The Ministry of Justice’s statistical report published yesterday into the riots must bring misery to the ears of those like Michael Gove who wished to argue that the root causes of the riots was a lack of morals and values and not poverty. The government’s own figures show that the rioters were in general less educated, young, and ultimately poor.
It brings back the one question which could not be answered by those who made such arguments: why were there no major riots in Richmond? In fact not even one rioter arrested by the police even came from there. By his own logic, would Gove argue that the people of Richmond are more morally virtuous than elsewhere in London?
There was a level of criminal copy cat activity going on across London, but mysteriously not by large hordes of young people in Richmond. We did not see an army of rubber Wellington boot wearing, barber jacket clad, red trouser Henley Regatta types storming a Jack Wills shop in Richmond. It certainly wasn’t the cast of Made In Chelsea on my TV last August.
What has made this modern utopia in TW9? Could it be the demography, which explains why Richmond was riot free? There are a quarter of 5-15 year olds in Richmond who go to private school compared to a national average below 7 per cent. Or only 12 per cent of children born into poverty in Richmond. Compare that with areas like Haringey and Hackney, where four out of ten children are born into poverty (rising to almost six out of ten if you catch a bus to Tower Hamlets).
There were a quarter of those arrested between the ages of 10 and 17. Of these children arrested in the riots, 42 per cent were also in receipt of free school meals, 43 per cent of children in state schools in Newham are on free school meals almost double the London average. Whereas Richmond has a third less than the London average of children on free school meals. There are also five times more EMA recipients in Newham than Richmond.
Furthermore, in the ranking of constituencies by no qualification there are almost 600 places between the constituencies of Tottenham MP David Lammy’s parliamentary seat than say Richmond Park MP Zac Goldsmith’s. Only 4 per cent of people in Richmond Park have no qualifications, compared to almost a quarter in Tottenham. There’s also three times more social housing in Tottenham than Richmond Park.
Oh what about the rioters seen in nearby Ealing I hear you say? Well, yes Ealing Broadway and the near surrounding streets are a little middle class enclave with a well to do private girls school off the main drag. But if you take a 10 min bus ride away from the high streets you will find it’s not so middle class; with three times the number living in families on benefits there than in Richmond and it rises to five times more in somewhere like Tower Hamlets.
For me the rioters resembled more the people I grew up with than the people I attended University with. Of course, there are poor people who do not engage in crime, I was one, but as any criminologist worth their salt will tell you, those more likely to engage in the sort of crime that we saw in the riots, are those with less to lose. And if the above evidence proves anything, it is that those with the least to lose, were certainly those who lived in areas of London where rioting took place.
Oscar Wilde once wrote that: “There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor. The poor can think of nothing else. That is the misery of being poor.” The misery of the likes of Michael Gove is their inability to see such misery.
James Mills is campaign director of the Save EMA campaign.
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