London’s Burning: Riots, Gangs, and Moral Formation of Young People

Abstract

The riots of August 2011 in the United Kingdom reignited a critique of Britain’s posteconomic crisis in the shadow of a new austerity. It also engendered and provoked a wider debate about families, fatherlessness, and the role of male adult role models in the lives of young people, along with related questions about morality and the culture of acquisition and greed that characterizes modern Britain. The critique, however, is not principally about the poor, disadvantaged, and the so-called underclass, rather it is about greed across class and the social divide—from top to the bottom. To put it more starkly, as Peter Oborne does, the criminality and wanton vandalism displayed by the rioters “cannot be dissociated from the moral disintegration in the highest ranks of modern British society.”¹