Parisian police officers might take some hope from the fact that relations between France and Senegal have never been as fractious and bitter as those between France’s former colonial possessions in North Africa. Indeed, Senegal achieved independence without a bloody war of the kind that has scarred Algeria. But the Senegalese in France have high rates of unemployment and poverty, and as such form a central part of the marginalized populations of the banlieues. 

This is the same population that brought havoc to Paris only two weeks ago, in the aftermath of the Champions League final between Arsenal and PSG. Once again, battle lines were drawn in the glamorous heart of the French capital between the riot police and so-called casseurs — meaning “wreckers” — the name given by the media and politicians to the nihilistic hooligans who so regularly enjoy a fight.

Within minutes of the end of the Champions League match, the French news channel BFM had already switched its coverage from a football match to the center of Paris, where you could watch in real time bins being set alight, youths dancing on burning cars, hire bikes on fire, shop windows being smashed and shops being looted. Bare-chested youths were flinging their arms open wide, goading the police to attack, while their comrades fired an onslaught of acid-filled bottles, fireworks and homemade mortars, often launched at police lines from cars or scooters in full flight. 

It was not the first time that a PSG victory in the Champions League had led to riots — last year’s triumph over Inter Milan had led to similar scenes. But on this occasion the police were prepared. On the morning of the final, the police had deployed 8,000 officers in central Paris and 14,000 more officers throughout France. In the event, there were 890 arrests — 45% more than last year — with 178 police officers injured, some of them seriously. One officer was badly burnt by a mortar firework and another run over by a stolen car.  

These scenes were not confined to Paris. More than 71 cities, towns and villages reported “violent incidents” through the night across France. If you did not know that this was in the name of a football match which had just taken place in another, distant country, you might have thought that France was in the throes of full-scale insurrection. As President Emmanuel Macron greeted the victorious footballers at the Elysée Palace on Sunday, he was moved to add a comment on the riots in his congratulations. “We are sick of it,” he said. Certainly, by midnight on Saturday, to most viewers this was less a celebration of a football victory than it was a scene from a war zone. 

That was also the immediate reaction of Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (RN), whose leaders were quick to condemn the violence. First to attack the government’s handling of the riots was Julien Odoul, an RN spokesman from Burgundy who decried the “unpunished hordes” and accused Macron of leading a government in “fire and blood”. The President of the RN, Jordan Bardella, was quick to follow up, using the same language, and denouncing “scenes of a near-civil war” in Paris and the provinces. On Monday morning, Bardella also made it clear that “there is obviously a clear link between our 30-year failure to manage immigration and the conflicts in question”.  

The response from the Left was less incendiary, less accurate and less honest. The Left-wing newspaper Libération barely mentioned the violence, preferring to devote its first six pages on Monday morning to the death, at the age of 104, of the distinguished Leftist sociologist and philosopher Edgar Morin (who was, a rarity amongst French intellectuals, a football fan). At the same time, throughout France, representatives of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise (LFI) were arguing lamely about poor “police mismanagement” of the “celebrations”, with lightly veiled accusations of police heavy-handedness. Clémence Guetté, Vice-President of the LFI in the Assembly National, went one step further and explicitly accused the police of “arresting people for no reason, firing grenades at families and young people simply because they had come together in a crowd”. Guetté said that there was a need for more “fan zones” and “better planning” to avoid future conflicts.  

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This was at best disingenuous, and amounted to a slur on those officers — publicly thanked by Macron at the Elysée alongside the triumphant team — who had literally been in the front line against an out-of-control mob of some 20,000 people on the Champs-Elysées. Understandably, the police argued strongly against the LFI’s version of events. In the pages of the conservative Le Figaro, Yoann Maras, the spokesman for the police union, said that it was too easy to launch “a witch hunt” against the police. “We refuse to accept the growing gap between official discourse and the reality lived by our colleagues on the ground,” he said. He went on: ‘There was not a single incident in Budapest (where the Champions League took place). We have this only in France.” The question Maras left hanging in the air was why this should be so.  

There is in fact no easy answer to this. What was clear to the police, however, who had been following encrypted messages on social media for weeks before the Champions League final, was that most of the casseurs on the Champs-Elysées were not city-center-dwelling Parisians but had flooded into Paris from the banlieues, which have fast, direct links to Charles de Gaulle Étoile, the vast metro station beneath the Arc de Triomphe. The common theme on social media was that the casseurs were planning to “bouffer les flics” (“devour the cops”). Many of them had little or no football affiliation. “I’m not really that into football,” said Raphaël D., arrested for drunkenness and insulting the police. “I’m more into basketball,” he said to a reporter from Le Parisien outside his court hearing. But he had come with his mates anyway for the ruckus. The same applied to Hichem S., an Algerian normally resident in Barcelona, who had also been arrested. Hichem S. presented himself in court as an unconvincing PSG supporter, having traveled from Spain to “kick up some trouble” with his mates in Paris.

Alain Bauer, a professor of criminology at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, compared the phenomenon of street violence in France with British football hooliganism. The British problem had been solved, he wrote in Le Parisien, only by “extreme repression”. This, he said, was the only solution. For Bauer, the violence was therefore a problem of policing rather than a political issue. 

Nobody in France, on the Right or Left, really agrees with Bauer: his is a quite simplistic form of wishful thinking. Rather, it has been clear for several decades that the make-up of the French population has changed, partly due to mass immigration and the reluctance, generalized in most EU countries, to tackle this issue head-on. Immigration is only part of the story, however. The real political issue is that there is a substantial part of the population which hates the French Republic and which likes to take this hatred out on the most visible part of the Republic: the police.

One of the paradoxes here is that the French team is largely made up of players from an immigrant background. The tough training grounds of the French banlieues produce some of the best players in the world. Certainly most of Senegal’s best known exports to France and Europe are made up of footballers, including Sadio Mané, formerly of Liverpool, and Benjamin Mendy, formerly of Manchester City. 

On recent form, the French team, partially made up of players from the banlieues, are already looking like they could win the World Cup again. They have a formidable attacking force, not just with the speed of Kylian Mbappé but also with the likes of Ousmane Dembélé, Rayan Cherki and Michael Olise — who scored a hat-trick in the recent friendly with Northern Ireland — all looking to make their mark. 

Each of those players, being of immigrant heritage, are part of what the LFI is now calling “the new France”. It is a term first used, and sometimes still used, to describe the French colony of Quebec, but it has been reinvented by Mélenchon, who also speaks hopefully of the “creolization” of France. Mélenchon is enthusiastic about this strategy because he sees it as a genuinely new “revolutionary” strategy to transform France. His own family background — he was born and raised in post-Independence Tangier — is also a factor in determining his sympathy for the Arabic-speaking Muslim vote. (Mélenchon himself speaks a workable street Arabic.) For Mélenchon, “the new France” describes the hybrid demographic of the banlieues, a demographic whose votes the LFI are deliberately targeting as part of a campaign of “infiltration”: taking the voting system into areas which traditionally have a low voting record. 

This strategy is perhaps laudable, at least from the point of view of making democracy more accessible and even necessary to a disillusioned and disenfranchised section of the population. The RN, too, would like to court these votes, if only to break the deadlock which prevents them finally taking power at each successive presidential election. 

The stumbling block here, however, is that the RN is less prone to denial and euphemism. The Left likes to talk about les jeunes du quartier, as if they were a sparky group of teenagers rather than coked-up rioters; the RN talks about voyous — criminal hooligans. This language naturally sets them at odds with the voters in the banlieues, who often feel stigmatized and angry. 

Yet the “old France”, so despised by Mélenchon and his party, has not yet gone away. The political fall-out from the violence after the Champions League final — an almost universal howl of outrage from all parts of the center and the Right — proves as much. It remains to be seen, however, how long this low-key civil war in France between the “old” and the “new” can last before the current proxy war between the banlieues and “official France” becomes real — and therefore ever more vicious. Such a development would deepen the fractures in an already fragmented and damaged country.

Hear me out. After descending on Oxford Street last Wednesday, scores of “troublemakers” urged a bunch of copycat looters to shift their focus to the careworn seaside town of Southend and “get lit”. In response, the Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, ordered the Met to “hunt down and lock up” the culprits, as though they were the Krays.

Obviously, crime is part of Braverman’s brief; and the Tories are desperate to regain their status as the party of law and order, not least because too many of their own (prime) ministers have been on the wrong side of the police. But the Oxford Street flash mob was no Cable Street riot; and the events in Southend turned out to be far tamer than anything previous generations of mods, rockers and sundry other yobs had brought to the Essex town.

This isn’t to excuse the sort of mass, wanton disregard for the law that we’ve seen of late. But it is hard not to conclude that the same vote-grabbing politicians who whipped up moral panics over ram-raiders, Rolex-robbers and other media-hyped miscreants now want looters to as the bogeyman du jour — even if, in reality, these wayward youths are part of a more complex criminal profile that can’t be easily dismissed as a (largely black) youth problem.

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It’s easy to blame absent fathers, again because this is a well-honed stereotype, but the frequent promotion of this dead cat fails to address the real problem here: Britain’s lack of leadership or adult responsibility. Whether it’s pederastic TV presenters or man-child prime ministers, Britain’s culture of role-modelling and leadership makes the average package-tour rep look like Shaka Zulu. How can we expect bored, feckless, confused, constantly castigated and pandemic-traumatised young people to cosplay as upstanding citizens when adults in positions of responsibility can’t even be bothered to do so themselves?

But perhaps that was never the point, given the degree to which conspicuous youth crime and deviant behaviour is imbued with media and political capital. Looting makes for a good story because it conspicuously feeds into our subconscious biases about “the other”. It’s a form of mass projection. Better to blame other parents for their errant brood, who we can see on TV and social media, than wonder why your own children might also be suffering from any number of modern malaises at home — eating disorders, self-harm, anxiety — all of which are expressions of a looting of the self.

And this is always the way with every moral panic. Whether it’s Jews, Italians, West Indians, Pakistanis, Somalians, Albanians, Polish plumbers, acid house ravers, radical feminists, Black Lives Matter or Gary Lineker, there’s always some bogeyman hiding in plain sight, trying to usurp the British. Every manifestation shares one thing in common: a sense of disenchantment, of losing control. Today, it takes the form of a pandemic generation of internet-impressionable and vulnerable youths who have all but given up on the idea of youth being “the best days of your life”. For many, these are the worst days.

Despite this, Britain’s politicians seem content with dismissing the nation’s arrested development as “the kind of lawlessness seen in some American cities”, blind to the fact that the causes, and solutions, lie closer to home. During the UK’s 2011 riots, which had nothing to do with “American lawlessness” and everything to do with “broken Britain”, the general consensus was that a “feral underclass” of looters deserved the draconian sentences they received. The logic here was that the riots were not a political act but a mass criminal enterprise — and, as such, Westminster could shift responsibility away from its policymaking and let the courts deal with the problem.

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Fundamentally, the rioters’ behaviour in 2011 was criminal, as is today’s looting. But visit inner-city Britain or its less-than-picture-postcard rural and suburban wastelands and you will witness the real conditions people are living under. We know that poverty isn’t just about a lack of money. It’s about a lack of opportunity, prospects and hope. As Thatcher and Cameron, then Blair and Brown, mortgaged British society, economically and morally, today’s political leaders are squandering what’s left. Riots and looting and recession are their legacy.

In 2011, one of the rioters sent out a Blackberry message in pidgin text-speak that illustrated the mentality of this disorder: “What ever ends [area] your from put your ballys [balaclavas] on link up and cause havic, just rob everything. Police can’t stop it.” David Lammy, the MP for Tottenham, remarked at the time that this was freedom “without any sense of duty”. “Our society needs to reconnect with other important, informal regulators of behaviour. Notions of decency towards others. Pride. Shame. Admiration. Scorn.” More than a decade later, plus ça change.

But from the images of the violence that were soon shared across the world, there didn’t seem to be much of that famed Dutch moderation, openness and reasonableness on show. While the rioters left destruction in their wake, it later emerged that the police had directed live rounds of fire at rioters, leaving four people with gunshot wounds. As Dutch virologist Marion Koopmans — who initially likened the protests against the Netherlands’ latest coronavirus restrictions to a World War Two bombardment (before retracting the war analogy after facing a barrage of criticism) — said, there was a “bitter irony” to the location of such wanton violence.

Dutch leaders were quick to paint the riots as acts of hooliganism rather than protest, with commentators citing the existence of group chats where people reportedly said things such as: “Where’s the protest? I want to riot.” Rotterdam mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb called it “an orgy of violence” that drew “a number of people who had no intention of acting peacefully, but who were there to riot, to confront the police, and to destroy public property”. Dutch caretaker justice minister Ferd Grapperhaus echoed his comments, saying that a protest against a controversial (and as yet unimplemented) idea to restrict access to certain areas for unvaccinated people was hijacked by football hooligans and criminal low-life.

But just 10 months after a the country was gripped by nationwide riots in protest at an earlier coronavirus curfew, such an explanation seems overly simplistic. I can’t be the only person here in the Netherlands left wondering why some of the country’s 17.6 million citizens are so visibly out of control and alienated from the majority. This isn’t some new phenomenon: the Dutch police have been highlighting the increasing violence of protesters for several years.

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According to the latest reports, it seems that rioters in Rotterdam were made of a number of disparate groups, motivated for a range of reasons. Football hooligans, young men with nothing to do, harbour workers with low wages and job security, and those suffering from the national shortage of decent housing were all ripe for civil disobedience. As MP Attje Kuiken says: “It’s a poisonous cocktail.”

But behind their resentment — which includes recent anger at a nationwide ban on fireworks this New Year — there are clearly bigger social problems. A widespread disaffection with government is evident in the peaceful protests in major cities practically every weekend (sometimes for things as trivial as wearing face masks).

As in many other Western countries, there is a deep polarisation in Dutch society, and increasing distrust in politicians. This was exacerbated when the Government fell in January over a scandal in which tens of thousands of parents — most of dual nationality — were wrongly accused of childcare benefit fraud and forced to pay back every cent they had ever received, with devastating consequences for their financial, personal and children’s wellbeing. Last week, the Dutch highest court officially apologised for upholding unlawful tax office rulings. But while 15,000 people have received €30,000 in compensation so far, the apparent racism engrained in government institutions has not yet been fully investigated.

After elections in March, resulting in a hugely splintered outcome, Dutch political parties are still unable to form a government — a telling picture about the difficulty in finding common ground. Those who voted for change are no doubt disappointed by the continued presence of the same establishment faces around the table, led again by liberal Mark Rutte. Meanwhile, newish far-Right parties such the Forum for Democracy have delighted in exploiting the pandemic to undermine “the political elite”. As Amsterdam University cultural anthropologist Dr Danny de Vries tells me: “Just a few days ago one of them publicly threatened another politician in the chamber, saying his time would come when tribunals are held to hold him accountable for ‘corona crimes’” Only last week, the leader of FVD, Thierry Baudet, compared corona measures to Nazi Germany.

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Yet the country’s political leaders have hardly earned a glowing report. For all their confidence in their liberal, efficient and wealthy society, they have been behind at every step in the pandemic. The Government was one of the slowest in Europe to start vaccinations, and now that it has one of Europe’s highest infection rates, it has just started offering boosters. Moreover, despite being perfectly well aware that there have been at least 31,000 corona deaths (as recorded on death certificates), the Government continues to put a much lower figure of “officially-tested positive deaths” front and centre on its dashboards. Conveniently, this number (18,966) is less than neighbouring countries like Belgium, which have always recorded suspect deaths too.

And so while there is broad support for vaccination and the Dutch have fully vaccinated 84.7% of adults, trust in government policy and leadership has plummeted recently. There have been U-turns on policy, with nightclubs open one minute, and then closed the next, and an imprudent loosening of most restrictions at the end of September. With coronavirus infections at record highs in the past week, and hospitals saying they will soon have to make decisions about who gets the IC beds, virologists are talking once more about the need for a full lockdown — and it’s not only the coronavirus sceptics or protesters who are looking at December with sinking hearts.

When he appeared on a morning chat show yesterday, Nijmegen mayor and chairman of the National Security Council Hubert Bruls was keen to emphasise that most people are not out on the streets rioting. That’s true, and it’s difficult to say whether the Dutch have more coronavirus sceptics — or, indeed, hooligans — than anyone else (although the head of Viruswaarheid corona protest group Willem Engel, adds a certain flair to events with his experience as a former dance teacher).

But anyone who has ever tried to stand in a queue in the Netherlands will realise that there’s a widespread sense of assertive individualism here, which is not often restrained by social norms such as politeness or the-other-person-was-actually-first. Basic rights like freedom of speech, movement and protest, are also grounded in the constitution, which has meant that it is very difficult for a government to restrain them. This has led to a surprising number of civilian court cases about coronavirus policy (eventually overturned by the courts).

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As a Brit living in the Netherlands, I’ve been surprised how much opposition there has been to following relatively minor rules such as wearing a face mask in certain places; the mere prospect of showing a coronavirus pass for entry is enough to cause a spiky hour of debate in most social groups, where it’s likely that at least a few people will disagree with their existence as a matter of principle.

Another element that might sit behind recent discontent is something that the Netherlands is often praised for: a light-touch legal system and emphasis on alternatives to prison and processes like mediation. Although Grapperhaus has pledged to fast-track stiff justice for rioters, and police are busy scanning camera images to round up the Rotterdam culprits, the Netherlands has recently been seen by organised crime as a “low-threshold” entry point to Europe.

The current struggle with organised crime has laid bare gaps in policing capacity, and a sense that a liberal but illogical weed policy is not helping (because smoking weed is tolerated, but growing it commercially is a punishable crime). Young men are apparently attracted to act as “collectors” of drug shipments in containers at Rotterdam harbour or criminal errand boys, and there’s a desperate need to offer other opportunities to certain groups of young people — something that has been recognised by the new mayor of Utrecht, Sharon Dijksma.

The recent violence in Rotterdam cannot, therefore, be dismissed as mere hooliganism. As the authorities launch an official investigation into the gunshot wounds sustained on Friday night, and police forces are deployed across cities to stop-and-search as bars close at 8pm, this isn’t a time to sit back and dismiss the rioting as an “orgy” of criminal activity. It’s time to sift through the ashes.

If you were Priti Patel, of course, this was, if not exactly a desirable ending, certainly a helpful illustration of what the Policing and Crime Bill can claim to be defending the public from. Of course the right to protest is a sacrosanct part of an open democracy, she said; but not this thuggishness, not this criminality, not this violence. Whoever argues against the bill now — and there are serious arguments to be made — will have to make their case against the image of a police van blazing in the night while protesters cheered the destruction.

But while you can make a cynical argument that the scenes in Bristol serve Patel’s more authoritarian interests, you can’t accuse her of having willed them into being. There was violence in Bristol because some people came out wanting violence, and they got it. Protests attract a kind of hanger-on who don’t truly care about the politics, but love a ruck. They don’t usually have anything as ostentatious as a homemade spear to give themselves away, but they’re always there, a shadow of aggro trailing every left-wing demonstration.

Violence is exciting. That crackle in the air, the surge of adrenaline: it feels good. The pure purpose in making a weapon of yourself. The very few times I’ve successfully faced down a physical confrontation (and being five-foot-one and female, it’s not exactly something I’ve gone looking for) it’s always left me shaken but elated. Staying on my feet when muggers tried to snatch my handbag, or shouting something sarcastic at masked anti-feminists who’d turned out to disrupt a talk I was giving then scampering to safety — those are things I remember with a shiver of pleasure as well as fear.

So I suppose I can understand a little of what drives the troublemaking element. I can understand, too, why some people are so infatuated with violence that they look for ways to justify it. Someone broadly supportive of the Bristol protests has two options when it comes to the subsequent riots: you can defend the principle of dissent while deploring the bad actors, which sounds mealy-mouthed and prissy even if it is right; or you could go big and argue that not only is the violence justified, but it actually further demonstrates the justice of the cause.

It’s that latter approach that you’ll find on the far-Left of British politics. After the 2011 riots, there was an impulse to weave the looting and destruction into a story about the deep suffering in British society: if people were compelled to act so outrageously, went the reasoning, they must have something powerful to be outraged by. One of the more bizarre examples of this was the claim that, because most of those arrested in the riots were men, they must have been revolting against the “feminisation” of the economy — as though it isn’t always men who commit most of the violent crime.

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In the same spirit, this week saw hard-Left outlet the Canary claiming that: “The people who besieged Bridewell Police station were fighting against state violence and authoritarianism, standing up for freedom and for the oppressed.” In this circular logic, the fact of the riots proves that the riots were legitimate: the violence of the rioters is evidence that they were reacting to the violence of the state.

Sisters Uncut complained that “the media drew a contrast between a moral majority and a small number of violent protesters”, and then set themselves resolutely on the side of the rioters: “The stigmatisation of protesters is a tactic of division that we won’t stand for. It is a fearful response by a state that thrives on division and scarcity.” Meanwhile, Novara hosted a discussion about the “utility of riots”: perhaps this had been counterproductive in the short term, it was mused, but would go on to drive a wider movement.

It’s always easier to see the “utility” in the violent actions of someone you suspect might be on your side, of course. None of these outlets were offering apologias for the Capitol rioters in Washington at the beginning of the year: the violence then was not obvious evidence of a populace confronting a state’s oppressive force, but of entitlement and delusion. Instead, the Bristol riots were blessed with comparison to the Poll Tax riots, the prime example of explicable political resistance expressed as destructive impulse.

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The point here is not that the Left is uniquely enamoured of its own aggression, but that the hard Left is labouring under a specific kind of hypocrisy — a hypocrisy that allows people to claim to be against violence while at the same time celebrating, relishing and instrumentalising it. It is a recipe for bad faith. It means never having to ask the question “is this violence politically justified?”, because you’ve always already decided that any violence is really the responsibility of the “other side”; and if the other side hasn’t committed anything close to actual violence, you can always upgrade words or even beliefs to the status of “symbolic violence”.

Whatever “your side” does is vindicated in advance, so long as you can make it part of your preferred story. The stories can be flexible here, because they have little to do with principle: the only principle is the pleasure of destruction, the longing to warm your politics in the glow of arson.

As for the people who actually have to live in the wreckage, well, they hardly count: after the 2011 riots, the Left fostered a particular strand of contempt for local residents who went out to tidy their own streets. (“Symbolic cleansing”, one blogger called it, as though the proper Left-wing thing to do was pick your way through broken glass in your neighbourhood indefinitely.)

The ecstasy of violence in Bridewell will probably have ensured support for the Policing and Crime Bill, but the point of the riots was clearly never to persuade parliament. The point of the riots was the riots themselves, the pleasure of destruction, the joy of the flames, the satisfying crunch of a body against another body. The point of the riots was to claim violence, and the point of those defending them is to turn that violence to their own ends.

Today’s urban promise is, however, vastly different — not only in New York, but San Francisco and Los Angeles, London and Paris. No longer cities of aspiration, they are increasingly defined by an almost feudal hierarchy: the rich live well, protected by private security and served by local coffee shops and trendy clubs.

Meanwhile, the working class struggles to pay rent, possesses no demonstrable path to a better life and, as a result, often migrates elsewhere. Crime rates are spiking and homelessness, once an exception, is increasingly widespread. Those very streets once said to be “paved with gold” are now are filled with discarded needles, excrement and graffiti.

Indeed, what we are now witnessing is the decline of former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s description of the city as “a luxury product”. Today, that sense of “luxury” has all but vanished, with modern urban economies promoting class divisions rather than upward mobility. Amid all the hoopla about urban revival, the truth is that entrenched urban poverty in the US — places where 30% or more of the population live below the poverty line — actually grew in the first decade of the new millennium, from 1,100 to 3,100 neighbourhoods.

Even the New York Times admits that, in the past decade, cities have gone from “engines of growth and opportunity” to places where class relations are increasing fixed, with only the upper end of the income spectrum doing well. Gotham’s one percent earns a third of the entire city’s personal income. That’s almost twice the proportion for the rest of the country. But such class disparity is becoming the norm; in the tech haven of San Francisco, which has the worst levels of inequality in California, the top 5% of households earn an average of $808,105 annually, compared with $16,184 for the lowest 20%.

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Predictably, those at the bottom of this new feudal structure suffer the most; today, the old saying that “the city air makes one free” all too often means freedom to be poor, to experience endemic homelessness, collapsing public infrastructure and rising crime.

And that was before Covid hit. Already many poor urban residents subsisted on transfer payments or worked in service industries. They were paid, usually poorly, to clean now-empty offices or work in restaurants and hotels. The lockdowns, whether justified or overwrought, have since pummelled these low-income workers; roughly 40% of Americans earning under $40,000 a year lost their jobs last March.

Unlike workers who occupy “the commanding heights” of finance, tech, marketing, and media , these people did not have the option of working from their kitchen tables or moving to suburban locations or smaller cities. Nor could they count on education systems to work their magic; most schools in American inner-city districts, in contrast to many suburbs and smaller cities, remained closed.

All of which meant America’s urban districts were ripe for civil unrest when George Floyd died last May, and these festering conditions exploded into the worst national rioting in decades. Parts of many cities went up in flames, the damage of which was obscured by mainstream media’s mantra of “mostly peaceful protests”. The constant rioting and demonstrations in Portland, once seen as a paragon of new urbanist-led revival, has all but destroyed its downtown, which is now largely bereft of pedestrians.

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Remarkably, despite the dramatic rise in homicides, the city seems likely to continue its programme of de-funding the police. In many cities — Los Angeles, Minneapolis, San Francisco, St. Louis, New York — “progressive” district attorneys have worked assiduously to restrain law enforcement. In California, where it is no longer considered a felony to steal anything worth less than $1,000, there has been a surge in property crime, including a huge rise in car thefts. San Francisco, for example, has seen the drug store Walgreens close ten outlets since 2019, citing elevated levels of theft and weak law enforcement. Meanwhile New York’s bodegas, small markets in ethnic neighbourhoods, experienced a 222% increase in burglaries last year.

The repercussions of this extend well beyond the criminal and judicial spheres. As cities slowly fall to pieces, they are increasingly becoming no-go zones for investors and business, except for those who see opportunity investing in suddenly distressed properties; barely ten per cent of US companies are interested in investing in large urban areas. A friend who runs a biomedical company had his warehouse burned down in the post-Floyd Minneapolis riots. When I asked him whether he would rebuild, he said yes — but in the suburbs of Tampa, Florida, or Atlanta.

Yet a number of progressives insist that the current urban exodus of wealthy residents is not a cause for concern, as it allows a more fair society to be “reborn”. Such a naïve approach forgets that there is one problem with expelling the rich: in New York, for example, the “one per cent” pay 43% of the city’s income taxes. The same is also true in California, where the top 1% of the population pays half of all income taxes. Even London now depends almost entirely on the wealthy to keep its economy afloat.

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But today’s activist Left does not seem to be concerned with economics — or, for that matter, much of the real world. In New York, activists have helped put an end to proposals for new jobs from Amazon, as well as a recent “Industry City” proposal in Brooklyn. In Seattle, the doggedly radical city council is working overtime to also push out Amazon — the company that has driven much of the region’s economic growth — to the surrounding suburbs and other regions.

But expelling tech oligarchs will not stabilise cities, improve the schools or lure business development. It certainly will not correct the fiscal crises faced by many cities, nor generate upwardly mobile jobs. Cities do not thrive by having more cutting-edge coffee shops, trendy restaurants and edgy boutiques; they need safe streets, decent schools and jobs for middle and working-class families.

Wishful thinking will not spark an urban revival. Yes, the decline of first-tier conurbations might enliven smaller cities. But overall, society as a whole will still lose. Dense urban places have always been critical in the development of culture and social behaviours. They remain crossroads of trade for goods as well as ideas, in ways that more dispersed places, even in the internet age, are not always suitable. Our cities are far from perfect. But a post-urban future could be even worse.