Last night, we decided to order pizza – we don’t do it often, it’s lazy but sort of a treat. However, out of the three local well-known places, only one was open: the other two had shut down early. Now, we don’t live in London per se, but Croydon (where there were major fires and a member of the public was shot just a night ago) is only a few miles east, and Clapham a few miles north. Sutton, the local town, had some windows broken by youths, but to be honest this isn’t exactly exceptional behaviour in Sutton.

What happened when the pizza came was slightly surreal. The delivery guy was very nice, but asked me to wait at the door until he left. Why? Because there was a group of three kids just down the road, and basically, he was afraid of them. Just to be clear, most people buy using their cards these days, so this guy wouldn’t be carrying much money and didn’t have any other pizza on his bike. He wanted to make sure that if something did happen, there would be someone watching. After he left, I did begin to wonder whether this pizza chain really did make the right decision to stay open. I don’t think he was actually in much danger, but to work in an environment where you believe yourself to be in danger is probably just as bad.

So what’s going on here? I think this has been a long time coming, if we’re very honest. Anti-social behaviour has been a significant political issue for the last fifteen years, and you only need to look back to the student fees marches just last year to see people rioting in London in pretty much the same way. The difference, of course, was that under the flag of another cause, people assumed that this wasn’t a more general problem.

No-one really knows why this is happening. This isn’t a sudden thing, this has been years in the making, and the cause or causes are probably no longer determinable. My personal favourite reason is education: I don’t think this country has ever had an education system which hasn’t failed a significant minority of the young, but in years gone by those failed by the system have been able to get jobs in factories and other places which had a wage that could support a family. Those jobs don’t exist in the same way any more, and they certainly don’t pay a living wage.

What is disturbing, though, is what comes out of the mouths of these people when you listen to them being interviewed. I’ve heard a variety of interviews with people across the country who’ve been rioting, and the message is basically the same no matter who they are. They hate the police (the “Feds”), but this is just a proxy for authority of any sort. They don’t care who gets hurt, they don’t identify with any particular societal structure except for maybe their own gang, and they see an easy opportunity to gain at low risk of getting caught.

This actually reminds me of various pieces of stories from Jon Ronson’s “The Psychopath Test”. I’m certainly not diagnosing these people with antisocial personality disorder, but good lord they certainly display many of the traits. You just need to look down Hare’s list and they tick practically every box at least once over – the main thing that they’re not doing that a real psychopath would do is the lying and manipulation to cover their tracks. Right now, many of these kids don’t feel the need to even cover their faces from the cameras which they know are there.

The radio told me this morning that three men had been run over, attempting to protect their neighbourhood. Many people have come out on the streets, the anti-rioters, the wonderful Riot Wombles, and it’s tremendously sad that rioters are not just attacking buildings and cars but also now their fellow man. I expect a number of commentators to draw immediate parallels with Grand Theft Auto, which had already been linked to these troubles by people who believe games influence real life. I think all it demonstrates is the lack of imagination the rioters have. They’re like a kind of Commercial Zombie, roaming the streets for TVs instead of brains, destroying everything in their way. They don’t know how to deal with people personally, all they can do is imitate and emulate others, whether it’s video game characters, movie characters, hip-hop stars, whoever. I don’t wish to dehumanise them, but they just seem to be incapable of rational thought, they just play out TV stories because they don’t seem to know any other way.