Just after 5 o’clock the boss told the two of us who were left to go home. The rumours of impending lawlessness were turning into something more a bit more substantial. Our fears for our city soon became reality.
Walking up Cross Street a few women came running down. Something was happening on St Mary’s Gate. A 100-strong masked mob went running towards Market Street: all youths, not a man amongst them, with the obligatory mountain bike following up the rear.
Others, with the kind of pastey-faces you can only gain by playing one too many Xbox game, trickled up Corporation Street squinting into a rarely seen City Centre sunlight. Clearly, the potential of a free iPad was too much of a lure… even for those who struggle to read and write.
Once described by Chief Superintendent David Baines as “feral youths” they continued to arrive into our great city on foot and on their mountain bikes as the great moral majority poured out en masse in the opposite direction. Or tried to. First Bus was true to form and appeared to have scrapped many of its services; only the 135 appeared to be running towards Bury. Their claimed every-10-minutes-service had reverted to the more familiar wait-for-half-an-hour-and-three-come-at-once service. When the inevitable trio finally arrived it looked like a peace convoy and felt more like the last chopper out of Saigon.
Save for the odd distant siren and a small pocket of police in summer dress, they were nowhere to be seen. Not in numbers anyway, and they certainly weren’t giving chase to the mob. Where were the boys in blue who can kettle students, trade unionists and beatniks in the blink of an eye, I wondered. Indeed, where were the tough guys from the TAG team, three of whom thought nothing of giving me a good hiding all those years ago?
Manchester has taken many long years to rebuild itself after the bomb. Now, we find that Mancunians and Salfordonians are only too happy to trash our city in a few short hours - for a pair of trainers, a telly or an easily traceable mobile phone. I never thought I’d see the like of the bomb again... until Glasgow Rangers came to town. But at least those two outrages were caused by out-of-towners, not our own. God knows what we’ll find tomorrow morning, but it’ll be left to those of us in the public sector to put it all back together again.
When the questions are asked they will all start with one word: Why?
Why have the GMP have been found lacking here as well, despite an afternoon of rumours? Why did the GMP send 100 officers to London when they would be better deployed here? (After all, we pay for them – not Londoners.) Why did it take so long for Lord Snooty and his chums to get back from their holidays and attempt to take control? Why have so many young people been abandoned to their respective fates, in a vacuous existence with no way out other than a life of crime? Why have the mamby-pamby liberals won the day for so long? Why can anarchy break out so easily and so readily in what is supposedly a civilised country? Why? Why? Why?
There will be more questions than answers, but tonight I weep for both my city and my country, neither of which I recognise any longer.
