All of this blather, though, is a sorry excuse for a lot of bad behaviour.
Scores of people burned out of their homes – not by riot police or CS gas canisters, but by looters.
Three men dead after being run over protecting their corner shop. A Gay bookshop done over. A Malaysian student robbed on the ground.
Richard has a tall order backing his party ‘line’ that this vandalism is in truth the coming revolution.
His comrade Gary MacFarlane writes in this week’s Socialist Worker: ‘Karl Marx was exactly right when he talked about expropriating the expropriators, taking back what they have taken from us. That's what looting by poor working class people represents and in that sense it is a deeply political act.' ('One of the Most Powerful Expressions of Anger', Socialist Worker, 13 August 2011)
But the rioters were not ‘expropriating the expropriators’ they were wrecking their own neighbourhoods.
That is why fully ninety per cent of Britons polled think that there is absolutely no excuse for the rioters behaviour. Those respondents are not in the grip of false consciousness. They just don’t think that it is a great thing for a lot of young men to smash up the neighbourhood, without any obvious reason other than having a lark.
Lastly, it is right, of course, that the looters are not defiant in the courtroom, and have listened to the advice of their briefs. But the reason that they are not defiant is because they were not political protestors in the first place.