ONE of the worst incidents of last year’s riots took place at the Bartons Arms, an ornate Victorian pub in the Aston district of Birmingham. Criminals set it alight, then shot at police officers on the ground and in a helicopter; six people have been jailed for up to 30 years for the ambush. But, with the help of its punters, the pub soon opened again. A scorch mark on the bar is the only reminder of the carnage.

Virtually the only trace in central Birmingham is a marketing ploy. After the windows of Cyber Candy, a sweet shop, were smashed, its hoardings were daubed with the words “Keep Calm and Candy on”. The slogan now adorns balloons in the window. The unrest “feels a little bit like a dream,” says Casey Rain, a local musician who chronicled the tumult on his blog. “Once all the damage was cleaned up, people just tried to forget about it.”

The riots that began in London on August 6th last year, soon spreading to Birmingham and other cities, seemed at the time to be an outbreak of mass lunacy. Now those few anarchic days feel instead like a mass hallucination. The closest analogy in recent history may be with the death of Princess Diana. Like the fevered week of mourning in 1997, the riots seemed set to be epoch-making; yet, a year on, so slight has the impact on politics and policy been that it almost seems as if they never happened at all.

That is not true, of course, for those since caught. At the last count 3,051 people had appeared in court (out of up to 15,000 thought to have been involved) and 1,968 had been convicted, mostly for burglary, theft or public disorder. The sentences, some for trivial-seeming crimes such as stealing groceries, have been much harsher than normal. A desire to make examples of the miscreants has trumped doubts about the value of incarceration.

Court records and surveys provide a fairly clear profile of the rioters. With a few well-publicised exceptions, they were mostly male, young and from poor areas. Many were “known to the police” (though such people are also easier to catch). Gangs were not a big factor—except by suspending hostilities to make common mayhem. The rioters’ motives were varied, ranging from hatred of the police to thrillseeking and opportunistic theft. They were angry and greedy; bored and disaffected; focused looters and regretful copycats.

Where the arsonists were more successful, such as Tottenham, in north London, scars remain. It was here that the trouble began, when a protest against the shooting by police of Mark Duggan, a local man, spiralled into violence. The job centre has reopened, the Post Office has moved up the high street, but several premises that were burned down are yet to be rebuilt. David Lammy, Tottenham’s MP—and author of a wise book about the riots—worries that firms are going to the wall because, after a long wait for compensation, they now face punitive rises in their insurance premiums.

Tottenham is getting a dollop of regeneration cash to rebuild and improve its infrastructure. Yet beyond the sentences and the sticking plasters, the legacy of the riots has been slight—astonishingly so, considering how apocalyptic they seemed. Nick Pearce, of the Institute for Public Policy Research, speculates that previous bouts of widespread rioting, such as in 1981, demanded a response because they were fuelled by racial grievances. This time it has been easier to dismiss the violence as mindless criminality.

There are other reasons for the oddly shallow impact. According to one analysis, the disadvantaged urban youngster, with a rocky home life and a shoddy education, too often “slips into the ranks of the permanent jobless…unemployed and unemployable”. That is from an inquiry into the Watts riots in Los Angeles in 1965: another country and era, yet the same prescriptions—better education, more jobs, more sensitive policing—were repeated in the official report on last year’s riots. England’s violence merely highlighted the existence of a large, heedless urban underclass. Because the underlying issues are old and well-known, the government has generally been able to say that it is dealing with them already, citing its ongoing education and welfare reforms.

Less fire next time

But if the background to the riots is clear, it is also complex. Complex problems sometimes become nobody’s problem, since no one institution has responsibility for solving them. (Eric Pickles, the communities secretary, is the coalition’s spokesman on the riots, but other departments and local councils are implicated, too.) And tackling them can be expensive.

The idea, advanced by some, that the riots were caused by public-spending cuts is implausible: the cuts had scarcely begun last summer. Yet subsequent attempts to deal with unruly youngsters have indeed been hampered by a shortage of cash. Craig Pinkney, a youth worker in Handsworth, a deprived part of Birmingham, points out that the folk who visit youth centres are well-behaved; the trick is to reach the more vulnerable ones, before they get into crime. That sort of work is costly, yet in some areas funding for youth services has been cut. A revamped bid to tackle troubled families relies on scarce council funding.

The riots have, however, changed policing. Especially in London, the police were accused both of being too soft and slow and of being too tough (not only in Mr Duggan’s shooting but in their general dealings with youngsters, especially black ones). If there is a next time, they are likely to be quicker to mobilise and readier to call in reinforcements from quieter areas. That is, assuming reinforcements are available: police funding is being cut. Officers are likely to have better and quicker direction about the appropriate level of force to use against a mobile mob—another issue that took too long to resolve.

The need for better monitoring of social media has also been amply demonstrated: last summer police found themselves trailing bloggers like Mr Rain in intelligence-gathering. Meanwhile some forces have tried to improve relations with local communities, even if the results are mixed: in Handsworth, where rioters attacked the police station as well as ransacking shops and trashing cars, allegations of police thuggery persist.

Perhaps the most important variable of all has got worse. Junior Smart, a youth worker with the St Giles Trust, a charity, who runs a project for ex-offenders in London, says the distinguishing feature of those who stayed out of the riots was that they had “something valuable to keep”, such as a job. Absent parents; a schism between young and old that is peculiarly deep in Britain; unchecked materialism: of all the contributing factors thrown up by research, youth unemployment, and the hopelessness it causes, stands out as both important and potentially addressable.

Since last August youth unemployment has increased. At the last count, over a million 16- to 24-year-olds were unemployed, 12% more than a year ago. The government recently introduced new incentives for businesses to hire and train young people; but in a loose labour market employers can take on more experienced workers instead. The prospects for ex-offenders are especially bleak: “nobody wants a thief in their business”, says Mr Pinkney. Karl George, a Birmingham businessman, says that, after the riots, the council and local businesses launched a scheme to help get youngsters into work. But the momentum was lost.