Tim Newburn, the LSE professor of criminology who researched the UK riots of 2011, has said many of the underlying conditions that helped cause them have now worsened.

Prof Newburn, speaking ahead of the fifth anniversary of the outbreak of disorder in London, which then spread around the country, said there had not been enough improvement.

“The underlying conditions for those riots still persist,” Newburn told the Guardian on Friday, before describing the conditions: rioters were drawn from the poorest communities, had a sense of being constantly harassed by the police, felt that their opportunities were limited and shrinking, and that the dearth of services and chances around them was the result of deliberate political choices, made by rich people who behaved with impunity.

It’s five years since the English riots, but the rifts in society are wider than ever | David Lammy Read more

“There’s no real sign that things have improved for the lives of the kinds of people who were involved and caught up in the riots. Certainly it’s not implausible that there could be more riots. But that’s not the same thing as expecting riots,” he said.

Newburn traces this lack of progress directly to the political response in August 2011, following what he called “possibly the most significant civil disorder in the postwar period”.

Newburn, whose researchers partnered with the Guardian for the Reading the Riots study, said: “From the very moment of the Cameronesque [judgment of] ‘Criminality, pure and simple’, the political diagnosis was, ‘You don’t need to look below the surface here because there’s nothing to find. This is just people behaving criminally and immorally. As soon as the cops have learnt to do their job, it will all be fine’.

“There was no sense that public policy had any role to play. So I don’t think there’s been any public policy response that you could link directly to the riots.

“I’d say everything’s worsened. I think politically, things have worsened for those people. Economically, they have too.”

The riots erupted after the police fatally shot Mark Duggan on Thursday 4 August 2011 as they tried to arrest him in Tottenham. Two days later, there was a protest outside the police station over the killing. Disorder flared later that day in the area.

David Lammy, the Labour MP for Tottenham, echoed Newburn’s argument, writing in the Guardian that “rifts in society are wider than ever”.



‘I remember thinking, the youth had spoken ...’

Tottenham High Road, where a protest outside the police station turned to burning buildings and spilled into a ransacked retail park, still bears the odd scar.

The post office burned down and is now in rather shambolic temporary premises 50 yards down the street, with a mobile phone unblocker in the corner and a fish stall on its doorstep.

UK riots: Paul Lewis's five-day journey Read more

A man in Anil foods, one of the many Turkish shops that was not looted, said: “The Poundland was on fire on one side. Post office on fire the other.”

At the Costa in the nearby retail park, Abuntu and Lisa, both 32, who went to school together (not their real names), remembered the riots with the vividness of post-traumatic stress. “These kids were running down the street with giant screens in shopping trolleys. They all had bandanas on, and marigolds. It was unbelievable. I’d just had a baby, she was three weeks old,” Lisa recalled.

Abuntu said: “Everything was on fire. I was heavily pregnant, and I just sat there, thinking … not ‘judgment day’, but … like the youth had spoken. A lot of youth provisions had been cut.”

Lisa disagreed forcefully. “A lot of young people got involved and didn’t even know what they were rioting for,” she said. “There’s a hell of a lot of opportunities, there’s a huge amount that people just don’t access.”

Abuntu worked in a youth programme, funding for which had been cut a month before the riots, while Lisa worked in young offending. They disagreed on everything from the causes of the riots to the harshness of the sentences. “The police were still knocking on doors a year later,” Lisa said approvingly, while Abuntu countered sadly: “There was a lot of young kids going to prison, and that’s a stain on them, isn’t it?”

Brandon was 13 when the riots broke out. He is now 18 and waiting to find out whether or not he has got into University College London to read mechanical engineering. He has no time for rioters. “It was just people being selfish and out for their personal gain,” Brandon said, and no time even for people caught up in trouble who did not necessarily do anything. “You should be at home. If trouble’s there, you should be at home.”

But it is not always that easy. Moin, 27, remembers the night of the riots, driving down Tottenham Hale, boggling at the fires, but mainly the next morning. “I was going to pray with my dad, it was five in the morning and we got stopped by the police,” he said. “I can understand, people are doing their jobs. I’m not an argumentative person. But my dad is an argumentative person. He feels humiliated.”

I asked if that was the first time it had happened, and he laughed. “No, I live in Edmonton, I get stopped all the time,” Moin said. “I’ll be honest with you, it’ll never change. It hasn’t been easy, living round here, from a Muslim background.” Abuntu said whenever she sees a young black man stopped by police, she stops her car to watch, to check that they being treated properly. “I’m often asked to move on. It’s terrible for their self-esteem. I’m so glad I haven’t got a son,” she said.

If stop-and-search is still an issue, economic conditions have changed somewhat. Guardian analysis of the key wards in the east of the borough showed that benefit claims hit a peak in August 2011. They were also at a record high for the Broadwater Farm riot in 1985.

Since then, claims all over the country, including this area, have gone down. However, most people, from Newburn to Tracey, 54, whose daughter lost her job when the shop she worked at was burned down, and had to move out of the area, point to social cleansing rather than improved prospects for the original residents.

Five years after the riots, tension in Tottenham has not gone away Read more

“I’ve been at a meeting,” Newburn said, “where people in Tottenham were talking about the local community, the regeneration around Tottenham Hotspur[’s football stadium], and the overriding emotion was one of anger: the money wasn’t really going to where it was needed, but actually it was aiding the gentrification of a poor area.”

Critics have questioned some of the decline in benefit claimants, citing moves to impose sanctions on jobseekers’ allowance and caps on benefits, including housing benefit, arguing that this has driven poorer families out of London.

And yet, more broadly, from Clapham Junction to Croydon, the overwhelming human urge to put a positive spin on almost anything (“My house got bombed, but it brought out this beautiful Blitz spirit”) nudges its way through.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Amy at the Party Shop: ‘I’m a supervisor. I used to be a sales assistant.’ Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian

Amy, 28, works at the Clapham Junction party shop that was set on fire. “We had a week off, but most of us had holiday to take. And then Clapham Junction had such a good reaction that we had a concession [a small store within a department store] in Debenhams by October,” she said.

“We had to be up and running by Halloween, otherwise we’d have gone under. But now we’ve got concessions in Croydon, Guildford, Woking and Harrow. And I’m a supervisor. I used to be a sales assistant.”

Data research: Helena Bengtsson and Sean Clarke