Riots in London

'An orgy of rioting and looting' over four days in August, and 200 people arrested. This was how the 'Liverpool Daily Post' described the aftermath of the police strike in Liverpool in 1919. It did not take much, even directly after the Great War, to cause people to lose their inhibitions about stealing and violence - just the removal of the threat of being caught.

So these things are not new. I am not trying to sanitise the present troubles in our cities by relativising them, but a sense of perspective is helpful. OK - so there was no police strike this time, but a large part of the scale of the present riots has been because people suddenly realised that if they come out in enough force, the police are, at least initially, helpless. There is no fear of getting caught.

Nor are riots in London particularly a new thing. Read Peter Ackroyd's 'London: The Biography' or a similar history of London to see that the city has frequently exploded. We have seen it in our own time, though not on the same scale as this week. The city is like a simmering pot that occasionally only needs a slight disturbance to boil over, apparently unpredictably. How much anger is there below the surface? How thin is the veneer of control and respectability.

Nor can people take the easy option that some may be tempted to take and blame immigrant communities. London has been made up of immigrant communities for most of its history. All colours and races have been visible on our TV screens in the thick of the trouble.

Nor is it new in history. 'Before the age of the Caesars, the Senate could not keep order. Armed gangs terrorised the city of Rome and the normal processes of government were disrupted as rivals fought for power. Self-interest became more significant than social interest...Then, in desperation, the people accepted authoritarian government.' (Francis Schaeffer in 'How should we then live' chapter 1).

Mob rule is a funny thing. A common feature shared by many - often a sense of resentment, anger and hatred, coupled with greed - is suddenly ignited by a spark - in this case the shooting of Mark Duggan in Tottenham. Fanned by the modern phenomenon of 'social media' (though it used to happen without that) a mood of rebellion takes over. Fear of authority is reduced and disappears; the boundary of conscience is easily crossed as is the boundary of respect for law; the appetite takes over, the exhilarating focus on what can be done physically, for now the only boundary to action is what is physically possible. Anything that can be done is done. Shops can be looted with impunity, so - just do it.

Perhaps a new feature is the prominence of the young, though that is by no means necessarily novel. Yet a clergyman had a good point in a TV interview when he said (in terms) that if we have undermined the authority of parents at home and of teachers at school, and instilled in children the idea that they need not be told what to do, we can hardly complain when they go onto the streets and do not listen to anybody.

A certainty in all this is the spiritual absolutes. However novel or not the present experience of our cities is historically, it is the expression of sin which is lawlessness. The immediate manifestation may have new features, and elements of it may be explicable in terms of contemporary issues, but ultimately it is, like all sin, inexplicable and irrational.

It is, of course, nonetheless wrong for that. God's glory is challenged as authority is held in contempt; his laws are trampled on; love for him and one's neighbour are forgotten. Lament the spiritual state of a nation that behaves like this. Pray for his mercy, for his salvation to be made widely known. But do not falsely grieve over a supposed golden age when things were so very different.