As shards of broken glass, house bricks and concrete blocks lay strewn across London’s dirty streets, so a steady stream of platitudes and sound bites have been delivered by the usual suspects.
We’ve grown sick of hearing regurgitated nonsense about ‘disaffected youths’, ‘deprivation’, ‘policing by consent’ and ‘society’s victims’, but there’s simply no excuse for hooliganism, smart phone-organised thuggery or theft.
On the BBC’s Newsnight programme, old rentaquote himself, Ken Livingstone, blamed ‘government cuts’ for wanton destruction, yobbish behaviour and looting.
He also inferred that the capital can expect more of the same before next year’s Olympic Games.
Olympiads have been used before as a legitimate focus of discontent, although there was no such cause underpinning this week’s looting and rioting.
In 2008, for example, the Chinese government launched a nationwide campaign to defuse tensions ahead of the Olympic Games after rioting erupted in the country’s south west.
Four days before the Games began, a police station in China’s Xinjiang region was attacked, killing 16 officers and wounding 12.
According to a survey by Visa, China recorded disappointing levels of expenditure by international visitors to the 2008 Games who spent just £93 million; many observers blamed civil unrest for this massive shortfall which before the Games had been expected to exceed £500 million.
Visa currently estimates that thousands of foreign visitors to London next year will account for a staggering £709 million of additional expenditure.
Britons’ spending is forecast to rise by only £41 million as this will either be incremental or money ordinarily spent elsewhere. At present, both figures look extraordinarily optimistic, though for a two-week event used to being draped with hype and swathed with miscalculations, perhaps this is to be expected.
The medium-term economic impact of what has happened in London over the past week cannot be ignored. Consider, for example, last year’s winter Olympics in Vancouver where thousands of normally reserved Vancouverians took to the streets to protest about the cost of hosting the Games and the fact that virtually every aspect of the Olympics had come in well over budget.
Pre-Games estimates of visitor expenditure proved wildly optimistic, especially once protests turned violent.
The most notorious example of pre-Olympic rioting occurred in Mexico in 1968, prompting the Mexican government to launch a huge cover-up operation.
In Mexico City just days before the Olympics were due to begin, thousands of students gathered to protest against the military occupation of the National Polytechnic Institute.
The protesters had planned to march through a suburb of the city, but by early evening military personnel in armoured vehicles surrounded them.
The Mexican government said “agitator groups” among the students began shooting at the crowds from buildings, which resulted in a 90-minute gun fight which killed hundreds of people.
Mexico’s defence minister said the army fired into the crowd in self-defence, even though the army arrived in armoured tanks. Eye witnesses reported so many dead that bodies were taken away at night in dustbin lorries.
