Where riots once led

The Metropolitan riot police.

I’ve just returned from South East Asia to news of these terrible riots across England. They’re unlike anything I can remember in this country in my lifetime. So many people we know have been affected. A friend of my daughter’s, for instance, woke up to find that thugs had burned her car. And shops that we all frequent in Ealing in West London have been looted.

But looking at the press coverage and the comments of politicians also makes me think of the relevance of these English riots to one of the most crucial questions of the last century. Which is this: how was it possible that millions of law-abiding Germans turned to the Nazis – who openly preached the importance of using violence against their opponents – in 1932? At first sight it seems almost impossible to understand how ordinary citizens who wanted to lead a peaceful, quiet life could willingly vote for a political party that so valued thuggery.

The answer to this question is worth thinking about in the context of London and the rest of England’s burning cities today. For the fundamental reason that millions of people who hated violence felt compelled to vote for people who used violence is simple. They were terrified of their country falling apart. They saw Communist youths fighting openly on the streets with Nazi youths. Unemployment was growing every day – many people who lived through this time told me of how they felt they could not walk through city parks in broad daylight without fear of attack from homeless people living rough.

‘You can only fight violence with violence’ one person who voted for the Nazis told me. And paradoxically the Nazis – via violence – promised to put an end to violence. A vote for them was a vote for the harshest measures imaginable to be used against Communists, against the homeless, against anti-socials, against anyone who potentially could upset an orderly society. And the Nazis were true to their word. They used extreme violence against their opponents as soon as they came to power. The problem was that once you voted these particular thugs into power, they were never going to leave without further violence being used against them on a catastrophic scale.

But don’t get me wrong. I’m not – as they say – a ‘bleeding heart liberal’, who believes that today we should not use all necessary measures to stop the horrors of this rioting. I want to see these criminals found and punished. All I am saying is that history teaches us that our society – our very lives – are all much more fragile than we ever want to believe. And the idea that you ultimately solve the problem of violence on the streets by using ever greater violence against the perpetrators does not have a great historical success rate. Lock up these rioters, of course, but then – to adapt the famous motto of the London School of Economics –  strive ‘to find the causes of these things’.