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Brazil is saying what we could not: we don't want these costly World Cup and Olympic extravaganzas

 

From the World Cup to the G8, many countries are paying an extortionate price for hosting these pointless displays

• 
• • Simon Jenkins
  • The Guardian, Thursday 20 June 2013 19.40 BST

A protester in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Photograph: Imago / Barcroft Media

On Tuesday evening a loud noise engulfed Parliament Square: a demonstration of flag-waving Brazilians. I asked one of them what he was protesting. It was, he said, the waste of money on the Olympics. I told him he was in the right city but the wrong year.

Here we go again. Brazil has been bamboozled into blowing $13bn on next year's football World Cup, and then on a similar sum to be later extorted by the International Olympic Committee to host the 2016 Games. Brazil's leftwing leader, Dilma Rousseff, was bequeathed the games by her populist predecessor, Lula da Silva. She has desperately tried to side with the protesters, but she is trapped by the oligarchs of Fifa and the IOC.

Brazil's citizens are being hit with higher bus fares and massive claims on health and welfare budgets. Up to half a million people may take to the streets this weekend to complain of "first world stadiums, third world schools". What is impressive about the demonstrators is that they appear not to be against sport as such, but against the extravagance of their staging. They are talking the language of priorities.

The World Cup is an ongoing scandal run by Fifa's unsackable boss, Sepp Blatter, on the back of ticket and television sales and soccer hysteria. Having bled the Brazilian exchequer of billions for new stadiums, he has the cheek to plead with demonstrators that "they should not use football to make their demands heard". Why not? Blatter uses football to make his demands heard.

The Olympics are likewise sold by the IOC to star-struck national leaders as offering glory for political gain. Their purpose-built stadiums, luxurious facilities, lunatic security and lavish hospitality are senseless, yet are backed by construction and security lobbies and a chorus of chauvinist public relations. If the cost is bankruptcy, as in Montreal and Athens, too bad. The golden caravan can move on to trap some new victim.

The World Cup and the Olympics are television events that could be held at much less expense and ballyhoo in one place. As it is, host nations are deluged with promises of "legacy return" that everyone knows are rubbish. Costs escalate to an extent that would see most managers in handcuffs, but gain bonuses and knighthoods for Olympic organisers.

Sport is not alone in this addiction to the jamboree. The London Olympics last year morphed into politics, as diplomacy, culture and trade were conflated in an outpouring of nonsensical rhetoric about £13bn in contracts. A summit used to be a meeting ad hoc to resolve a crisis in world affairs. It is now a Field of Cloth of Gold, a continuous round of hospitality, rest and recuperation, flattering the vanity of world leaders.

This week's G8 shindig in Northern Ireland was pointless – a night and two days on a bleak Irish lough at a cost to taxpayer of £60m and a deployment of 1,000 policemen per delegate. It was held in Fermanagh to be as far as possible from demonstrators and "real people". The sole outcome was modest progress on tax avoidance, but that cannot have required two days in Fermanagh. Could they not have used Skype?

The survival of the G8 is extraordinary, based on the pretence that the second world war protagonists are still major world powers. When Vladimir Putin refused to attend the 2012 summit in Washington, there were hopes that it might disappear. Putin was back this week, though his face suggested he regrets it.

In his iconoclastic study of postwar summits, David Reynolds remarked that they are based on hope over experience. Most are either pointless or disastrous. Reynolds compared Tony Blair's Iraq meeting with George Bush in January 2003 with Chamberlain and Munich. Their high point was during the cold war, yet it is only since then that summits have become fixed in the political year. David Cameron's diary is crammed with G8s, G20s, UN, EU and Commonwealth conclaves. The elephantine G20 has become a carnival of obsessive security. The 2012 gathering in Toronto was newsworthy only for apolicing bill close to $1bn for two days. It did nothing for the poor but devastated the local economy for a year.

Power craves authenticity. On his way back from the G8 to America, President Obama stood in Berlin at (or near) the Brandenburg Gate where Kennedy delivered his freedom address 50 years ago. A special stadium had to be built for him, and a wall of bullet-proof glass. He gave a hand-picked audience a welter of platitudes and went home.

Technology has moved on since 1963. Obama could have copied Kennedy on Facebook. Yet he had to be in Berlin in person, as he was in Ulster in person. The whole thing could have been staged for television, but television needs some contact with reality. Electronics can create these events and disseminate them. But nothing can replace the chemistry of the live presence.

Futurologists of the internet used to claim that electronics would render obsolete such sporting, political, even musical events. Human avatars would cruise cyberspace and engage with their audiences at the touch of a button. Leaders would communicate with each other from their desks in real time on giant screens. Contact would be digitised. We could experience each other's presence without the need for flesh-and-blood exchange. There would be huge savings in plane tickets.

This ignores the yearning of all people, leaders and led, rich and poor, to feel involved, to participate in some degree in a live experience. Nations want to be visited by political, sporting or artistic celebrities. They want football heroes, racing cars and three tenors on their soil. Leaders crave the status of "hosting" fellow leaders, of standing side-by-side with power. It is not the same on the web.

To this quest for authenticity Brazil's demonstrators offer a corrective. They point to its cost. The addiction to "eventism" can be so potent, so demanding of security and so expensive as to defy restraint. London's £9bn extravaganza was not necessary to host an international athletics show. It should have been the last such display of conspicuous consumption by the rich in the face of the poor. Yet Rio de Janeiro is now saddled with not one extravaganza but two.

So congratulations to Brazilians for saying what Britain last year lacked the guts to say: that sometimes enough is enough. If I were Blatter and his henchmen, I would get out of town fast.

Suddenly, it’s all hail multiculturalism

HASAN SUROOR  in The Hindu

• APIn this August 4, 2012 photo, Britain's Mo Farah, left, and compatriot Greg Rutherford pose for photographers after both won gold. Farah won gold in the men's 10,000m and Rutherford in the men's long jump.
• APIn this August 5, 2012 photo, Britain's Mo Farah poses with his gold medal in the men's 10,000m in the Olympic Stadium.
• 

One year after the London riots, the national mood has changed as Britain basks in the glory of the Olympic Games

This week, a year ago, London was burning as anger over the death of a black youth in a police shoot-out spiralled into one of the worst riots in England for a generation.

The violence prompted a torrent of incendiary comment about the impact of “laissez faire” multiculturalism on British values and Britain’s way of life. A year on, as London basks in the warm glow of the Olympic Games, with several immigrants bringing glory for Britain, the mood has swung to the other extreme. There is a mass outbreak of enthusiasm for multiculturalism, famously declared “dead” by the head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) not long ago. Suddenly it is seen as up there with other “unique” values that put the “Great” into Great Britain.

Athletes of foreign descent such as Mohamed “Mo” Farah, Jessica Ennis, Greg Rutherford, Tiffany Porter and Yamilé Aldama — once derided as “plastic Brits” — are being hailed as the new face of Britain’s “vibrant” racial and cultural diversity.

Ennis, daughter of a Jamaican immigrant, has been called “the nation’s new sweetheart,” and Mo Farah, who came to Britain as a nine-year-old refugee from war-ravaged Somalia, a “British legend.” Along with the Australia-born Rutherford, fondly referred to as a “ginger wizard,” they have been dubbed Britain’s “golden trio” for winning gold for their adopted country.

There is a sense that something profound has happened and, as The Times noted in a breathless editorial, “a new Britain is being born out of the best of the old Britain.”

“The prospectus that delivered the Olympics (to London) relied heavily on an account of a tolerant, multicultural Britain and it is as such that the success has followed, both inside the arenas and inside,” it said.

A year ago, Prime Minister David Cameron described Britain as a “broken society” suffering from “moral collapse” and suggested that “state culturalism” was the first step on the slippery slope to extremism. Today, he finds Britain an “inspirational country” that “makes people feel proud to be British.” He has spoken of the “awe-inspiring” performance of the multi-ethnic Team GB, and hailed London as the world’s most diverse city. A senior Conservative MP received a public dressing down for dismissing the opening Olympic ceremony as “multicultural crap.”

Many are mystified by the Prime Minister’s conversion and asking whether he is the same man who had warned that “passive tolerance” of multiculturalism was an invitation to extremism, and argued for a more “muscular” approach. “Frankly, we need a lot less of the passive tolerance of recent years and much more active, muscular liberalism,” he said at a security conference in Munich last year causing anger among immigrants back home.

Mr. Cameron’s new-found passion is simply a reflection of the national mood: he is saying what he believes people want to hear and will “connect” him to the masses. Partly that mood has been generated by the media, with newspapers making an extra effort to pick out “ethnic” faces to illustrate stories about the “wonderful” Olympic spirit that, among other things, has seen hundreds of Asian and African immigrants work as unpaid volunteers at the Games.

NEW CONVERTS

Even the notoriously xenophobic Sun is singing a refreshingly new tune. “Red, white, blue, black, brown, pink or purple — these Olympic Games have united us all,” it exulted in a report headed “Marvellous Modern Britain Unleashed Upon the World.” And, with the zeal of a new convert, added how the world had seen “the true colours of British greatness with champions of every hue — a mixed-race Yorkshire lass, a Muslim refugee and a ginger.”

“How can your heart not surge with pride when they win for Britain?” it asked.

At the rabidly anti-immigrant Daily Mail, it is a bit more hush-hush with the paper dressing up its celebration of Britain’s diversity as “conservative values in action.”

But it is celebration, nevertheless.

So, what does this sudden burst of love for multiculturalism signify? Is it an acknowledgment, finally, that in a country as diverse as Britain, multiculturalism alone can work, and a signal to the advocates of mono-culturalism to shut up shop?

An honest answer will be “no.” Sceptics warn against reading “too much” into what they believe is simply a passing phase — part of a general “feel-good” mood generated by the success of the Games and achievements of British athletes, especially those from ethnic groups. Those who know a thing or two about the fickle British temperament, mirroring its fickle weather, predict that “normal business” — i.e. moaning and carping — should resume once the Games get over this weekend.

The economy is getting worse by the day and cracks in the ruling Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition have widened while the country has been distracted by the Games.

“Just wait for the news to get out and see how quickly the euphoria evaporates,” warns an observer. But then who knows? The country may have changed this summer, and it could be the start of a deeper engagement with what the Sun andMail patronisingly used to dismiss as “multi-culti” Britain.

The Rioters' Defence

By Peter Oborne Politics Last updated: August 11th, 2011 in The Telegraph


David Cameron, Ed Miliband and the entire British political class came together yesterday to denounce the rioters. They were of course right to say that the actions of these looters, arsonists and muggers were abhorrent and criminal, and that the police should be given more support.

But there was also something very phony and hypocritical about all the shock and outrage expressed in parliament. MPs spoke about the week’s dreadful events as if they were nothing to do with them.
I cannot accept that this is the case. Indeed, I believe that the criminality in our streets cannot be dissociated from the moral disintegration in the highest ranks of modern British society. The last two decades have seen a terrifying decline in standards among the British governing elite. It has become acceptable for our politicians to lie and to cheat. An almost universal culture of selfishness and greed has grown up.

It is not just the feral youth of Tottenham who have forgotten they have duties as well as rights. So have the feral rich of Chelsea and Kensington. A few years ago, my wife and I went to a dinner party in a large house in west London. A security guard prowled along the street outside, and there was much talk of the “north-south divide”, which I took literally for a while until I realised that my hosts were facetiously referring to the difference between those who lived north and south of Kensington High Street.

Most of the people in this very expensive street were every bit as deracinated and cut off from the rest of Britain as the young, unemployed men and women who have caused such terrible damage over the last few days. For them, the repellent Financial Times magazine How to Spend It is a bible. I’d guess that few of them bother to pay British tax if they can avoid it, and that fewer still feel the sense of obligation to society that only a few decades ago came naturally to the wealthy and better off.

Yet we celebrate people who live empty lives like this. A few weeks ago, I noticed an item in a newspaper saying that the business tycoon Sir Richard Branson was thinking of moving his headquarters to Switzerland. This move was represented as a potential blow to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, because it meant less tax revenue.

I couldn’t help thinking that in a sane and decent world such a move would be a blow to Sir Richard, not the Chancellor. People would note that a prominent and wealthy businessman was avoiding British tax and think less of him. Instead, he has a knighthood and is widely feted. The same is true of the brilliant retailer Sir Philip Green. Sir Philip’s businesses could never survive but for Britain’s famous social and political stability, our transport system to shift his goods and our schools to educate his workers.

Yet Sir Philip, who a few years ago sent an extraordinary £1 billion dividend offshore, seems to have little intention of paying for much of this. Why does nobody get angry or hold him culpable? I know that he employs expensive tax lawyers and that everything he does is legal, but he surely faces ethical and moral questions just as much as does a young thug who breaks into one of Sir Philip’s shops and steals from it?

Our politicians – standing sanctimoniously on their hind legs in the Commons yesterday – are just as bad. They have shown themselves prepared to ignore common decency and, in some cases, to break the law. David Cameron is happy to have some of the worst offenders in his Cabinet. Take the example of Francis Maude, who is charged with tackling public sector waste – which trade unions say is a euphemism for waging war on low‑paid workers. Yet Mr Maude made tens of thousands of pounds by breaching the spirit, though not the law, surrounding MPs’ allowances.

A great deal has been made over the past few days of the greed of the rioters for consumer goods, not least by Rotherham MP Denis MacShane who accurately remarked, “What the looters wanted was for a few minutes to enter the world of Sloane Street consumption.” This from a man who notoriously claimed £5,900 for eight laptops. Of course, as an MP he obtained these laptops legally through his expenses.

Yesterday, the veteran Labour MP Gerald Kaufman asked the Prime Minister to consider how these rioters can be “reclaimed” by society. Yes, this is indeed the same Gerald Kaufman who submitted a claim for three months’ expenses totalling £14,301.60, which included £8,865 for a Bang & Olufsen television.

Or take the Salford MP Hazel Blears, who has been loudly calling for draconian action against the looters. I find it very hard to make any kind of ethical distinction between Blears’s expense cheating and tax avoidance, and the straight robbery carried out by the looters.

The Prime Minister showed no sign that he understood that something stank about yesterday’s Commons debate. He spoke of morality, but only as something which applies to the very poor: “We will restore a stronger sense of morality and responsibility – in every town, in every street and in every estate.” He appeared not to grasp that this should apply to the rich and powerful as well.

The tragic truth is that Mr Cameron is himself guilty of failing this test. It is scarcely six weeks since he jauntily turned up at the News International summer party, even though the media group was at the time subject to not one but two police investigations. Even more notoriously, he awarded a senior Downing Street job to the former News of the World editor Andy Coulson, even though he knew at the time that Coulson had resigned after criminal acts were committed under his editorship. The Prime Minister excused his wretched judgment by proclaiming that “everybody deserves a second chance”. It was very telling yesterday that he did not talk of second chances as he pledged exemplary punishment for the rioters and looters.

These double standards from Downing Street are symptomatic of widespread double standards at the very top of our society. It should be stressed that most people (including, I know, Telegraph readers) continue to believe in honesty, decency, hard work, and putting back into society at least as much as they take out.
But there are those who do not. Certainly, the so-called feral youth seem oblivious to decency and morality. But so are the venal rich and powerful – too many of our bankers, footballers, wealthy businessmen and politicians.

Of course, most of them are smart and wealthy enough to make sure that they obey the law. That cannot be said of the sad young men and women, without hope or aspiration, who have caused such mayhem and chaos over the past few days. But the rioters have this defence: they are just following the example set by senior and respected figures in society. Let’s bear in mind that many of the youths in our inner cities have never been trained in decent values. All they have ever known is barbarism. Our politicians and bankers, in sharp contrast, tend to have been to good schools and universities and to have been given every opportunity in life.

Something has gone horribly wrong in Britain. If we are ever to confront the problems which have been exposed in the past week, it is essential to bear in mind that they do not only exist in inner-city housing estates.
The culture of greed and impunity we are witnessing on our TV screens stretches right up into corporate boardrooms and the Cabinet. It embraces the police and large parts of our media. It is not just its damaged youth, but Britain itself that needs a moral reformation.

David Cameron has to maintain that the unrest has no cause except criminality – or he and his friends might be held responsible

These riots reflect a society run on greed and looting

• 
• • Seumas Milne
  • guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 10 August 2011 22.39 BST
  • larger | smaller

David Cameron talks to acting borough commander superintendent Jo Oakley during a visit to Croydon to view the destruction from the riots. Photograph: Wpa Pool/Getty Images
It is essential for those in power in Britain that the riots now sweeping the country can have no cause beyond feral wickedness. This is nothing but "criminality, pure and simple", David Cameron declared after cutting short his holiday in Tuscany. The London mayor and fellow former Bullingdon Club member Boris Johnson, heckled by hostile Londoners in Clapham Junction, warned that rioters must stop hearing "economic and sociological justifications" (though who was offering them he never explained) for what they were doing. When his predecessor Ken Livingstone linked the riots to the impact of public spending cuts, it was almost as if he'd torched a building himself. The Daily Mail thundered that blaming cuts was "immoral and cynical", echoed by a string of armchair riot control enthusiasts. There was nothing to explain, they've insisted, and the only response should be plastic bullets, water cannon and troops on the streets. We'll hear a lot more of that when parliament meets – and it's not hard to see why. If these riots have no social or political causes, then clearly no one in authority can be held responsible. What's more, with many people terrified by the mayhem and angry at the failure of the police to halt its spread, it offers the government a chance to get back on the front foot and regain its seriously damaged credibility as a force for social order. But it's also a nonsensical position. If this week's eruption is an expression of pure criminality and has nothing to do with police harassment or youth unemployment or rampant inequality or deepening economic crisis, why is it happening now and not a decade ago? The criminal classes, as the Victorians branded those at the margins of society, are always with us, after all. And if it has no connection with Britain's savage social divide and ghettoes of deprivation, why did it kick off in Haringey and not Henley? To accuse those who make those obvious links of being apologists or "making excuses" for attacks on firefighters or robbing small shopkeepers is equally fatuous. To refuse to recognise the causes of the unrest is to make it more likely to recur – and ministers themselves certainly won't be making that mistake behind closed doors if they care about their own political futures. It was the same when riots erupted in London and Liverpool 30 years ago, also triggered by confrontation between the police and black community, when another Conservative government was driving through cuts during a recession. The people of Brixton and Toxteth were denounced as criminals and thugs, but within weeks Michael Heseltine was writing a private memo to the cabinet, beginning with "it took a riot", and setting out the urgent necessity to take action over urban deprivation. This time, the multi-ethnic unrest has spread far further and faster. It's been less politicised and there's been far more looting, to the point where in many areas grabbing "free stuff" has been the main action. But there's no mystery as to where the upheaval came from. It was triggered by the police killing a young black man in a country where black people are 26 times more likely to be stopped and searched by police than their white counterparts. The riot that exploded in Tottenham in response at the weekend took place in an area with the highest unemployment in London, whose youth clubs have been closed to meet a 75% cut in its youth services budget. It then erupted across what is now by some measures the most unequal city in the developed world, where the wealth of the richest 10% has risen to 273 times that of the poorest, drawing in young people who have had their educational maintenance allowance axed just as official youth unemployment has reached a record high and university places are being cut back under the weight of a tripling of tuition fees. Now the unrest has gone nationwide. But it's not as if rioting was unexpected when the government embarked on its reckless programme to shrink the state. Last autumn the Police Superintendents' Association warned of the dangers of slashing police numbers at a time when they were likely to be needed to deal with "social tensions" or "widespread disorder". Less than a fortnight ago, Tottenham youths told the Guardian they expected a riot. Politicians and media talking heads counter that none of that has anything to do with sociopathic teenagers smashing shop windows to walk off with plasma TVs and trainers. But where exactly did the rioters get the idea that there is no higher value than acquiring individual wealth, or that branded goods are the route to identity and self-respect? While bankers have publicly looted the country's wealth and got away with it, it's not hard to see why those who are locked out of the gravy train might think they were entitled to help themselves to a mobile phone. Some of the rioters make the connection explicitly. "The politicians say that we loot and rob, they are the original gangsters," one told a reporter. Another explained to the BBC: "We're showing the rich people we can do what we want." Most have no stake in a society which has shut them out or an economic model which has now run into the sand. It's already become clear that divided Britain is in no state to absorb the austerity now being administered because three decades of neoliberal capitalism have already shattered so many social bonds of work and community. What we're now seeing across the cities of England is the reflection of a society run on greed – and a poisonous failure of politics and social solidarity. There is now a danger that rioting might feed into ethnic conflict. Meanwhile, the latest phase of the economic crisis lurching back and forth between the United States and Europe risks tipping austerity Britain into slump or prolonged stagnation. We're starting to see the devastating costs of refusing to change course.

• © 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

We can't deny that race plays a part

Christina Patterson: The Independent

Too many black men have been killed by the police. This is not the cause of these riots, but it's in the mix

Wednesday, 10 August 2011

August, historians will tell you, is a good time to start a war. And, boy, does this feel like a war. This feels, when you switch on the TV, and see footage of burning cars, and burning buildings, and of people jumping out of burning buildings, and of people too scared to walk down their street, and of dark silhouettes in helmets waving shields, and of dark silhouettes in hoodies waving iron bars, like the nearest to war most of us have been.

This feels, when you talk to friends, and find that they're staying in with their children all day, because the area outside their front door has been turned into something that looks as though a bomb has hit it, and when you talk to friends who do open their front door, and find a looter in a balaclava hiding in their garden, like the end of something, and the start of something else. It feels like the end of getting up in the morning, and knowing that you'll be able to go to work safely, and get home safely, and do your job safely when you're there.

For some of us, the only sign on our doorsteps was even more police cars screeching past than usual, and shops that closed early, and helicopters overhead. For my neighbours, down the road in Dalston, and down the road in Hackney, it wasn't. For the man, for example, who runs a pharmacy in Mare Street, and watched a group of teenagers try to trash his shop, which was, he said, "everything he had", and who pleaded with them not to, it must have felt like the end of everything he'd spent his whole life working to build up.

For the other shopkeepers in Mare Street, and the ones in Dalston, and the ones in Tottenham, and the ones in Brixton, who watched teenagers smash glass and fill their pockets with mobile phones, or jewellery, or grab trainers, or tracksuits, or even stagger under the weight of giant TVs, it must have felt as if one of the central pillars of their life was under threat.

And for the people who lost their homes, and all their possessions, and their children's toys, and every single photo of their children, which they will never, ever be able to get back, and who nearly lost their lives, and their children's lives, because someone thought it was a good laugh to throw a can of kerosene and a match, it must have felt as near as you get to losing your world, without losing your life.

This is what happens in a war. Wars start for a million different reasons, and the time to understand those reasons is not while the war is going on. They can start – even world wars can start – with a single gunshot. This one did. This one started with an old, old story, of a black man killed by police. It started when a woman wanted to know why four children would never see their father again. And when the police said nothing. And frustration turned, as it often does, and particularly in communities where there's a lot of frustration, to anger, and anger turned, as it often does, and particularly in communities where there are a lot of teenagers with not very much to do, to violence.

And it spread. Do we know if the boys, and young men, smashing windows, and trashing shops, and burning cars, and buses, and buildings, in Hackney, and Croydon, and Brixton, and telling passers-by that what they were doing was "fun", and that they were "trying to get their taxes back", knew about the shooting of the black man, or even cared? Do we know if they knew about the black teenager in Hackney who was stopped and searched by the police, and found to have nothing illegal on him?

We don't, and we can't. We don't, and can't, know why young men, and teenagers, and children as young as 10 suddenly decided that it was a good idea to do what everyone else was doing, which was to spread chaos, and violence, and fear. But we do know that when a tinderbox, or a car, or a carpet store, is set alight, this is what, throughout history, everywhere in the world, sometimes happens.
Race didn't cause these riots, but it played a part. Why else do you get three black men talking about them on
Newsnight, when you almost never see a black man talking about anything on Newsnight? And asked questions about "the black community", as if the people who had had their livelihoods destroyed would have the same views on anything as the 12-year-olds waving iron bars? And why else do you get people talking, as they are on newspaper websites, and radio phone-ins, about "thieving black scum"?

There is no excuse for wrecking people's livelihoods and lives. "She's working hard to make her business work," screamed a brave black woman at some of the rioters in Hackney, "and you lot want to burn it up, for what? To say you're warring, and you're 'bad man'? This is about a fucking man who got shot in Tottenham. This isn't about busting up the place. Get it real, black people. Get real!"

The woman was nearly in tears, and who wouldn't cry seeing their community destroyed, and who wouldn't cry knowing that this would be yet another excuse for people to associate black people with crime? The rioters weren't all black, of course. They were black, and mixed race, and white and wannabe black. They were people who are probably already in gangs, but who usually keep their violence to other gangs, but who, on Saturday, and Sunday, and Monday, and Tuesday, didn't. On Saturday, and Sunday, and Monday, and Tuesday, they discovered, perhaps for the first time outside their little world, the thrill of power.

There are 169 gangs in London. There are 22 in Hackney alone. These are people, often people who have grown up on estates where almost nobody works, often without fathers, and often without any qualifications, skills, or ambitions, who feel that the world has let them down. The guns and knives they carry make them feel that there's a tiny corner of the world they can control. And because of these boys – no more than 2,000 of them – who carry guns and knives, and because it takes more than reports on "institutional racism" to get rid of "institutional racism", you can hardly walk down a street, if you're black, without being stopped and searched.

Too many black men have been killed by the police. Too many black men and women have been treated like criminals when they're not. This is not the cause of these riots, but it's there in the mix, a mix where the key ingredient is feeling powerless. Cuts won't help. Growing unemployment won't help. Some investment, in youth services, and better schools, and mentoring schemes, might, but money alone isn't the answer.

It wasn't these children who created the culture that told them that what mattered was the brand of their trainers, or the glitter of their bling. It wasn't these children who created the culture that told them that their one hope of escape was hip hop, or fame. It wasn't these children who created the institutions of a country where all the black workers were in the canteens. We have, as a society, created this monster and, as a society, and like those people heading into the trouble spots with dustpans and brushes, we must pick up the pieces.

c.patterson@independent.co.uk; twitter.com/queenchristina_