White Riot, I Wanna Riot....

The Bank told us all to go home early Tuesday afternoon, after a Facebook posting that encouraged people to go to the West End and get the shareholder's money back from The Bank. It had already closed a number of branches in various dodgy parts of London - though Bexleyheath isn't my idea of anywhere anyone is going to riot.

After a quick stop at the gym for a run, I proceeded home. And passing through the Cineworld complex, which on cut-price Tuesday is starting to get full right about that time, saw this lot instead.

The green doors are to an amusement arcade. They have shoved a large drinks fridge, seats and a games machine against the door. The Burger King has never looked so clean and tidy. The car parks never so deserted and the point of the last shot is that while this area is, well, doesn't have the same proportion of graduates as Richmond-upon-Thames, it's not an urban grime-hole like Mare Street or most of Peckham. The unemployment rate round here is actually quite low. And it is a long way from the nearest enclave of, errrm, disaffected youth. The riots haven't been in Hounslow and Southall, but Brixton and Tottenham. Any rioters would need to be imported and there are plenty of nicer places between them and me. Like Richmond, or Twickenham, or Putney. But perhaps when the nice places start boarding up and closing, everyone else has to.

This won't last to the weekend, if it isn't stopped by a couple of nights of 16,000 policemen on the streets of London. This isn't a real riot, there's no political motivation behind it, and my guess is that the opportunist anarchists who were probably the one putting things like the Facebook message out will have found that the disaffected youth aren't up for being guided.

If you really want a conspiracy theory, try this: these riots were inflamed by MI5 provocateurs to provide an incident for RIM/Blackberry to either provide GCHQ with the cryptography keys to the BBM kingdom or to have it shut down in this country. Or try this one: it was inflamed by the wide-screen smartphone makers to ensure that the Blackberry image was moved irrevocably down-market in the eyes of people who aren't disaffected youth.

It doesn't matter if either of those are false, because you can bet that MI5's lawyers drafting that request, and that the Nokia / Apple / HTC / Samsung marketing departments are all currently lighting candles to the God of Happenstance and ordering in more for the copycat white kids to buy or contract. That's the thing with Capital: when it loses, it wins, and when it wins, it wins.