THE RIOTS in France have been greeted here with something uncomfortably close to a national sneer. So much for la grande civilisation, we murmur. For all the talk about French citizenship and its unifying force, not much seems to have changed since 1793. The sans-culottes are back on the streets, and the great social divide between the haves and the have-nots yawns as wide as ever. Not only are they setting cars alight, they have also turned against the firefighters who come to put them out, and they hurl bricks at the police who try to protect them. Behind the windows of the tower blocks where France’s alienated minorities live, there is, it now seems, seething resentment against a society that has never got round to including them. Whatever the French word for “respect” may be, déférence it is not.

There is no earthly reason why we should be complacent. Last Saturday, at a bonfire night in Rutherglen, a Glasgow suburb roughly equivalent to the Grigny area of Paris, a fire crew was called to put out a blaze. As the engine approached, it came under sustained assault from a group of youths — men and women — who pelted them with stones. The firemen withdrew, and police in riot gear moved in. For upwards of an hour, both fire and battle raged. By the time they died down, two police officers had been taken to hospital, and 16 men and three women had been arrested. There were six similar attacks that night, one involving a direct attack against police by youths firing rockets at their cars. Andrew Shuttleworth, the assistant chief officer of Strathclyde Fire and Rescue Service, said it had only been luck that prevented serious injury. “These attacks are beyond the pale,” he said. “Some of the things that are happening at the moment really are potentially lethal.” And so it proved last March, when a fire engine in Easterhouse, a Glasgow housing estate, was attacked by a man with an airgun. He missed, but the shot hit a two-year old boy, who died.

So routine have these attacks become that some fire engines have been equipped with CCTV cameras to record the incidents. After one particularly savage attack in Coatbridge earlier this year, a new operational plan was drawn up so that fire crews could call in police instantaneously. Known as Code 13, it is the equivalent of the US army’s “man down” system, indicating a serious assault.

These may amount to little more than a few sparks compared with the conflagration in France. But a quick round-up indicates there are many more of them than most of us realise. In recent months there have been similar attacks in Manchester, Plymouth, Birmingham, Rochdale, Cleveland and South Wales. The Fire Brigades Union, which is backing a private members’ Bill by the Labour MP Alan Williams to counteract them, has calculated that there are about 120 incidents every week across Britain, in some cases involving deliberate ambushes to lure fire crews into trouble.

“Recreational violence” is the unlovely phrase now used to describe them. They conjure up a picture of boredom, alienation and the breakdown of a law-abiding society. They also carry echoes of Grigny, Clichy-sous-Bois, St Etienne or Marseilles, and though they may lack the racial element, who is to say that a fatal accident involving a stand-off with police or firemen would not set off the same kind of chain reaction that has so shocked the French authorities? Running through all of them has been the familiar phrase “breakdown of community” that cropped up similarly in the separate reports drawn up after race riots in Burnley, Oldham and Bradford.

Unemployment, low educational attainment, a rise in crime and drug use, polarised communities, racial and religious divisions, poor housing and poverty, were all cited as contrib- utory factors. That, and the hatred that may simmer below the surface of divided communities and can be fuelled by even the most minor of confrontations.

Last year David Goodhart, Editor of Prospect magazine, set off a lengthy debate about multiculturalism in modern Britain. He argued that, as society became more diverse, so the common values and assumptions that once held it together are breaking down. He was speaking primarily about ethnic divisions and the alienation of a younger generation of immigrant families. It may be, however, that those divisions go wider, that they can affect communities where race is less the issue than deprivation, the breakdown of family discipline and a growing sense of exclusion from mainstream society. In such places, acts that most of us would condemn as “beyond the pale” — attacking a fire engine, or firing a rocket at a police car — become not just routine, but seen as a legitimate means of taking revenge against a society that is mostly content to turn its back.

These acts of random violence may not yet have reached the level of the French attacks, let alone the riots that engulfed Brixton, Toxteth or Bristol in the 1980s. But they should not be ignored. They are warning signs of a volatility that can spread beneath the ground, like smouldering peat. It may be tempting, like Nicolas Sarkozy, the French Interior Minister, to dismiss the attackers as “rabble” or “scum”. But it does little to dow se the flames. Better, surely, to find out what started the fire in the first place.

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