15th August 2011

I once stopped a riot.

Me against twenty or twenty five angry young men.

They were residents of a hostel that I set up and ran with volunteer staff, one volunteer was an American who said that America was meant to be a violent society but he had never witnessed violence like he had during his six month placement with us.

One of the lads had a girl friend whose father, a publican in a local pub, didn't approve of him. He decided that this was disrespect and so he came back to arm himself with a knife and recruit some back up and go back to teach the father a lesson.

The hostel was not the most popular house in the street and relationships with the local community were tense at the best of times.

I heard the noise in the hallway and came out of the staff room to see the gang assembling, fired up and ready for a good dust up.

Most of the lads had spent time in young offenders institutes and were wise to the consequences of their actions but actually didn't care because they were able to deal with the regular meals and exercise which made a change from their usual hand to mouth existence being turned out of shopping malls because they were young.

When I approached the main actor in this drama he made it clear that he couldn't stand by and allow people to disrespect him he had to respond, which was when he produced a fearsome looking knife.

Somehow I persuaded him to hand over the knife. Making sure that he didn't lose face in front of his mates. I then talked him out of over reacting to the disrespect and at least to sleep on his hurt feelings and see how things looked in the morning.

This incident occurred in a Northern Town nearly forty years ago but unemployment amongst young people was rife, the concept of neets hadn't been invented and young people were frequently made homeless because they didn't have any income and couldn't pay and their families couldn't subsidise or support them.

In keeping with the time the mission statement for the hostel was a line from a Bob Dylan song The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest:

"What kind of a house is this", (said Frankie Lee)
"Where I have come to roam ?"
"It's not a house", said Judas Priest
"It's not a house, it's a home".

Eventually the costs of running the house with volunteers and charitable funding became too much for the voluntary committee and the project was taken over by the Probation Service, it did not take too long for the residents to burn it down.

Recent events reminded me of this experience.

Amazing how we have gone from 'hugging hoodies' to 'making life hell for gangs'.

The Labour Party is beginning to formulate a National Conversation in order to develop a reasoned narrative to provide a context for the social unrest that shocked the Coalition Government who still deny any linkage between their policies and the events of last week.

Moral collapse and criminality is not sufficient of an explanation because it is not true.

Like my experience forty years ago it was never clear what lay at the roots of the eruption of the anger: Disrespect, Check. Dissatisfaction with their living circumstances, Check.

More recently envy at the lifestyle boasted in the FT's How to Spend it supplement, has been represented by the commentariat as a possible cause. 

But the coalition has to accept that their policies are exacerbating social division, that across the country people are struggling to put fuel in their cars, clothes on their backs, food on their tables.

Mr Clegg warned that these things would happen if the Tories won outright.

They didn't, and yet they are happening anyway.