There is nothing new about the Clapham riots

George Griffiths

Let no one say that woke is dead after the tawdry slew of euphemism and obfuscation on display this week following the recent rioting in Clapham. Across multiple nights, large groups of ‘youths’ and ‘bored teenagers’ have looted shops, smashed things up, started fires and attacked bystanders and police, in disorder that is now spreading from south London to Bristol and Birmingham, and probably beyond. The villains of the piece are described as ‘gangs of youths’ ,‘teenage mobs’, ‘bored children with nothing better to do during the half-term’, even ‘mob[s] of masked TikTok twats’. Almost nowhere in the mainstream press is it made clear – other than through the footage of what’s happening – that the individuals causing mayhem in our inner cities are almost entirely black.

Even the spitting fury of the anti-woke liberals, who have been denouncing ‘feral mobs’ and calling for ‘mass arrests’, serves as a way to avoid acknowledging the basic racial dynamics at play here. That these teenagers are behaving like teenagers from their grandparent’s country of origin; that their privileged lifestyles in our inner cities are only possible through the largess of taxpayers and that they today act with impunity because they get soft treatment by the police owing to their skin colour. The Metropolitan Police, having made vanishingly few arrests, has instead been reduced to pleading with the rioters and their parents to ‘think of the consequences’ of their actions (for most, there will be none).