The riot on Tuesday evening in Southport was so barbarous it may have done some good. Yesterday morning the people of the town showed what they thought of such thuggery by coming out to clear up the mess.
And the whole country was presented with a lesson. If the police had not arrived quickly and in considerable numbers on the scene, and restored authority, much worse destruction would have occurred.
The rioters showed their lawlessness not only by ransacking a shop and seeking to destroy a mosque, but by hurling missiles at the police, many of whom were injured.
Here was the clearest possible demonstration that this band of hooligans wished to smash, not uphold, authority.
We may not often use the word “authority”, but we all depend on it. Without it our homes, persons and freedoms are in mortal danger.
Anarchy is terrifying. In August 2011 riots broke out in London, and spread to Birmingham, Manchester, Nottingham, Wolverhampton, Liverpool, Bristol and other places.
In London, one of the kindest men I know was so frightened, and therefore so anxious to see order re-established, he said anyone on the streets should be shot.
“But what if they have only gone out to buy a pint of milk?” I objected.
“It does not matter,” he said. “They should not be on the streets.”
Order was restored by the deployment of very large numbers of police officers. A few weeks later Ken Clarke, the then Lord Chancellor and Justice Secretary, wrote a piece for The Guardian about the riots:
“It’s thanks to the police officers who cancelled leave, the staff who kept courts open all hours and the judiciary who worked through the night that rioters high on violence soon found themselves facing the cold, hard accountability of the dock.”
Clarke also observed:
“It’s not yet been widely recognised, but the hardcore of the rioters were, in fact, known criminals. Close to three-quarters of those aged 18 or over charged with riot offences already had a prior conviction. That is the legacy of a broken penal system – one whose record in preventing reoffending has been straightforwardly dreadful. In my view, the riots can be seen in part as an outburst of outrageous behaviour by the criminal classes – individuals and families familiar with the justice system who haven’t been changed by their past punishments.”
We shall discover, once the courts have done their work, whether the Stockport riot was “an outburst of outrageous behaviour by the criminal classes”.
It was certainly an outburst by louts who derive pleasure from throwing rocks at the police, and here, oddly enough, we ought not to allow ourselves to become excessively gloomy.
Disturbances of this kind have occurred at quite frequent intervals throughout our history. Within living memory, football hooliganism was a far worse problem than it is now, running battles were fought between pickets and police at places such as Grunwick, Orgreave and Wapping, and serious riots took place in Toxteth, Brixton, Handsworth and other districts.
Nigel Farage said, in a video clip he issued before the Southport riot took place, that “something is going horribly wrong in our once beautiful country”.
It would be more accurate to say that this remains a beautiful country, but one where horrible crimes sometimes occur, for that is the nature of human affairs.
There was, of course, a period when Farage, born in 1964, was young, when the country may seem to him in retrospect to have been better. But at the time, Harold Wilson and Edward Heath were making a hash of things, we were seeking to join the Common Market because Suez had shaken the British Establishment to its foundations, Enoch Powell said the nation was committing suicide, the officer class was mocked, Mary Whitehouse was dismayed, the IRA was murdering people, the trade unions were out of control, management was third-rate and our industry seemed to be collapsing in the face of competition from the Germans, the Japanese, the French and the Italians, all of whom had apparently recovered better than we had from the Second World War.
In May 1992 I was sent to report on the riots which had raged for three nights on the Wood Lane Estate in Coventry, with gangs of children roaming the streets and chucking petrol bombs at the police in their vans.
I approached the estate on foot through a large tract of suburban houses with immaculate front gardens. Not all of Coventry was racked by riots: most of it was thoroughly respectable.
But the only safe place on the estate was the Live and Let Live pub, run by a huge and fearless landlord who tolerated no nonsense on his premises.
He observed that the children should have been put to bed by their parents hours ago, and the police could not be expected to ignore a rock landing on one of their vans.
The landlord had authority, which meant he could maintain order. All of us will have known some such people. In even the rowdiest school, there is usually some member of staff before whom the class falls silent.
We shall see how much authority the new Government commands. Sir Keir Starmer has the advantage of knowing the criminal justice system well. He and his colleagues will presumably continue to lend their full support to the police and the courts.
Conservatives must do so too. One of the essential things about this country is the rule of law, and anyone in authority, indeed any good citizen, must uphold it.
We do not burn down a mosque when a Muslim commits a crime, a synagogue when a Jew breaks the law, a church when a Christian is at fault. We do not have mob justice, or allow ourselves to be led astray by rumours on social media. We await the verdict of the courts, and only agitators and demagogues would have it otherwise.