“London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down’’ — T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

“All quite astonishing or perhaps entirely predictable’’: this is how a social scientist friend of mine who lives in London described the exhibition of violence that rocked London and other cities in England. The comment has embedded within it a paradox. If predictable, how are the events astonishing? But that is the nature of the violence that England has just witnessed. Its cause, its scale and its progress are difficult to pin down. The elusiveness of any firm analysis and explanation reflects the paradox.

The beginning offered no clues of the trajectory the violence would take. The saga began with the ‘arrest’ of a young man called Mark Duggan. He was shot dead sitting in a minicab; a policeman was wounded, but as has subsequently been confirmed, by a bullet fired from a police hand gun, not by the theoretical culprit. Nobody quite knows for what notional offence Duggan was stopped and arrested in the first place. The Independent Police Complaints Commission has admitted that the entire incident was woefully mishandled by the police. Duggan thus became the ‘victim’.

The rest, as they say, is history. A protest against police mishandling transformed itself into a carnival of looting and arson. Parts of London burnt, reminding old timers of the city during the Blitz. Shopping centres and shops set ablaze became the pictures of the times as the entire world watched aghast. It seemed initially that the match of Duggan’s killing had fallen upon a tinderbox of pent up emotions.

The initial conclusions and attempts to see the violence in racial terms had to be quickly withdrawn as events unfolded and the violence spread. As the nights followed, it was increasingly obvious to anyone with eyes and ears that unrelated gangs of young men and women and even children, irrespective of colour of skin, looted and baited the police. It is also clear now that these gangs were coordinating their actions with various devices of mobile communication that are ubiquitous in the hands of the young. The vandalism was way beyond the bounds of implicit, let alone explicit, reason. The land of moderation and liberal ideas has suddenly become the stamping ground of barbarism. It has been famously remarked by a historian that the British Empire was acquired in a fit of absentmindedness. Echoing that, it could be said that England burnt in a fit of mindlessness.

Conventional wisdom tends to see this kind of violence as a function of deprivation. It seemed convenient to see the vandalism, especially since it was directed at stores selling relatively expensive consumer goods, as being linked to the cutbacks in public spending and subsidies that have been introduced by the Tory prime minister, David Cameron. The problem with this argument, alluring though it is in its simplicity, is that the pains related to the cuts are yet to bite. Also, reports and pictures seem to suggest that sections of the youth population unlikely to be adversely affected by cuts had enthusiastically participated in the looting and arson. One report, in this paper, said that a millionaire’s daughter had been accused of theft, and in her car had been found the tool kit of a looter — balaclava, gloves and a bandanna.

Another problem with the cuts argument is that there is no necessary correlation between deprivation and violence. If such a correlation had existed, violence would be far more endemic especially in countries where the signs of deprivation are far more prominent than in England.

A variation of the same argument is the attempt to relate the violence to growing unemployment in England. Here again, the figures run somewhat against the generalization. Unemployment is around 20 per cent in Great Britain which is considerably lower than the rates prevailing, say, in Spain where it is as high as 40 per cent. So unemployment by itself does not quite explain the phenomenon.

Looting, arson and widespread destruction have always been features of insurgencies, in both rural and urban areas. One has only to think of what the sepoys and the rebels did in the summer of 1857 in north India. In England, the historian, E.P. Thompson, showed how in the 18th century when the price of bread went higher than a limit accepted by custom — Thompson called it the moral economy — the crowd looted markets and took direct action against hoarders. In revolutionary France, as Richard Cobb demonstrated, dearth led to popular insurrection.

These historical precedents do not offer any parallels or clues to comprehend or analyse what parts of England witnessed this last week. The looting was not to acquire essential goods like bread or milk. It was directed at consumer goods like electronic gadgets, clothes, shoes and so on. Young men and women using costly mobile devices and wearing hooded jerkins or anoraks do not suggest that these were persons who were down and out in London, Birmingham or elsewhere. Some reports said that while they looted, a few young looters sent out messages calling on their peers to join the fun. Does one detect in this a touch of ennui? Was the violence grounded in that?

Such questions point towards the broader social, political and cultural ambience that had a formative influence on a section of the young population. The cuts may not have hit yet but they have conveyed the impression that this is a heartless government, indifferent even to the needs of education and health, and have created an atmosphere of hopelessness. Over the years, there has been a crumbling of social values and a general laxity of discipline. The young have no adult role models — the mind boggles to think of Blair, Brown or Cameron in such a role. The models that the young choose to emulate are hardly positive — rappers, footballers and others whose behaviour has spawned a cult of irresponsibility, hedonism and violence. What the “lost” generation suffers from is the absence of aspiration engendered by a climate of despair. Disenchantment breeds ennui and indiscipline. The result is an eviscerated society.

This dismal picture stands in stark contrast to the obscenely high salaries in banking and corporate sectors. Such salaries have no reciprocal social responsibility. It was none other than John Maynard Keynes who wrote nearly nine decades ago, “To suggest social action for the public good to the city of London is like discussing The Origin of Species with a bishop sixty years ago.” The comment has lost none of its relevance today. Add to this, the revelations about a major media house that had used its vast influence to intrude on people’s privacy, and in the process, spread corruption in the higher echelons of the police, members of which had suppressed evidence and delayed investigations. It has also been revealed that important members of the political class, cutting across political parties, had been cosy with owners and editors of the concerned media house. There is the growing suspicion that leading politicians may not have been as innocent as they are pretending to be. All this suggests a moral vacuum, which the youth are forced to inhabit.

It would be impossible in terms of evidence and causal links — the historians’ tools of trade — to establish a direct connection between the violence, on the one hand, and the moral vacuum and the eviscerated society sketched above, on the other. But it would be remarkably naïve to think that the two dimensions — the moral and aspirational vacuity, and the violence — are unrelated.

The young of England have no ideals to live for. Thus the mind has gone out from the crowd. Capitalism in the era of globalization has created unprecedented wealth, but its excesses have destroyed the basis of liberalism in England by making money the measure of man. It was John Stuart Mill who made the comment, “The idea is essentially repulsive of a society held together only by the relations and feelings arising out of pecuniary interest.” The essential decency of the English way of life, which George Orwell remarked on, is now being attacked by the stalking figure of the hooded youth who seeks violence for fun and for easy access to consumer goods.