Yesterday’s political violence in London provided a striking snapshot of the flailing authority of both the traditional left and the police.
Brendan O’Neill
So, what was that all about? The morning after the riotous night before, how can we explain the gathering of thousands of students in the political heart of London, and their subsequent leaking into Whitehall and Oxford Street, where they smashed up the Treasury building, did some damage to Topshop, and frightened the life out of Charles and Camilla?
None of the official or radical explanations for this night of political violence rings true. Neither the Metropolitan Police’s predictable denunciations of ‘violent elements’ hellbent on destroying London, nor left-wing commentators’ impassioned hymns to a new 1968-style movement for progress, captures what took place in London yesterday.
Instead, what these events reveal, for anyone who cares to look, is the profound crisis of legitimacy of both the forces of the state and the forces of the left – with the state utterly incapable of properly policing the protesters, and the traditional organisations of the left utterly incapable of cohering them around a political ideal.