Politically committed people of very different beliefs can take exactly the same events and discover in them

a precise vindication of their own original worldvi ew. And so it has been this week. A certain kind of rightwinger fits the riots i nto the pattern of moral and social decline that she imagines has afflicted Brit ish society since the 1950s: multiculturalism, soft policing, family breakdown ( ie, sexual tolerance and feminism), liberal teaching, welfare dependency and imm igration are all part of this elaborately imagined world. In the other ideological corner the causes are alienated youth, cuts, police haras sment, unemployment, poverty, tuition fee increases (which, if the poverty expla nation holds, none of the rioters would have to pay), and neoliberal economics, which allows bankers to earn bonuses usually described as obscene. Remarkably, a G uardian reporter on the fringe of a riot even found a bystander to weave reaction to the Iraq war into the reasons for the looting. Not that either position is entirely wrong all the time. But none of us escapes our prejudices easily. Vicars blame materialism. And I, pursuing past battles ag ainst the civil liberties lobby, rail against identity-obscuring head and facewe ar and am inclined to demand more CCTV and a rethink of the scrapping of identit y cards. But imagine that we came to this innocent of all beliefs. Suppose we looked at e vents since Saturday and just asked the basic questions of who, what, where, whe n and why. So first, who? And how many people actually took part in rioting, looting or vio lence since Saturday? Ive been wondering about this since I accidentally stumbled on the original demonstration outside Tottenham police station that was suppose d to have been the birth moment of the Week of Shame. Actually standing in Totte nham High Road, blocking the way, Id estimate no more than 100 people. Standing i n doorways and on pavements, Id say another 100 or so. Bear in mind that Id just c ome from a Spurs pre-season friendly match attended by 25,000. The highest realistic estimate Ive seen for rioters in one place was 200, and pic tures of that event suggest that it was too high. It also seems that one must ma ke a practical distinction (if not a moral one) between rioters and looters peop le who entered shops already broken into to steal goods. There is some evidence of the same people moving from one location to another. With the number of arres ts at about 500, I seriously wonder if many more than a few thousand people were involved in rioting. This is important because it tells us two things. First, we are not dealing with a mass criminal insurrection. And second, that a remarkably small number of peo ple, if they are mobile and use surprise, can cause mayhem out of all proportion to their numbers. I was told this by Tony Blair once, in the context of terrori sm, and its true. Even so, who are these few? Theyre mostly (but not entirely) teenage boys from po orer areas, black from black areas, white from white areas, the same demographic as that for gang violence, street robbery and vandalism. In other words, their actions are a spillover into the nicer world of what is already going on in theirs . (The links between pre-existing criminality and looting are suggested by repor ts of vans and cars turning up as stores are emptied, and by gunfights over loot ed goods.) This is important too, because it simply isnt true that they have, in the past few years, been affected by cuts, lack of attention to their education or lack of investment in their areas. It is pretty likely that they attend (or p lay truant from) newly rebuilt schools, with highly motivated teachers who put s ignificant emphasis on citizenship and social responsibility. They will often re turn to estates that have been improved out of all recognition since the riots o f the 1980s. They are very much less likely than their fathers to have suffered from police harassment and violence. Far from their being forgotten and marginal ised, a lot of time and effort has been spent on them and their peers. What we h avent managed to do is to persuade them into qualifications, or unglamorous start er jobs. Its not for lack of trying. Then the what and the where. The looting has suggested to many that this is a form o f self-Sherwooding, a white-goods redistribution from rich to poor. Especially a s some of the on-street self-justification has been of the were poor, youre rich var

iety. Well, what would you say if you were a slightly guilty looter? Intercepted looters messages, not designed for third-party scrutiny, seem to show few such h eroic inclinations. And theres another clue. While some have clearly gone for upmarket stores, others have been completely undiscriminating about which shops theyve emptied. And whil e a few symbolic targets have been selected for vandalism and arson, most had no symbolic value at all. In other words it is not what they represent but what th e act of destruction represents. This, and that the ostensible cause of the rioting (the shooting of Mark Duggan) had just about no resonance outside one area in North London, tells us a lot ab out the motivation. In short, at the weekend the word spread by 24-hour news, so cial media and messaging a section of society discovered that they could do some thing and that the something they could do was a lot of bad fun. They could go o n the streets, create havoc, make money, be violent, get drunk, behave as if the y were the tyrant kings of an area the mini-Sopranos of Enfield or Croydon, the gangstas of Chalk Farm and there would be no immediate retribution (immediate be ing the only kind of anything that means something to a 16-year old boy). They h ad the thing that in their own lives they lack power. Just as a gang of black-fl ag anarchists has when it stones a police line into retreat or before Heysel foo tball hooligans had when they took the other sides end and sent the opposition into flight. Because, yes, we have been here before, with a relatively small number of young men, high on violence and low on personal skills, finding a way to drive the res t of us mad. This analysis is both gloomy and hopeful. It suggests that, short o f a world war to send them to, difficult and violent young men will always be wi th us. The numbers matter, of course, and we can and should whittle away at them with firmness. But we wont eradicate them altogether, and if improvement is alwa ys slow and adapting difficult, we can of course make things worse quickly, by r eacting with impatience, prejudice and stupidity.