by Dave Osler

Remember this front page lead story from the Guardian in February this year?:

Britain faces summer of rage – police

Middle-class anger at economic crisis could erupt into violence on streets

Police are preparing for a “summer of rage” as victims of the economic downturn take to the streets to demonstrate against financial institutions, the Guardian has learned.

Britain’s most senior police officer with responsibility for public order raised the spectre of a return of the riots of the 1980s, with people who have lost their jobs, homes or savings becoming “footsoldiers” in a wave of potentially violent mass protests.

Superintendent David Hartshorn, who heads the Metropolitan police’s public order branch, told the Guardian that middle-class individuals who would never have considered joining demonstrations may now seek to vent their anger through protests this year.

Even at the time, publication of the article caused me to muse about the potential consequences:

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the best-mannered and most polite protests in British political history. Even as we speak, some opportunist author is presumably working on the Little Book of Riot Etiquette, a sure-fire number one in the non-fiction bestseller chart if this alarming scenario of petit bourgeois quasi-insurrection does come to fruition.

Molotov Cocktails, we will be told, must be passed to the left and must not be thrown while wearing brown shoes or before 6 pm. It will also be deemed inexcusably bad form to run away from a pitched battle with a phalanx of tooled up police before one has had a chance to present flowers to the hostess.

Demographics alone dictates that the Dalston branch of Matalan will be immune from looting. But just picture the scene as the baby buggies get hurled through the plate glass windows of Fresh & Wild on Stoke Newington Church Street, and squads of pierced-nose yummy mummies clad in combat gear dive in to liberate the overpriced organic lettuce.

What if things get really serious? At that point, some tax lawyers will get sufficiently angry to order the nanny to forget the school run and to engage in acts of sustained sedition on their behalf. Could legitimate order possibly survive?

Well, summer’s over, and it seems like the massed ranks of Hugos and Sophies somehow managed to contain themselves. Any theories as to why every progressive’s Berliner of choice got it so spectacularly wrong? Let’s face it, comrades (and Lib-Dems), we need to get our act together.