Manchester Riots and The Class Who Can’t Have

Manchester is closed as mobs patrol the city streets looking for anything they can steal. Nothing was safe, not even the Oxfam store on Oldham Street.

I’m led to believe the trouble started in Salford and began in Manchester at the bottom end of Market Street near to The Triangle. I saw a group form in Market Street who then walked up to Piccadilly Gardens. At which point they met with the heavy police presence and made their way back down Market Street. After this, Manchester had a riot on it’s hands. I followed for a while but after being hit and verbally abused, had to stop taking pictures for long periods.

I saw that groups on bikes or older men on foot would soon be followed by much larger gangs. When the police caught up looters were sometimes warned by yelling (presumably heard by the looters in the shops) from people outside who should also be classed as rioters themselves. Whilst this meant the groups could be highly mobile the lack of police down back streets like Spring Gardens was partly to blame for the free roam which the gangs had of the streets.

The knobs involved were of mixed backgrounds and ethnicity. I saw Whites, Blacks, Asians, children, men wearing suits, mothers with young babies and grown men in their 40s and 50s – all taking whatever opportunities they dared to engage in differing levels of violence and theft. One elderly man said to me they are a “class who can’t have” right before he took his second trip into the clothing store to grab another pair of jeans. Seems like the class who can’t have finally have what they always wanted, 4 pairs of jeans and a coffee machine from that independent coffee store on Deansgate.

Nobody was blameless. Bystanders who could intervene did not, through fear of personal injury or that they might spark something much more dangerous. And whilst I sympathise greatly after experiencing the horrors myself, we should ask ourselves why we did not stop them, and what more we can do to stop a minority from destroying the city in which we live in the future.