One of the most infuriating aspects of the #ukriots was the comprehensive failure of media operations like BBC2’s Newsnight to rise to the challenge. Night after night I turned to it in the hope that eventually we would hear some insightful, useful, sense-making discussion. I did so in vain. Instead, night after night, we got brain-dead, sterile, staged confrontations (like the one between the Michael Gove and Harriet Harman) and the usual cast of opinionated fools like David Starkey and Kelvin McKenzie. As I watched, I remembered something that Neil Postman once said about the intellectual ‘bandwidth’ of various communication channels. It’s impossible to have a serious discussion on broadcast television, he said, for the same reason that one can’t do philosophy with smoke signals: the medium can’t bear the weight. And yet, if the folks who produce shows like Newsnight read more widely, had richer address books and better contacts across academic and intellectual communities, then there’s no reason why they couldn’t do better than they currently do. Imagine, for example, how much more intelligent a discussion would be if it had someone like Martin Hall, the Vice-Chancellor of Salford University. Here, for example, is an excerpt from a a blog post he wrote about the disturbances in Manchester.

Pendleton, the broad swathe of highrise around Salford Precinct, is a 1960s urban planning disaster. It’s one of the most challenged local areas in terms of the Multiple Index of Deprivation, which brings together street-by-street statistics on unemployment, housing, health and other key indicators of the quality of life. Salford Precinct is also a bustling, friendly cluster of shops and stalls. Everyone who I spoke to who lives in this area was appalled by what happened on Wednesday, and will do everything they can to stop it happening again. The lazy assumption that people condone burning and looting because they have low incomes (or no incomes) is both insulting and dangerous. We need to be very careful about the “sick society” line taken in other near-instant opinions, with the implication that, like a gangrenous limb, troublesome communities should be amputated from the body politic. As elsewhere in the world, viable long-term solutions will come by working within communities, and not by doing things to them.

By coincidence, a few days earlier I’d met with colleagues from Bradford University’s fine and widely admired Department of Peace Studies. They had made the point that understanding the 2001 Bradford riots had taken many months of careful work in partnership with a wide range of people and organisations. Most of the instant explanations that had been offered at the time turned out not only to be wrong, but also to be a bad foundation for appropriate public policy. Janet Bujra and Jenny Pearce’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning: The Story of the Bradford Riots, published earlier this year, shows how a closely informed understanding of what went wrong in 2001 directly informed civic leaders when they were faced with the provocations of the English Defence League in 2010. This sort of experience-based expertise will be vital over the next few years in shaping future interventions, policies and responses that can work.

Above all, this is a time for listening. All the affected cities have community organisations with close knowledge of local circumstances. In our case, these are organisations such as the Broughton Trust and the Seedley and Langworthy Trust. We need to listen to teachers from local schools, to local councillors and to police community support officers. We also need to listen to our own experts in the health and social care professions, who interact with local communities and community organisations on a daily basis. We need to appreciate the difference between criminal justice and criminalising communities.

I think it was Philip Knightley who said that, in war, “truth is the first casualty”. What the political and media response to the riots showed is that, in a public order crisis, intelligence and reflection are the first things to be jettisoned.

Fifty years ago today, the East German Communist regime started to seal off their part of Berlin from the West. This is my piece of the Wall — a gift from a friend who went to Berlin in 1989 when the wall came down. It normally sits on the windowsill of my study.

In 2003 I went to Berlin and walked some of the route of the Wall, spending a long time looking at what used to be “Checkpoint Charlie” — the official crossing point. It was strange to see what had once been a flashpoint of nuclear confrontation looked humdrum.

Today’s Guardian has a nice piece about the anniversary.

Cory Doctorow became a British citizen this morning. I was privileged to be invited to the ceremony in Hackney Town Hall. Beforehand I spent an hour walking the streets in Hackney that had been the locations of looting earlier in the week. What was astonishing was the air of quiet normality. The clean-up operation seemed to have been virtually comprehensive. Here and there some windows remained boarded up, but in general it would have been impossible for a stranger to know what had gone on. At one point I got lost and wandered into a Turkish tailor’s shop to ask for directions. He smiled and told me I was “twelve minutes” away from my destination. “How can you be so precise?” I asked. “Well”, he said, “unless you are a very fast walker that is what it will take”. He was spot on.

The citizenship ceremony was fascinating and oddly moving. In addition to Cory (attired in his special Union Jack jacket), there were about 20 other ‘new’ citizens, of whom the overwhelming majority were non-white. They were a wonderfully variegated lot, some dressed to the nines, others in what might charitably be described as “smart casual”. They came from all over the world, from Angola to Zimbabwe. We gathered in the Council Chamber, and after a time the Speaker of the Council, an imposing black woman in impressive robes entered to preside over the proceedings. She made a nice informal speech about the importance of citizenship, what a precious thing it was, and about the responsibilities and rights that it conferred on its holders. Then each new citizen was required to swear an oath or make a declaration pledging allegiance to “Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, her heirs and successors”. Interestingly, some of the candidates elected not to read from the supplied script but asked the Registrar to say the words, which they then repeated. (From which I inferred that some of them might have literacy problems, at least in English.) Most of those who read tended to mumble a bit. The only one who was as clear as a bell was Cory (no surprise there).

After that, all the candidates stood and collectively made the second part of the declaration. They were then welcomed as citizens of this great country, and presented with their certificates of naturalisation by the Speaker. Many opted to have friends and family included in the resulting photograph. One person was asked if he had any friends or family. “Yes”, he replied, “but not here”.

It was a touching and impressive occasion, the more so because of its location. It was impossible to square what I saw and heard in Hackney today with Cameron’s odious ranting about a “sick” society. What I saw were people whom I found infinitely more preferable (and probably more valuable to society) than the denizens of Canary Wharf or Eaton Square.