Cause of the riots revealed: it's the smoking ban!

I thought I ought to say something about the riots. An appalling business. I'm trying hard not to go into hanging and flogging mode, which is tough, and think creatively about causes.

One obvious thing is that if the police stand around and allow people to nick stuff then a lot of other people will want a piece of the action. Who wouldn't enjoy a night out watching fires and breaking glass with the bonus of coming home with a new TV and some upmarket threads? Sounds good to me. Of course most of us don't do that sort of thing but clearly there's a fair number of people who are less inhibited by those annoying moral scruple things. The original trouble was pretty obviously due to a local Tottenham gang trying to get some retribution from the police who'd gunned down one of their number. Unjustified, undesirable but understandable. But the way it spread was due to the kind of opportunism I've mentioned, no doubt also fuelled by gang culture and I expect some of those shady class war anarchist types who lurk about in society's dark corners and who would have seen the Tottenham troubles as a golden opportunity for giving "the man" a bloody nose.

Let's nail this idea that it had something to do with the oppressed "deprived underclass", desperate for a square meal and some shoes for their unshod urchin children. I'm not even going to give this argument the dignity of examination but what I will do is give you a kind of related hypothesis to mull over.

The basic premise is that people want to be free to do what they want. Now, if "what they want" involves stuff like violence and theft then it's hard to find a society anywhere where there's not a consensus which says this sort of behaviour should be discouraged and punished. But the laws in most countries go way beyond this and all sorts of minor freedoms are restricted in all sorts of ways which are not necessarily supported by consensus.

How about parking as a for instance? Continuing my series of undergraduate reminiscences, I often used to drive the couple of miles to university and I could park the car, completely legally and completely free, just a short stroll from the lecture theatre.  Just try doing that in Manchester today, or anywhere else for that matter. More pertinently, given recent events, I used to drive regularly to Tottenham to watch the might Spurs play and park just a stone's throw (excuse unfortunate metaphor) from the ground. You'd find it hard to park for free in the same borough these days.

I find this really annoying and I'm not at all sure it's justified. It has more to do with local authorities seeing parking charges as a revenue stream than merely a way of regulating supply and demand for parking spaces. I also find the smoking ban annoying and unjustified. I imagine that other people would say the same about any number of other restrictions on individual freedom.

If you try and squeeze an inflated balloon into a box, you will find that when you push one bit in, another bit will pop out, the volume of air in the balloon being a constant that no amount of squeezing will reduce. I'm suggesting that an individual's desire for freedom of action is also a constant and that if you restrict people in certain ways, this desire for freedom is likely to pop out, balloon-like, in other ways and those ways may be very unwelcome.

It may not be the complete answer but my recommendation is this: cut people a bit of slack. Get rid of a few laws, like the smoking ban. Make it easier to park the damn car. Abolish the hunting ban. Stop nagging people to death with all this green nonsense: having to shove different bits of waste into different bags is enough to make anyone want to start a riot. I'm not sure that all this would absolutely guarantee no rioting in the future, ever, but it would certainly help.

If people aren't on the streets, they won't riot. Want to get people off the streets? Let them smoke in pubs.