David Cameron and Ed Milliband both gave speeches yesterday setting out their responses to the riots that convulsed our cities last week. As might have been expected their rhetorical emphases were different and played to their respective constituencies: Milliband stressed the impact of socio-economic factors and a lack of opportunity upon the rioters, Cameron personal responsibility, the need for a tough police response and the failings of a 'human rights culture'. Milliband emphasised the effect of government cuts, Cameron played down their significance. But while large parts of their speeches set out the political battle lines of the next few months, there were also interesting commonalities in their analyses: both emphasised the importance of family, of positive role models and of combating gang culture. Both men also situated the riots within a broader context of failing values, citing the banking crisis, MP's expenses and phone hacking as further failures of responsibility at all levels of society.
They also emphasised the importance of local communities in responding to the immediate crisis and in creating the conditions in which all young people feel they have a stake in the community.
This matters because in many ways the events of the last fortnight represent a challenge to localism: to the idea that all things being equal communities should as far as possible manage their own affairs. Indeed, the riots pose some fundamental questions for localists about who and what a local community is. We have seen some striking examples of community spirit as local people mobilised first to protect and then to clean up their neighbourhoods. Nonetheless, the most dispiriting aspect of the violence has been the readiness of a minority of local people to direct violence upon the fabric of their own communities, communities with which they clearly feel little identification. The wound that this inflicts upon our collective sense of belonging may linger long after the physical scars of the rioting have faded.
In his speech, the prime minister announced that he was asking Emma Harrison, Chief Executive of A4e, to look at how intensive intervention programmes could help turn around the lives of 120,000 of the most troubled families. We know that such interventions can be effective. Local authorities such as Swindon have been using them to achieve better outcomes and generate efficiency savings.
Already, however, there have been calls to ringfence the budgets for such programmes. In a time of crisis it is tempting to look for a national response but this temptation must be resisted.
It is at local level that we must seek answers to the questions the riots pose. Strikingly, this is true wherever one sits on the political spectrum: neither robust, proactive policing nor addressing the causes of social and economic exclusion can be mandated through central strategies, both must be informed by local context, flexible enough to adapt to changing conditions and delivered in collaboration with local communities.
Councils will therefore play a crucial role, not just in clearing up after the rioting, but in providing the local leadership to deal with the long term challenges. As the economist Tim Harford has shown in his recent book Adapt, effective responses to complex problems evolve from a critical mass of ground level trial and error, from strategies that are informed by detailed local knowledge and that change as the facts on the ground change. Central government can't deliver strategies like that. Local government, working with local communities, can.
Jonathan Carr-West is a director at the Local Government Information Unit. Follow him on Twitter @joncarrwest
You can read the full text of the speeches Jonathan mentions here - David Cameron and Ed Miliband
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