Power-Looting After the Riots: Be Prepared (draft 1)

We all know that the violence of these riots we have seen are inexcusable. Let's make that clear. The left perspective is not "this is okay" and it is ridiculously simplistic to say "This is not okay, but it's understandable: they're poor". But rioters' violence does not exist in a vacuum without build-up and - most importantly - without effect on legislation.

I hear them called "youths" and "rioters" and "animals" - any word that is not "people". The rioters are not a different species. We seem to want to distance our own race from these "rioting youths", but it is not just possible. We need to remember that they are humans, and then ask what made these thinking people into cruel, selfish, violent, destructive ones.

It's anger, it's opportunity, it's more than just "taking stuff", but that will come out in time. I have ideas, speculations, things of which I'm certain, but explaining why we do what we do is a wing of academia that could fill Croydon...or Hackney or Ealing, and simplifying isn't useful. In a way, it's too late to discuss why; what's done is done, as was said by a young man who used social networking media to arrange some community clean-ups. Maybe he's onto something. Right now, while we watch the riots continue, we need to prepare ourselves for our own fight - one to maintain what freedom we have.

So looking to the future: what happens now? "Precautions", more invasive police powers – “robust” is the Government's favourite word this time – and a link which is forging in so many minds between peaceful protest and riots. One fool (a politician at that) stated on the BBC news around midday today that the riots demonstrate that water-canons should've been used, but furthermore - that they should have been used in the November student protests! The gathering of forty-five thousand people, mostly students brought by University Unions, last year ended in a damaged window, a small fire and a heavy fire extinguisher chucked into a crowd from a roof. It was, of course, these images that made it into the papers, and it is the idea of chaos that sticks.

The Government line is that the riots had nothing to do with the protest of around 120 people in Tottenham following the shooting of Mark Duggan by police (the details of which were withheld from even the family). This is probably the Government line because it prevents a link being made between a police act and the riots. And yet the Government seem happy to relate riot-response by police to protest-response. It's a clever use of outright statement ("this has nothing to do with the Mark Duggan shooting protest") and tying together unconscious connections between"dealing with riot" and "dealing with protest". No one should be allowed to have and eat their cake. Especially not cats who are already excessively fat. Now the job's done: the link has been drawn between protest and riot, which attempts to justify brutal – sorry, “robust” – police response as the solution to both.

We saw this same story-line with the 7/7 terrorist attacks, when horrific but isolated acts were used to justify expanded police powers. These powers were then abused; implemented completely out of context – to search the bags of children during political party conferences, to quash peaceful direct action, even in the countryside, and to keep people imprisoned without charge. The police will take whatever powers we let them. They are learning from patterns of the past – we, the folk of Britain, need to learn too.