Another Non-Article About the Recent Riots

Like everyone else, it seems, I have noticed a conspicuous bias among those who are offering explanations for and interpretation of the recent riots. Rather than a bias about the kind of conclusions to be drawn, however, I am concerned with one about the amount of conclusions to be drawn. Isn't it at least possible that the events of the last week are not actually going to change this country forever? I can think of a few reasons why this sort of article is less common than perhaps it should be:

1) It is hard to play down the importance of the riots without sounding a bit insensitive to everyone who has lost their business, or been assaulted in the street, or been trapped in their house out of fear. To be clear, I am not saying that they are completely unimportant. Just that the might not be quite as socio-politically significant as all that.

2) The ratio of risk to reward in writing such an article is far too high. If you are wrong, you will look like a massive twat. And if you are right, no-one will really remember anyone saying anything either way anyway. So why risk it? Why indeed.

3) If there is one thing we know about professional journalists, it is that they are professional journalists. It is quite difficult to write an interesting article saying something is not very interesting, as I am currently proving. And if you do write a piece saying that the news is not very interesting, what on earth do you say or do when you have to write about it again tomorrow? Similarly, the one thing we know about people who are compelled to blog about such things in their spare time is that etc etc.

So, for all of these reasons and more, I am definitely not going to be caught saying that there might be very few lessons about society to be drawn from all of this, or even that it doesn't really tell us anything very much about anything at all. Instead I will just reminisce about the last time the government apparently "came very close to asking the army to come in", according to Jack Straw. That was in the autumn of 2001, when the country was brought to a standstill (/the brink of anarchy/its very knees) by the fuel protests. Remember them?