David Hamilton

The Great Disconnect: Why Riots were Inevitable

We have a society where almost half the eligible population feel that there is no point in voting - that the mechanisms that run our country have nothing to do with them. For certain age groups, such as the young, that proportion becomes the majority. So why do most young people feel that there is no point in voting, that there is no point in expressing their point of view about how the world around them works?

The answer is simply that our political parties do not reflect what the young think or believe. And that comes about because the voting system allows our political parties to ignore huge chunks of the electorate. One of the points that I made during the AV campaign was that our current voting system shuts out sections of our society - minorities, but large minorities nonetheless.

Once you have a large group of disaffected, energetic people, conflict becomes inevitable. All it needs is a trigger. Of course, if you were to ask the rioters about the underlying cause of the trouble they would be highly unlikely to identify the political system. Which is because these people have stopped thinking of the political system as being even vaguely relevant to them (assuming they ever did, which is highly unlikely).

Voting reform was voted down by the 28.5% of the population who had a vested interest in keeping a system that works (very) well for them. The political parties (one in particular) wheeled out the block vote of their core supporters to protect the interests of the parties themselves (which, intriguingly, involved their supporters voting against their own interests as voters). With our political systems remaining locked down by a self-interested minority, that many, many people feel shut out and excluded is inevitable.

Someone who has a vested interested in society doesn’t attack it. Those who are rioting are disconnected from the rest of us, disconnected from the results of their actions, disconnected from their neighbours. Disconnection isn’t a new thing - there have always been disaffected groups in any society, and teens inherently disconnect - however unrest of the scale that we’ve seen this week, especially following last year’s student riots, is a clear indicator of a deeper problem.

It doesn’t justify what they’re doing - such violence and destruction is completely and utterly wrong. However that doesn’t make it any less inevitable.