How does the recent history of law and order policy help to explain the official reaction to “the riots” of August 2011?

“It is plain that he has done nothing which deserves death. I will scourge him, and then he shall go free… But they, with loud voices, insisted on their demand that he should be crucified; and their voices carried the day.”

Introduction

On the 4^th August 2011 Mark Duggan, a 29 year-old black man, was shot and killed by police in Tottenham, North London. The following day, at 5pm, 300 people walked from the Broadwater Farm estate where Duggan had lived to Tottenham police station calling for “justice”. At 8.20pm two police cars, left unattended on an adjacent street, were attacked, set alight and “the riots” began.

For the four days that followed “feral youth” roamed the streets of London, terrorizing its citizens, trashing and looting high streets, torching buildings. The most televisual of events, perfectly suited for the age of 24-hour news, this was, at least, how “the riots” were portrayed in the mass media.

This, as it happens, was also how Britain’s political leaders saw them. Obliged to return prematurely from their summer holidays, the Prime Minister and his deputy, the Home Secretary, the Leader of the Opposition and London’s Mayor were beseeched by the media to facilitate the restoration of order, to supply answers and, later, to provide suitable reparation for the victims and punishment for those responsible.

Even as the fires burned, social commentators and stakeholders sought to influence, desperate to be first to provide the definitive explanation for the unrest. Online and in newspapers, opinion pieces covering the broadest imaginable spectrum of judgments were published; the same or similar figures were afforded radio and television airtime to “explain” the causes for the riots; still more heated debate ran rampant online. All “answers”, whether tonally punitive or moralistic, despairing or sympathetic, of press or politician, were united by one thing: preordination. In the days during and immediately after the riots the explanations massively exceeded the availability of facts that might be thought essential to inform them, yet precisely served the political outlook of those that provided them.

Crime and law and order policy in the UK, once an issue for experts and academics and free from outside influence and interference, is no longer characterized by reflection, investigation and study. Instead the approach, of both the political and the mainstream media class, is based upon reaction, rapid response and a rush to the retributive right.

The sense that public policy and expertise have become largely removed from each other is hardly new and far from revelatory. The savvy politician seeking to be “successful” is more aware than ever that success in politics does not necessarily mean getting the policy “right” but is as much to be found in mobilizing the support of both the media and the electorate – often viewed as one and the same. While some eagerness to appeal to public and media support can be found in all areas of policy-making, in none has the distance between expertise and political decision-making become greater and more visibly enshrined and institutionalized, than in the realm of law and order.

Just as Pontius Pilate deferred to a baying mob in the sentencing to death of Jesus Christ, so we find today’s leaders doing the same, as manifested in the popular press and mass media. The difference, as I will demonstrate, is that while Pilate demonstrably goes against what he knows and believes, the alignment between the views of our politicians on law and order, and those of the baying mob is all but total: no resistance is needed; no internal wrangling need take place. The question is not, therefore, how much consensus is there between the different and disparate stakeholders, but how did such a comprehensive convergence occur at all? As the consensus amongst criminologists appears to be that the turning point came in the early years of the 1990s, this essay will look most closely at the relevant events and issues of the start of that decade. I will then discuss the contributions these can be seen to have made to the policies and rhetoric of government officials, and opinions of key media figures in response to the riots.

While the timing and occurrence of the riots themselves were impossible to predict with any precision, over the course of this essay I intend to demonstrate that the rhetorical and judicial responses could have been scripted months, if not years, in advance.  My goal here is not to offer my own response to the riots of August 2011, but to demonstrate that the official response, while intellectually inadequate, was utterly predictable and subservient to the demands of politics, the public and the press.

The Response to the Riots

On the morning of Tuesday August 9th, after three nights of unrest in Britain’s capital, Prime Minister David Cameron arrived back in Britain declaring the riots to be “criminality pure and simple. And there is absolutely no excuse for it.” For Cameron “the young people stealing flat screen televisions and burning shops that was not about politics or protest, it was about theft.” Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg similarly declared the rioting to be “needless, opportunist theft and violence – nothing more and nothing less”, while London’s Mayor described the events as “acts of sheer criminality” .

Cameron’s dismissive judgement that “[t]here is no justification for the aggression the police and the public faced, or for the damage to property” bore a strong resemblance to the view of Margaret Thatcher following the Brixton riots of 1981, when she declared that “Whatever the problems, nothing, but nothing, justifies what happened.”

The political verdict that the violence was the act of “criminals” and “criminal gangs within the urban underclass”, riots without reason, was in close step with that of the mainstream press. The newspaper The Sun’s editorial of August 7th stated that “The mob that turned the centre of Tottenham into a smoking ruin were not seeking justice. They are criminal thugs who were hell bent on theft, arson and violence.” For the popular press the answers as to “why” the riots occurred were simple and easily identified, with no need for further exploration into “root causes” and certainly no call to understand the situations of the rioters themselves.

For Professor John Solomos of City University the popular verdict suited very much [into] the Government’s requirement that any particular policy or action/inaction of their own not be viewed as a significant contributing factor to the riots:  “Cameron was keen to use this notion to distance the violence from any policies initiated by his administration and to construct them as the outcome of a breakdown of morality and a sense of order in some families and communities.” In other words, it needed not to be seen as result of governmental failings requiring governmental solutions.

With no significant pressure placed on them to do so, the government was therefore able to dismiss/ignore any solutions that could be considered “welfarist” in nature, regardless of the merits of doing so. Instead emphasis and attention was afforded to the area most easily actioned, that of punishment, with the Prime Minister declaring “if you are old enough to commit these crimes, you are old enough to face the punishment.” Prison sentences handed down to individuals convicted of riot-related offences were reported as being 25% longer than normal and the rate of imprisonment was 70% higher for those crimes that took place within the context of the riots. A senior clerk in Her Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service was reported to have circulated instructions to court clerks that they should disregard normal sentencing guidelines and instead impose tougher sentences than usual. The government was evidently eager to send a message, not simply, or even really, to those involved in the riot but to the media and to the greater public.

Stafford Scott, a consultant on racial equality and community engagement, has said that “seeing the riots as linked to criminality and gang culture has made it difficult to give voice to calls to provide more social and economic resources for the communities that live in the most deprived areas”. In a so-called time of “austerity”, when community services are not just not increasing but being cut, this represents not merely a political inconvenience – it would be portrayed as rewarding the rioters – but an economic one as well.

The rioters, rather than being given too little, had been given too much and expected even more. The answer could only be penal: punishment as deterrent rather than as a right response or execution of justice. The answer was to respond better next time, to provide the police with more resources and broader, stronger powers to act. While government for most of the 20^th century was characteristically “welfarist”, in Britain in the 21^st century it is politically suicidal to be seen as anything less than “tough on crime”. Next I shall be looking at how this situation came about.

The Roots of the Response

While the government might have been keen to isolate the riots and the rioters from any political context, to minimise the intellectual and investigative scope of the response, we are not obliged to do the same with our analysis of the response. Far from unusual or unlikely, the government behaved exactly as could have been predicted, with the ramped-up rhetoric and raised-stakes of the sentencing instructions epitomising the character of cross-party criminal policy of the past twenty years and more.

While sociologist David Garland points to the 1970s as the time when the public and political mood changed, as several decades of welfarism gave way to a vastly more punitive governmental approach to crime, Lord Windelsham and Jon Silverman separately identify the early 90s as marking the period when law and order policy became a key political battleground, with public and media opinion overtaking expertise as an influence on political practice. Ann James and John Raine, similarly, ascribe the transformation to a shift in ideology under Margaret Thatcher which saw the welfare consensus replaced by the culture of the market and government adopt a neo-liberal managerial approach.

Garland notes that a number of features of law and order policy that would once have been thought unlikely if not impossible, such as “mandatory sentences, victims’ rights, community notification laws, private policing, “law and order politics” and an emphatic belief that “prison works”… have become taken-for-granted features of contemporary crime policy”. For most of the twentieth century the British (and to a lesser extent, the American) approach to law and order, had been characterized by the directionally developmental march of institutionally “penal welfarist” arrangements. He therefore finds it counter-intuitive that it should perform an about-turn in the 1970s when “punitive sentiments and expressive gestures” that appear “oddly archaic and anti-modern” began to reappear in official policy.

One crucial element was the normalisation of crime. Although the riots were themselves far from ordinary they were, in some ways an exaggerated form of a negative experience which we have come to accept as ordinary and therefore part and parcel of day-to-day living. In that vein, we do not think of crime as something that the government (in the form of mobilised police resouces) can really prevent, not entirely, nor do we see crime prevention at a social level as something into which it is worth investing resources. It is, instead “a fact of modern life, like pollution or the perils of heavy road traffic that has to be accommodated.” We have, ourselves, become as responsible for crime prevention as the police.

Paradoxically, while this sense of the limited capacity of government to control or reduce crime has been allowed to develop, democratic electoral politics still do not allow for its admission. This contradiction has, according to former government minister Lord Windelsham, led to “the emergence of punitiveness as a reaction which can be exhibited to the general public even if, in anything beyond the short term, it is likely to exacerbate the social blight caused by such extensive criminality.” For Garland “[a] show of force against individuals is used to repress any acknowledgement of the state’s inability to control crime to acceptable levels. A willingness to deliver harsh punishments to convicted offenders magically compensates a failure to deliver security to the public at large.” Windelsham similarly describes such posturing as demonstrated by David Cameron on August 8^th as nothing more than “a rhetorical smokescreen”.

Lord Windelsham, in his dissection of the politics surrounding the 1993 Criminal Justice Act, points to it as a pivotal moment in the gradual and extended transfer of primary influence over criminal policy. This is not to say that the responsibility for this shift – from experts and institutions to the media and the public – lies solely with politicians, but that a degree of accommodation from key figures – such as Ken Clarke’s retreat over a number of contentious aspects of this bill – are seen as some of the earliest and most significant examples of politicians altering law and order policy in the light of sustained and strident popular pressure to do so.

From here on, Windelsham argues, “greater reliance on punishment and heightened sensitivity towards public opinion were soon to emerge as the central planks of a radically reconstructed policy towards criminal offending.” In his tenure as Home Secretary Michael Howard, was viewed by both Windelsham and Jon Silverman – the BBC’s former Home Affairs correspondent – as having been responsible for the greater politicization of law and order policy, for bringing it more into the public realm and further away from the influence of academics and institutional experts. Windelsham describes Howard as being “generally dismissive of professional expertise, including at times advice from his own officials, sensing that the general public was looking for a greater emphasis on punishment than on the rehabilitation of offenders”.

This he was more than willing to deliver and Silverman similarly identifies Howard as being a man of politics before policy, in contrast to predecessors such as Willie Whitelaw and Douglas Hurd. For Michael Howard “Everything was political. Crime was a big political issue because it resonated on the doorsteps and for him, if you made an impact on crime, you made an impact on politics.” Ascribing to Michael Howard a large share of the responsibility to prioritising public perception might be to give him undue blame (or credit). He may or may not have been the one who “fired the starting pistol which set off the penal arms race between the parties” and would ultimately lead to what academic Michael Tonry describes as “the most hyperbolic, anti-crime rhetoric of any in Europe, language that elsewhere characterizes right-wing fringe parties”. Looking back it is clear that the dash that would lead Britain to the populist, authoritarian right would have happened irrespective of whether Michael Howard’s Conservative party decided to join it. Tony Blair, as Shadow Home Secretary and subsequently as leader of the Labour Party and Prime Minister is seen as just as important a protagonist.

The 1992 General Election defeat triggered a sea change in the Labour Party’s approach to law and order. Under Blair “Labour adjusted its traditional libertarian stance and style of political discourse on crime and punishment to suit the hardening political mood.” That Blair’s “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” should become one of the most resonant political catchphrases of the subsequent generation is as much to do with the signal it sounded for the national popular and media approach to law and order, as it was a war cry that would lead ultimately to Downing Street. As criminal policy was becoming, for the first time, a serious electoral battleground, Blair identified the importance of avoiding being “outflanked on the right” – he might not have expected to win the battle, but it was one that it was crucial not to lose outright.

Garland is deeply critical of the politicization of law and order policy and what he describes as “the new populism”, in no small part because, where often politicization is accompanied by positional polarity, penal politics has meant a “narrowing of debate and a striking convergence of the policy proposals of all the major political parties”. Cameron, as he struck out rhetorically at the “thugs” and “criminal gangs”, promising “more arrests” and accelerated court processes, could do so with impunity. By 2011 in Britain, when it came to law and order policy, there was no such place as too far to the right and no room for a liberal perspective.

But was it the politicians, the press or the public that made it this way? The tightening of the relationship between criminal policy and the popular press is surely no coincidence. Still, it is difficult to say whether or not the politicians were attuned to and channelling the national public priorities, as reflected in the press, or whether the press was reflecting the concerns of the public at all and seeking to draw the politicians’ attention to them. Each would blame the other, with the Daily Mail’s Editor Paul Dacre admitting in 1993 that “this newspaper does seek to articulate the concern of its readers and, thereby, harden the response from the Tory administration”, while for Geoff Mulgan, an adviser to Prime Minister’s Brown and Blair, “it is a proper function of democracy that government should sometimes ignore sound evidence and follow a contrary path.”

This path was one that the Government, in response to the riots, would prove more than willing to follow as anti-intellectual catchwords such as “common sense” rode roughshod over information and expertise. Criminology has become an academic discipline that serves only itself,  with little influence on policy and political positioning. As law and order policy has become a major political battlefield, expertise and academic study has been displaced by the media as a political resource.

That little or no reference was made to academic studies of crime, or expertise in criminal behaviour does not mean that such information did not exist, or could not be commissioned, merely that the political interest in it, with regard[s] to the riots, does not. One such paper was published before the riots in 2011 and which sought to explore the – long assumed – relationship between inequality and rioting. This study ultimately found that, rather than inequality causing riots, a lesser privileged group was more likely to commit violence only if they considered themselves to be denied the opportunity to succeed, or to improve their social standing.

In November 2011 the Guardian, in conjunction with the LSE, released a study largely based on interviews with those involved in the riots. While this study must be viewed as inherently self-serving and, at least to some degree, unreliable in methodology, it at least offered an alternative reading of the riots. This naturally meant its lifespan would be limited to the news cycle, as it was immediately dismissed by the authorities while the “tough on crime” juggernaut rolled on.

By “a contrary path” Mulgan also means one driven by results and in keeping with the managerialist, market-based approach to the performing of government functions as adopted and promoted during the Thatcher years. This inevitably resulted in an outlook that prioritised short-term, small-scale victories, akin to those of the business cycle, over long-term, transformative achievements. James and Raine would agree: “Instead of making policy through recognized institutions within a climate of agreement and with the support of key professional bodies, the Government sought to deliver through the medium of management.” It had become less important to adopt the right policy and more important to enact that which would deliver measurable, demonstrable and immediate results.  Although the Guardian may not like it, riot arrests figures and prison sentences provide exactly that.

Conclusion

The government’s response to the riots of 2011 therefore represents a convergence of convenient forces. It is simultaneously reflective of the economic imperatives of the era, the emergence of an unsympathetic national sensibility, the displacement of expertise by managerialism and a two-decade long race between political parties to be seen in the media as the least tolerant of crime and the toughest on criminals. In such circumstances, a more liberal state could afford to do no more than a conservative one. A Labour government could afford to be no more generous or offer more compassionate solutions to these problems because they were just as complicit in the construction of a climate of punishment.

Would the response have been different had the riots happened thirty years ago? In the urban unrest that characterized the 1980s, we have evidence upon which to draw. Margaret’s Thatcher’s government also condemned the riots as “criminal”. The difference, one feels, is that the political climate of the 1980s required that the government possess at least an informed understanding of the social and economic factors that contributed to the unrest.

In 1981 the government commissioned Lord Scarman to author a comprehensive study into the causes of the Brixton Riots. The conclusion that they were “not pre-planned but the spontaneous welling-up of the feelings of angry young men, most of whom were black, against what they saw as a hostile police force” demonstrates an intellectual interest and an effort at engagement. This further reveals a willingness on the part of the government to understand the underlying causes, issues and grievances behind the violence, to solve them for their own value rather than merely to prevent further outbreaks. 2011’s riots saw no such efforts at engagement and, as Solomos puts it, “a strong theme in the official response to the riots has been to see them as issueless riots”. While the body politic in the 1980s was equally outraged by the immediate effects of the riots and inclined towards the punitative response it was  at least not unwilling to listen to opposing views and entertain the analysis of expert bodies and experienced individuals and institutions.

Thirty years on from the Brixton riots, with the distance between expertise and criminal policy comfortably wide, and no political advantage to be had from reducing it, we can expect nothing more influential than the Guardian/LSE study to emerge.

The answer in 2011, which would prove populist as well as economically expedient, simultaneously satisfying the major media institutions and their audiences, was that the riots were their own cause. Rather than being a symptom of a sick culture, one which might call for a cultural remedy for which only government had the capacity to instigate, the solution lay in the communities and with the families of the rioters who had, themselves, failed Britain. Government power to punish the rioters would be maximised, responsibility to help them reduced to nil.

Just as Henry Mencken declared that “no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public”, in Britain no politician has, for the past two decades, suffered electoral disapprobation for underestimating the public stomach for punitiveness. Whether the media, the politicians or a natural shift in the public priorities is most responsible for the changes that occurred in the arena of criminal policy matters little: that a transformation took place is beyond dispute and the response to the riots was therefore pre-ordained. The Prime Minister, in his first statement as well as all subsequent ones, reached strong and certain conclusions, repeatedly referencing punishment, sentencing and individual culpability. Just two days after the first wave of violence, no more information was needed than was available. The response was set in stone.

A fully referenced version of this essay is available upon request. © Nick Christian 2012 

The suggestion that the universe could consciously conspire to engineer the meeting of mind, bodies and souls is, of course, preposterous. The very definition of solipsism it places the self and the other at the centre of the infinite continuum of time and space.

An awareness of this is not, however, enough to deny the feeling and the feeling is all.

In many ways it’s torturous: Out of breath, appetite extinguished, attention lost to everything except her. No longer are you your own but at the mercy of a mind that is determined to focus on this and not that. It has to feel like that, though. Agony and ecstasy, that’s how you know it’s real.

The essay got written by the way, but it wasn’t good.

The sense that you have encountered someone who will have changed, if not everything, then very many very significant things in your life so seldomly appears and be so easily dismissed and squandered. Don’t.

Stars might not align, but you should believe that they have.

In no particular order (apart from the first one):

• EMA – Past Life Martyred Saints

• M83 –  Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming
  

• Guillemots – Walk The River
  

We cannot account, or take responsibility, for the actions of a ragtag militia who, in their jubilant discovery, brought a violent end to an era of despotism. That Qaddafi should not have been executed is my view on the subject but irrelevant, for I never suffered under his tyrannical rule and nor was I present at his death, and therefore able to meaningfully appreciate the circumstances surrounding it. It cannot be undone.

My concern, and where I feel more attention should be focussed, is with the role of NATO forces in the death of the dictatorship. While Western leaders have been keen to credit the Libyan rebels with the overthrow of the regime there can be no doubt that that NATO planes, having carried out more than 30,000 sorties since UN Resolution 1973 was passed, played a significant role, beyond its original mandate.

Article 4 of UN Resolution 1973

“Authorizes Member States that have notified the Secretary-General, acting nationally or through regional organizations or arrangements, and acting in cooperation with the Secretary-General, to take all necessary measures, notwithstanding paragraph 9 of resolution 1970 (2011), to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, including Benghazi,”

The explicit purpose of UN Resolution 1973 was therefore to prevent a massacre of the people of Benghazi, as Qaddafi appeared to be threatening; while several international figures had decried the Libyan government as illegitimate nowhere in the resolution is there mention of a secondary aim of regime change, or even of assisting the rebels in their ultimate goal of its overthrow. Whether or not the key instigators and authors of the resolution meant for the mission to mutate in such a way we do not know, but what we do know is that had they included such language in the document, the Resolution could not have passed the Security Council vote.

Even as it was, the resolution which authorized NATO action in Libya only passed the Security Council with the slimmest of margins: while neither Russia nor China blocked its passage as they could have, neither explicitly supported it either. We must assume that concerns over mission creep had already been raised and allayed in order to achieve abstentions of Russia and China as well as Arab League support. These concerns would appear to have been justified as, only a few weeks into the mission, China criticised the NATO operation for overreach while Russia called for NATO to bring an “end to the indiscriminate use of force”. These calls went unheeded.

It has been suggested that, with the Libyan operation ostensibly a success, such interventions may be more likely to take place in the future. My view is that the manner in which the mission was extended, far beyond the parameters of the mandate outlined above, makes any future crises far less likely to be dealt with militarily, regardless of the extent to which the situation calls for force. As we’ve recently seen in Syria it doesn’t take much to turn an abstention into a veto.

Of course mission creep in Libya does not explain why we have seen no action against Assad in Syria. It has, however, made it easier to understand. If Western countries, in assisting a people under threat, cannot be trusted to wield their military power responsibly, then next time they will not be trusted to wield it at all. As significantly, if not moreso, support for engagement will be weaker.

Accusations that, by actively picking a winner in a civil dispute, Britain and chums engaged in behaviour that was paternalistic to the point of pseudo-colonial are, in my view, completely fair. Seven months ago I supported an intervention that was limited in scope but I did support it. Take me back seven months, today, and I wouldn’t.

Earlier this year I wrote an essay about humanitarian intervention, and the competing legal, political and moral contributory factors. My conclusion was that considerations of a political nature carry far more weight than any other and that this largely explains the appearance of inconsistency in policy. Although relatively well received, the paper was criticised for not looking in more depth at NATO’s activity in Libya and, moreover, the interventions that didn’t happen in other parts of the Middle East.

The rebellions that occurred across the Middle East were met with varying degrees of government resistance and rapprochement, with significant concessions made in some countries and all out war waged against the civilian populations of others. Libya was where Western media attention was focussed but the Syrian, Yemeni and Bahraini regimes all employed (and are employing) tactics as violent and oppressive, if not moreso, than those of Qaḏḏāfī.

Although I did reference the action in passing, at the time it felt far too “live” an issue for any meaningful analysis or commentary. It probably still is but, without writing an essay on the subject, I thought it was worth looking at the political differences between Libya and the other countries in the region. Gross simplification of how international relations works coming up:

Syria

Intervention? Sanctions, no military action.

Why not?

1. Next door to Israel
2. Actually has Weapons of Mass Destruction
3. Exports from China to Syria worth upwards of $2billion
4. Russian investment in Syria valued at $19.1billion plus $1.1billion in exports (mostly military hardware).
5. Any action tabled would therefore fall victim to inevitable UNSC veto.

Yemen

Intervention? Condemnation of Saleh, no sanctions or threat of military action.

Why not?

1. No (recent) history of beef.
2. Scant media attention paid to the uprising – no public demands for intervention
3. Geographically isolated – no strategic interest.
4. Important battleground in the War on Terror – cooperating with the US.

Bahrain

Intervention? No condemnation, sanctions or military action.

Why not?

1. Closely allied with Saudi Arabia.
2. Host of the US Fifth Naval Fleet.
3. Buying its weapons off the US.

Saudi Arabia

Intervention? No chance.

Why not?

1. Uprising choked off before it could gain traction.
2. Media too tightly controlled to report freely and accurately on protests.
3. Close relationship with the US in combating Global War on Terror.
4. Supplies 19.5% of world oil reserves
5. Holds – along with the other oil exporters – 2.6% of US debt.
6. America’s best customer.

Libya

Intervention? NATO airstrikes.

Why?

1. Did not have Weapons of Mass Destruction.
2. Qaḏḏāfī no real asset in the war on terror.
3. No direct threat to Israel.
4. Supplies only 3% of world oil reserves.
5. The Arab League said intervention was fine by them - they didn’t really like Qaḏḏāfī anyway.
6. (Former) State sponsor of terrorism.

A few weeks ago it was the bins, followed closely by a mooting of an increase in the national speed limit. On Tuesday Dave was desperate to announce that Internet Service Providers would soon be making pornography an “opt-in” provision. Besides being seemingly live-streamed from a Melanie Phillips wet dream (and by “wet”, I obviously mean “sandpaper dry”) this last one rather reminds me of this:

As a friend of mine neatly hash-tagged it: #britainisrunbygibbons.

I’d like to believe it, but maybe not. I wouldn’t go so far as to say “it’s so stupid it’s ingenious” but I suspect they think it is. That each policy could be explained to (or by) a three year-old, is not just entirely deliberate but, mores the point, indicative of the cynicism of the current ruling class. As stupid as they seem, that’s nothing as to how stupid they think WE are.

For Cameron, Osbourne, Pickles, Gove and whoever else you care to name (not Clegg though, I can’t believe he actually does anything), these are the issues they think really mean something to the people – the equivalent of the Roman emperor distracting the masses with gladiatorial exhibitions while depriving them of basic sanitation and watching them die of dysentery.

For while the government has been dangling its car keys in front of us – and by the way, Liam Fox is every inch the car key – it continues to merrily shred the very fabric of our society. Yesterday saw a significant milestone passed in the marketisation of the NHS, while this morning the first effects of the government’s decision to ditch the EMA was revealed and – guess what? – it turns out fewer poor kids are doing A Levels this year. The rate of public jobs being cut continues to rapidly outpace private sector job creation – just as we were told it wouldn’t – with youth unemployment about to hit the nausea-inducing heights seen in (royally fucked Greece), Portugal and Ireland.

All the while we are expected to be appeased by gifts of increased speed and reduced porn.

Won’t somebody please think of the children?

To non-cyclists that won’t mean an awful lot, but to those familiar with the by-bike London to Brighton journey, Ditchling Beacon represents the end – either of the ride or of the rider. Rising 139 metres in just shy of a mile, while hardly Everest or even a Yorkshire Dale, it’s  pretty steep. Most riders can expect to reach in to their gearbox and be spinning on the biggest cog by about half way but on my single speed, my options were somewhat more limited. Prior to doing it I didn’t think it could be done and while I found that, in one go it could not be, in the end, after three evenly spaced 30 second pauses, it was. Still as I rested at the top, glad to have made it, I felt the achievement belonged to the bike.

People have questioned the logic of a bike with only one gear. Why, they wonder, would you deny yourself the advancements designed to multiply your effort on a downhill and save it when you’re going back up again? Is it a “hipster” thing?

While I can’t deny that my bicycle is very pretty or that he looks far more at home in the Old Streets and Hoxton Squares and Curtain Roads of Shoreditch than I do, for me, still, the function is all. Well, almost all. A single speed bike is a wonderfully simple thing: remove the gears from a bike and you remove most of what can go wrong or, at least, most of the bits that are tedious and difficult to repair when they do.

My old multi-geared bikes used to go wrong all the time and it was always in the gears. It would start with an annoying but largely cosmetic, rhythmic clicking noise, which would then progressing to a less than cosmetic paralysis of a chain ring, before ultimately leaving me with… a single speed bike.

The most complicated bits of a bike, not to mention the bits with the most perplexing nomenclature, are also all related to the gears: derailleur, cassette, bottom bracket, sprocket – while probably not as intimidating as they sound, none of those components do not do exactly what it says on the tin. Even it it did it would probably be called something else and you’d be far too embarrassed to ask for it anyway.

My new bike has none of those things and as a result there is nothing now, or very little, that I don’t think I can repair on my own. Replacing a chain is a relatively simple fix and the frequent flat tyres – a hazard - are a doddle. I may at some point have to replace a brake cable but given that it’s just a thing that pulls a thing that stops the bike I feel I understand how they work and how, with maybe some Youtubed tuitional assistance, I could do it on my own.

One other question which is always asked is: how do you get up hills? The answer to which, now, is like this:

http://bit.ly/mP0COH

It doesn’t look like much but the wobbly blob below is my proud first attempt at a panna cotta. Although the concoction calls for loose leaf gelatin, it’s nowhere near as complex or intimidating as you might imagine.

For the basic PC, simply soak three leaves of gelatin in cold water to soften, then dissolve along with 25g of sugar into a 500ml mixture of equal parts cream and milk heated to a simmer. Add any flavouring you like (vanilla is pretty standard but I reckon you can use your imagination, and I intend to use mine) and pour into moulds – ramekins are recommended but again I think you can use anything that will fit in the fridge – and leave to set.

An hour an a half later, just flop them onto a plate and serve. This recipe takes a bit of time but I can’t overstate how simple and, if you’re a dairy fiend, sumptuously creamy it is as well.

In the search for something to do with the leftover breadcrumbs from breakfast (see the earlier post) I came across this recipe for black pepper panna cotta which I’m excited about having a bash at.

French Toast with Blackberries, Strawberries, Maple Syrup* and BACON. Could maybe have done with some crème fraiche for balance and blackberries were perhaps ill advised but other that I’d call it a gastronomical grand slam. NB. Cutting the bread into bite-size circles is great for consistency but does result in a lot of wasted trimmings; I would suggest to pre-empt this with a decent breadcrumb-based recipe.

Photo courtesy of Renjujoseph: http://www.flickr.com/photos/renjujoseph/

Cycling in London will never be perfectly safe and we all know this. By virtue of being more visible on the roads, forcing motorists to learn to accommodate for our presence, the increasing number of cyclists is nonetheless making it safer. Unfortunately this also means more inexperienced, more complacent and more dangerous cyclists on the roads and these days I actually feel more at risk, not less, every time I go out on my bike. As other cyclists being better would put me very much at ease here are my top main key crucial bits of advices. Have at it.

1. Ditch the headphones.
This is fucking obvious but, since I’d estimate that at least 1 in 5 cyclists now ride wearing either earbuds or full headsets, it bears a mention. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and allow that you perhaps aren’t blasting out the dnb to the exclusion of all external noise and, in fact, you probably can hear the sirens coming. Still, that you’re so bored on your commute that you’re in need of entertainment tells me that you simply aren’t paying enough attention. On a standard half hour ride through the capital you’ll be confronted with a myriad of crucial, life-saving signals, and you, you contemptible berk, are missing most of them. If I’ve given you too much credit and you have cranked the volume up to eleven, when that ambulance you didn’t hear coming knocks you down, this one’s for you.

2. Ride slower through traffic.
No, that pedestrian shouldn’t have been crossing blindly between buses and technically you were in the right. Good job. As you’re hurtling over your handlebars having had to slam on the brakes and go from 20mph to 0 in a yard of road, technically being in the right doesn’t count for much. That pedestrians sometimes cross in stupid places, and sometimes do so without looking out for anything less large or loud than a motorbike, needs to be as much your problem as it is theirs. If you can’t see between the two vehicles in front you need to be in a position to stop in time. Kill your speed, not yourself (or someone else).

3. Do it or don’t do it.
A general principle tip, this one. Mirror, signal, maneuver is the primary routine we’re taught in driving lessons and it is, if anything, even more important when cycling. If you’re prepared to make your move you will be in a much stronger position when you do so and will complete it far more confidently and cleanly. Hesitation will get you killed so if you’re not sure if you can cross in time don’t even try.

4. Check over your shoulder.
I seldom see other riders doing this which is baffling to me as it seems so fundamental. Those that need to heed this tip the most are, sadly those least likely to do so as, if you can’t hear what’s coming up behind you, then you’re probably less likely to be looking out for it. [Hint: I'm talking about number 1's] Even the aurally alert could probably do with more of an awareness of what’s coming up their arse because G-Whizz’s (not to mention other cyclists) are damn near silent and to get tangled up with one would do nothing for your cred.

5. Overtake with a car’s width, or don’t overtake.
Related to number 4, this one is about not making any assumptions as to the next move of your intended overtakee. Just because they have maintained a consistent path for the last 100 yards doesn’t mean they’ll continue doing so for the next 50. Equally important is that you have no idea if they’re alert to your presence, unless you’ve been responsibly dinging your bell as you approach and even then, y’know, headphones. Anyway, you certainly can’t see the pothole or drain that’s going to cause them to veer wildly into your path, so make sure you don’t have to.

6. Keep your eye off the clock.
It’s okay, I get it, we’re all a little bit competitive. But if your primary MO is to get to work quickly, rather than alive, you will severely reduce your likelihood of achieving the latter – at which point who cares about the former? I noticed it myself when I went out this afternoon on a timed ride: at first I was worried about losing precious seconds, so pushed it at traffic lights – a late amber is practically green, right? – took a few chances at junctions and generally (briefly) paid a lot less attention to anything other than my need to get from A to A via B as quickly as possible. The only place it’s safe to time yourself is on a track so make sure you leave enough time to get to work and forget the clock. Relatedly, ignore other cyclists who may be going faster than you on better bikes. I am certain you can keep up with them, I’m certain you don’t have to prove it and I’m certain the undertaker isn’t going to give a shit.

7. Traffic Light Etiquette
This could be a blog post all of its own or, equally, could be summed up in four words: don’t piss me off. All you’re doing is pissing me off. Traffic lights are where cyclist bunch up and therefore where its most important that you respect your fellow rider. Few do. A. Don’t overtake someone on the line if they’re inevitably going to be quicker than you off it. Doing so will only piss them off. B. Stop trying to gain that fractional advantage by edging ahead of the other bikes and watching everything except the lights. You will ultimately make no extra ground and be swiftly passed by non-twats. C. Only skip lights where you’re absolutely certain you’ll provide no impediment or alarm to anyone else. Clue: there aren’t many of these. Zipping through a four-way pedestrian green is stupid because another cyclist could easily be doing the same. Bang!

8. Signal
The kindest thing you can do for those around you – be they cyclists, motorists or pederists – is to inform them of your intended action. Whether it’s with an arm signal, frantic bell-chime or simply by shouting “Oi, wally I’m coming up behind you.” everyone can make better decisions themselves if they have a better sense of your future movements.

9. Let he who is without sin etc etc