London has definitely witnessed some events in its time and this summer was no exception. Everyone wants to know why it happened and offer their reasons as to why it occurred. There was one man who seemed to be doing an excellent job in providing information from the ground on the situation as it was unfolding. So what better than to attend an event which tried to understand the aftermath of the London riots with Guardian reporter Paul Lewis speaking to a bunch of Westminster Skeptics inside a hot pub near Victoria.

Paul Lewis: “The aftermath is more interesting then the events themselves”.

The pub was packed with people eating and drinking, the temperature was hot and the anticipation seemed even higher. After a long delay the event kicked off with an acknowledgement that Twitter provided the best information during the London riots. When Paul wanted to know what was going on instantly, Twitter was the place to go to. Twitter was great for feeding back, questioning, correcting errors, offering help, and everybody collectively reporting the riots.

After the situation happened in Tottenham, the next place to experience lawlessness was Wood Green between 2.30 – 5am on Sunday morning. People were literally entering shops and taking exactly what they wanted without anyone stopping them. Even though these events have been classified as rioting Paul had other ideas: “I don’t think it was rioting, more like sustained looting as law had been suspended”.

The first important question was why did the riots stop?

In the aftermath, we should be concerned about the suspension of ordinary sentences taking place and the fact that the judicial process is being speeded up to deal with offenders. On the one hand it is great that justice is being served but we are meant to do things differently in the UK.

In Westminster the emphasis is on gang culture and new policies are being implemented with too much scrutiny from wider public. Those policies will exclude people already on the margins and we will only make the situation worse by removing their links to the welfare state. Why hasn’t an enquiry been set up? Paul felt that the lack of public enquiry allows the government to enact knee-jerk policies that are popular to the public mood. Politicians needed to be seen to be doing something and reacted in the usual predictable way by not knowing what to do.

Paul called for reliable, empirical evidence as to why this is happening. The Guardian has a database on the people who have been convicted – mainly young, poor, and men. Correlation isn’t a cause but it does have something to do with poverty. Something that society does not seem to want to mention.

Here are some of the theories as to why this happened and what Paul thought about them:

• Completely mindless – doesn’t agree with that statement as it was directed and there was a level of organisation about it
• Product of social media – even though people were communicating via social media they were not organising, a point of absolute ignorance is where Louise Mensch comes from
• Collective response to government cuts – that doesn’t hold water as we are yet to see the full extent of those cuts
• Poverty and where the rioters themselves come from – in London it looked like self destruction, in Birmingham and Manchester the rioters went into town. The relationship is not directly causal as it didn’t happen in the poorest cities and the rioters were not the poorest members of society
• Gang related – there was a guiding hand in the riots and gang identity melted away when the riots started
• The underclass theory – a separate group of people, defined by their social identity and culture which is different to ours. I didn’t see it, they wear the same clothes, listen to the same music, they didn’t feel like an other
• Broad social decline – morals and values have somehow broken down, there could be something in it, MPs expenses, bankers, tax avoiders, the masters of the universe get away with what they want
• The riots happened because police lost control and the riots stopped when police regained control – law had been suspended

Paul Lewis decided to report actions rather than merely words to not inflame the tense situation any further. When he was reporting in Birmingham he noticed that the Asian people regained control over their actions to not go to the black areas in Birmingham and burn it down.

No-one seems to be asking the rioters why they did it and Paul again made a call for an academic study. Paul: “Everyone will give you a reason but no-one want to back that up”.

History can provide some important lessons, let us not forget that 200 years ago people were chopping heads off of the ruling classes, today they are stealing commercial goods! The conditions in the world that make things like this happen are all around us, whether we open our eyes and do something about it is a different matter. We will never understand until we walk a mile in the same shoes as those who were involved in the destruction.