Hoodie? Check. Shopping Trolley? Check. Phone Camera? Check - Okay, let's riot

Two phrases kept going in and out of my head last night as I sat watching, from just after 10 p.m through until around 12:45 a.m, the events on Tottenham High Road unfold. Firstly the words of Joe Strummer in the song "White Riot," but secondly and perhaps more bizarrely Margaret Thatchers famous interview to Womans Own on the 23rd September 1987 from which the "no such thing as society," seems to be the only phrase that has lived on.

 It's something else she said though following that misquote that I think bears more relevance to what I was watching last night. She said "It is our duty to look after ourselves and then also to help look after our neighbour and life is a reciprocal business and people have got the entitlements too much in mind without the obligations, because there is no such thing as an entitlement unless someone has first met an obligation."

All my working life has been lived by that ethos, it's the carrot and stick approach, the 'you only get out what you point in' way of living your life. As somebody who has been left of central politically all my life, possibly a rebellion against growing-up in a Conservative voting environment, I have been aware that there are people who are part of the 'have-nots' not through choice but through circumstances often beyond their control. I have also been aware of those who feel that life is all about taking and nothing to do with giving or meeting a moral, rather than financial, obligation.

Watching and listening last night and this morning a couple of things kept being mentioned which need to be looked at by somebody who has some political power. Firstly the Police, I suspect as a result of the McPherson report, have painted themselves into a corner  and are now desperate to be even handed when evenhandedness is actually the last thing that is required in a situation like last night. One of the local residents said on Sky, and I paraphrase here, "Why didn't the Police react straightaway? Why didn't we see rubber bullets or water canon on the streets instead of this constant treading on eggshells?"

I'm not advocating the use of excessive force a la Hurricane Katrina but at one point last night Police vans were driving down Tottenham High Road being stoned by groups of youths who knew that no retaliation would be forthcoming.  This was a peaceful protest that was hijacked by a group of people who wanted nothing more than to loot, burn and cause trouble. This morning you have to ask, bearing in mind Mrs Thatchers words above, what are the community going to do about this? Are people going to stand up and identify neighbours and/or family members who can clearly be identified by the television pictures, as many of them can? At what point during a peaceful demonstration do you decide that you are going to burn down the local supermarket or use rocks to hurl through the window of a carpet shop and on what level does that help the IPCC enquiry into Thursday's shooting.

Again going back to one resident's e-mail to Sky this morning, "It's funny how turf wars and gang disputes can be put to one side if it means you can loot Comet for a plasma tv."

Of course there are people who feel that the shooting on Thursday was part of a bigger problem and yet the majority of people who have called-in to television and radio stations and those interviewed on BBC and Sky last night and this morning all said that Tottenham was a nice place to live and that there was a sense of community. If you have a genuine grievance about police attitudes in your area is the best way to address them by setting fire to a row of shops above which people were living who subsequently had to run for their lives and in the process of that fire they have lost all their life's belongings?  Is the best way to vent your frustration that no answers to Thursdays shooting have appeared within forty eight hours to take a trolley down to the local retail park some seven hours after the trouble began and load up a plasma television? Can you satisfy that anger by getting together with a group of other concerned "community members" and ripping a cash dispensing machine from the wall?

I don't know the answers to those questions.

As I sat watching last night there was a sense of deja vu, a return to the riots of 1981. The riots in the summer of that year in Brixton, Toxteth, Leeds and Birmingham all had one thing in common, they were triggered by events connected with the distrust of local police and policing methods. In the case of Tottenham 2011 events  began on Thursday with the shooting of a local man during an operation which itself was part of Operation Trident, the subsequent closure of one of London's main arterial routes for twenty four hours suggests to many locals that something beyond what has so far made its way into the public domain occurred. It is from these small doubts that rumours spread and eventually those rumours led to a quiet demonstration which then evolved into last nights riots and looting.

The lack of any meaningful statement from local community leaders and the local Labour MP were quite shameful, putting out a message on Twitter? Come off it, appear in front of the cameras and condemn people, don't hide because somebody has got their hands cupping your balls in the name of political correctness. Police officers were called into the area from Thames Valley and Kent, something that should ring all manner of alarm bells in Whitehall as it considers cuts to the law and order budgets, were those officers part of the local problem? I don't think so.

Up until around 12:30 the Police handled the situation on the street as well as they could without using excessive force, in fact most of the youths who were despearte to appear behind Ben Ando on BBC 24 didn't even try and hide their faces, they weren't looking for trouble they were doing their, "Look Mum, I'm on TV," poses.  The Fire Brigade were held back for fear of coming under attack, which says a lot about certain sections of society, but they did their job quickly and efficiently. The escalation of violence, looting and arson took place after many observers, including journalists and the former head of the TSG  had gone to bed assuming that it was all over.

When Mrs Thatcher said, "It is our duty to look after ourselves,,"  I don't think for a minute she meant that you could throw a rock through the window of JB Sports at 7 a.m on a Sunday morning and help yourself to a pair of trainers or that having been part of a gang that had kicked in the windows of a health shop you should stand reading the labels on thejars of vitamin supplements before deciding which ones you were going to nick - oh yes, we do a better class of looting in the U.K, none of this trolley dash approach.

You hope at the end of all of this that the family of Mark Duggan do find out what really happened on Thursday and why it happened and that they are the recipients of the full facts. You also hope that those misguided individuals who injured Police officers, members of the public, cost people their homes and livelihoods and caused millions of pounds worth of damage last night also find out what British justice is all about.