Burning indifference

A year ago England was engulfed by riots but the UK government has done nothing to tackle the issues that sparked them, writes Siôn Simon

A YEAR ago I stood in the centre of Britain’s crippled second city and watched as reinforcements arrived. I was desperate to get home, to start work on the article I’d been asked to write for Newsweek on the wave of riots engulfing England, but I couldn’t. The city of Birmingham was paralysed.

Trying to get back home from visiting the families of three Muslim men killed in the disorder the previous evening, I had been dropped off in a city centre through which it had become impossible to pass by car. I went to my favourite café in the business district, which was open but empty. The offices around it had shut. It was 3pm. The lawyers and accountants had locked their plate-glass doors, doubled the security, discreetly tucked their laptops into the bottom of their gym bags, and set off for home. Now they sat in their Jaguars, immobile on the city’s gridlocked roads. The only thing that moved, albeit slowly, was an endless convoy of police vans bringing reinforcements from Scotland.