Coming off the M602, I could see a mass of people gathered on Cross Lane next to RRG Toyota and my heart jumped into my throat. I have never seen that many people gathered for such a negative reason. Usually when you see a big group of people hanging about it's for a concert or some other similar event. The atmosphere is usually uplifting and positive as those gathered look forward to their dose of excitement or entertainment or pleasure. Coming off the motorway that day was a completely different atmosphere.
I have lived in Salford for almost five years. During that time I have got to know the area and the people really well and have never felt uncomfortable or uneasy walking the streets where I live, even at night on my own. On Tuesday I wasn't even walking; I was in my car and still felt unsettled.
As I turned off Albion Way onto Liverpool Street I locked my car doors and prayed that the lights at Cross Lane, where the crowd was gathered, would be on green. They were. And as I made my way down Liverpool Street towards home, although there were more people than usual milling about, there were thankfully no other signs of trouble.
Throughout the afternoon and into the evening, we watched the TV news and monitored developments on Twitter. Salford precinct is only about half a mile from our house and there are plenty of shops and off-licences nearer than that, so we were rightly concerned. As matters got more out of hand it was easy to imagine rioters and looters driven away from the precinct by the police, only to spill out into residential streets to regroup. This was a pattern we'd seen in London on Monday night and a pattern which had resulted in homes being ransacked and torched, either deliberately or by accident.
We were prepared for trouble, half expecting a brick come through the window, or to hear our car windows being smashed. I spoke to my Mum, who lives in Scotland and had seen the precinct on the news. I told her we were fine and that the trouble was nowhere near us. I reassured her and made a few jokes even though I felt no reassurance myself; it had occurred to me that if someone decided to torch one or both of our cars we would be trapped, as the fire would block our escape route and would likely spread to the building very quickly. Afterwards I packed a bag with a change of clothes and a few of our most precious possessions that couldn't be replaced, which made me feel a bit better, and when I went to bed, the baseball bat came with me.
As it happens, we saw no trouble on our street at all. There were gangs of young lads moving about for most of the night and we could hear banging and general disturbance in the distance, but the next morning I actually felt a little embarrassed at how alarmed I'd been the night before. I took a quick drive around before I set off for work and saw a lot of damage, but nothing too extreme and the worst of it had already been cleared up.
I look back at it all now and I can be more objective. At the time everything appeared much worse than it actually was, but that's not to play down the seriousness of the situation or how it made me feel. In an article on Salford Online, Rev Hayley Matthews, the Chaplain at MediaCityUK, said this:
"as the drinking (‘free beer!’ (stolen from the aforementioned Bargain Booze)) got underway, cars screeched into the area that clearly were the organised element of the criminal culture... I watched teenagers loot an electrical good sole trader’s shop. Don’t get me wrong when I say this, but if they’d nicked the TVs and laptops I could almost understand it, but they simply brought them outside and smashed them to bits in the street. Young girls on alcopops ‘dared’ each other to go and nick something. Lads tried to break onto Lidl and set fire to it, and mothers sent small children in to fill shopping bags with food and beer because they are too young to be arrested.Suddenly a mass exodus: the precint had been compromised and there were shouts of ‘iPhones! Xboxes! Everything! You can get whatever you want!’ Hoodies went up and scarfs went over faces, in they went and more ‘respectable’ cars started arriving to collect the goods. Youths started arriving with hammers and the women and girls backed off. What appalled me most were the amount of families, and I mean kids in the back seat, involved in all of this. Like some kind of surreal supermarket sweep, winner takes all, what a larrrff! Children hung out of their car windows video-ing it all on their mobiles."
Now, looking back the whole situation makes me angry. I detest how that night made me feel. I resent that these people made me feel unsafe in my own home and that they have had their fun at the expense of my community, particularly as it becomes apparent that the perpetrators were by and large from outside the area. If I'm honest, part of me wants to take the baseball bat and wrap it around a few heads to see if I can knock sense into them. I am furious and I am outraged. I'm also worried because I don't know how to fix this and no-one else seems to know either.
In the short term, charging and prosecuting as many of offenders as possible will help to deter others but it doesn't deal with the underlying problem. These were ordinary people: someone's child, someone's mother or father, someone's brother or sister. They get up each day and carry on as normal, playing with their mates, having a pint in the local pub or going to school or work. What happened to make ordinary folk sink to such detestable behaviour?
If you were able to line up all the rioters across the whole country and ask each of them why they did it, you would get a hundred different excuses. We've all seen the news; we all know what people (rioters, observers, victims, police, Councillors and MPs) are saying and everyone seems to have a different opinion. Everything from bankers to Twitter, from police being too heavy-handed, to police being too soft, from the government cuts, to racism, is being blamed. What that says to me is that this is a riot with no Cause, a view that is further reinforced by the indiscriminate nature of the violence: A small business was just as likely a target as a major chain and a bank was no more likely to be hit than a supermarket or a post office. Businesses, offices, shops and even homes were all fair-game and the police only came under attack when they turned up to disperse the vandals and thieves. There's no ideology here except for a greed for material wealth and a lust for violence.
To my mind, the riots are a symptom of a society too rooted in consumerism, too hung up on ownership and too selfish to appreciate how well-off and lucky we all are. As individuals are charged, we can see few distinct patterns emerging; people who are middle class and relatively well off have been just as involved as council tenants who survive on benefits and the unemployed stand side-by-side with the employed in the dock. It's not about poverty (you cannot make this claim when you're on TV wearing designer gear and carrying a Blackberry and be taken seriously) or cuts. There is a deep seated attitude that has infected some individuals and sections of society. It's an attitude that wants whatever it can get for free and that says it's right if I want to do it and can get away with it and only feels remorse at getting caught. To highlight this, I use the example of the lads Hubby and I caught trying to smash a bus-shelter a couple of weeks ago, long before the riots. He picked up a concrete block and was about to use it on the shelter for no other reason than he felt like it.
We raise our children to think and behave like us, to share our beliefs and ideologies. Society moves and changes incredibly slowly and attempts to deliberately shape it have been known to back fire horribly. So how can we fix it? I don't know. I don't have an answer. And that terrifies me almost as much as the riot itself.
For now, you can make the world a better place by helping to identify those responsible. GMP have photos of their 'most wanted' here. Shop a Moron now!
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