banking reform. European leaders will vote later today on proposals to introduce the rubric of Basel III across European financial institutions. Led by EU Finance Commissioner Michel Barnier and ECB Vice-President Jean-Claude Trichet, these proposals would insist that minimal and maximum capital requirements are imposed on banks. The terms dictate that banks hold 7 per cent of their top-class assets in reserve. Britain opposes the scheme, not because the requirements are too steep: the UK’s Banking Commission has suggested that banks hold 10 per cent of their assets in reserve.

Sunday

James Forsyth

Now Sir Paul Stephenson resigns

This story just keeps speeding up. Paul Stephenson, the commissioner of the Met, has now resigned because of his links to Neil Wallis. Wallis is the former News of the World journalist arrested recently as part of the investigation into phone-hacking; he was hired by the Met to offer media advice from autumn 2009 to 2010. The New York Times today claims that Wallis was reporting back to News International during this time. Boris Johnson and the Home Secretary will now have to agree on a replacement for Stephenson. Given what we have learnt about the Met in recent days, I suspect it will be an outsider. Bernard Hogan-Howe, the former chief

Saturday

David Blackburn

Inadequate stress test inspires anti-EU sentiment across Europe

Yesterday’s European Banking Authority (EBA) stress test was supposed to restore confidence in the euro and Europe’s beleaguered financial institutions; it has had the opposite effect. Investors and market analysts are preparing for ‘Black Monday’ after only 8 banks failed the test and must now raise £2.2 billion between them to stave off ruin. A respected estimate by Goldman Sachs expected at least 15 banks to fail, requiring £29 billion to recapitalise. As the Spectator’s business blog reported yesterday, analysts feared that the EBA’s test would not be sufficiently stringent, and so it came to pass. The findings have served only to undermine confidence in institutions across the continent, many of

Friday

James Forsyth

Ofcom to rule on Murdoch’s purchase of BSkyB

If News Corporation was not trying to buy the whole of BSkyB, there’s a good chance that phone hacking would not still be in the news today: that decision was one of the things that led to a revival of interest in the story. As has been said many times during the past few days, securing full ownership of BSkyB is regarded as crucial by the Murdochs and that is one of the reasons they were prepared to take the dramatic step of shutting down The News of the World. But the letter from Ofcom about the takeover and the possibility of Labour forcing a vote in the House of

Monday