Guns of Brixton

London's emergency services were on full-scale alert on Monday night as rioting, fires and pitched battles with police erupted around the city from late afternoon.

The Metropolitan police poured hundreds of extra officers on to the streets as trouble flared in the north, south and east of the capital.

In Hackney, east London, masked and hooded youths smashed up shops and threw missiles, planks of wood and wheelie bins at riot police. Several abandoned vehicles were set alight. There were also violent scenes in Lewisham, south-east London, where petrol bombs were reportedly thrown at officers, and shops looted. A bus was torched in nearby Peckham as police struggled to respond to the spread of sporadic violent incidents.

Witnesses said a 100-strong mob cheered as a shop in the centre of Peckham was torched and one masked thug shouted: "The West End's going down next." A baker's next door was also alight. One onlooker said: "The mob were just standing there cheering and laughing. Others were just watching on from their homes open-mouthed in horror."

Like the 1981 riots, this weekend’s riots come early in the term of a Conservative Prime Minister at a time of deep cuts to public and social services. Tottenham, which has a large African-Caribbean population, has the highest unemployment rate in London, and the eighth highest unemployment rate in the U.K. Many of the jobs in the area are dependent on public funding. In the vacuum left by vacationing senior politicians, David Lammy, the Labour M.P. for the area (“from Tottenham, for Tottenham”) was left largely alone to deal with the media over the weekend. Standing near the hulls of burned-out buildings, Lammy told reporters, “The vast majority of people in Tottenham reject what’s happened. A community that’s was already hurting has had the heart ripped out of it.” Today, Clegg denounced the weekend’s events as “needless and opportunist theft and violence—nothing more, nothing less,” and, in a way, they were: it is unlikely that the people stealing sneakers from the Foot Locker on Brixton Road were planning to wear them to Mark Duggan’s funeral. But where have all the opportunists been between 1981 and now? In the agitated heart of a anxious nation, the riots seemed just the latest plague.