Illustration: Liu Rui

For anyone involved in law, medicine, or social work, the faces of the English rioters, captured on cell phone shots and closed-camera footage, were worryingly familiar.

We might not know the individuals, but we know the type: feral, tattooed young men, and occasionally women, whose first response to questions is "Fuck off!" They quit school at 16, after which they went into a life of petty crime, welfare fraud, and spawning more of their kind.

I know them because they've made up the majority of my Legal Aid clients for the last few years. I do the cases out of a sense that everyone deserves representation, whether on criminal cases or in family court, but after spending hundreds of hours with the UK's underclass, my sympathy for them is at a low ebb. Their crimes are committed not out of social oppression or lack of opportunity, but laziness and greed.

The original protestors in Tottenham had a point to make. After years of harassment of young black men by the Metropolitan police, the killing of Mark Duggan was the final straw.

But the mostly white rioters elsewhere had more interest in expensive shoes than justice. Those without any stake in society waged war on the rest of us.

Ah, you may ask, but what about the conditions that created them? Aren't they revenging themselves against a society that never gave them a chance?

Well, the UK has free education up to 18, free healthcare, virtually free university education if your parents can't afford to fund you, council housing if you can't afford a place of your own, job centers to help you get work, and the dole to keep you alive while you're looking. It's a package of benefits that millions elsewhere in the world, from China to Africa, would kill for.

Yes, there have been cuts to public services recently. But looking at the looters, does anyone familiar with the UK's underclass really think they were protesting an end to remedial reading classes and youth soccer teams?

As for arguments that the consumer society drove them to it, let's credit them with a modicum of free will. No advert ever forced somebody to burn down a store.

What really shows that this is a cultural problem is the contrast between the looters and those who turned out to defend their communities, like the Turkish shopkeepers in London and the Sikhs in Birmingham. These children of immigrants were members of the same generation, had the same chances, and their parents often arrived in the country with nothing. But they were defending homes, not attacking them.

The crucial difference here is the role of fathers.

I have to admit, when I first heard the news that "29-year old father of four" Mark Duggan had been shot, my first thought was "Oh yes, and how many mothers?" This was unfair, as it turned out, since whatever Duggan's crimes, he was a family man.

But I've encountered plenty of men whose sole involvement in their kids' lives is to turn up with a stolen present at Christmas. For a wide swathe of the English underclass, fathers are semi-mythical figures.

My own ethnically Chinese father could sometimes be a stereotypically strict East Asian dad. But he taught me what it was to be a man, to live up to my responsibilities, respect my family and my culture, work hard, and support myself and others.

They're lessons I will pass on to my own son. They're not lessons that the kids, some of them as young as eight or nine, who took part in the riots were ever taught.

Look to the words of Yimaz Karagoz, a Turkish shopkeeper interviewed by the Guardian, to understand the ultimate cause here. "We have businesses and work hard for what we have. As parents we want our children to work, earn money and be able to buy what they want, not steal it. Our young people know we would be ashamed of them if they were doing this."

Who ever taught the looters shame?

The author is a UK lawyer. opinion@globaltimes.com.cn


Counter Point:  Broken jobs, slashed services led to London burning