It’s high summer. Traditionally, this is riot season. Angry young men are rarely roused to protest in the dead of winter, but give them a nice sunny day and they’re game for anything.

But aside from all the most eye-catchingly ugly racial violence that has accompanied protests in the UK this August, it is a postscript to the events that caught my attention.

BBC Verify wrote the following in the final paragraph of their analysis of violence in Hull: “We have also seen footage of looting in Shoezone, where a large pile of shoes was brought out and set on fire, Greggs the bakers and cosmetics retailer Lush.”

Thinking small

It reminded me of the riots of the summer of 2011, which included the looting of Argos, Currys, Lidl, Aldi and JD Sports and the smashing up of corner shops. Angry men smashing up shabby discount chains and small shopkeepers.

I spent that first rioting night in August 2011 in St John’s Wood in north-west London, and knew nothing about it until the morning. The fact that the poor were smashing up their own streets was striking and somehow pathetic.

Were they to walk down any street in St John’s Wood and run a key down every parked car, or maybe put a brick through the window of every BMW they passed, it would rightly cause deep alarm among London’s wealthy.

Shoezone in Hull city centre

When you see images of a Shoezone looted and burnt, or a Greggs the bakers smashed up, it is almost like an installation art piece depicting the decline of modern Britain. This is what we’ve come to.

The poverty of the high streets being smashed up speaks volumes for the state of the men doing the smashing, long before they even pick up the metal bars. The easy response is to see them as pathetic, and as a consequence, despise them.

The difficult response is to see the open wound in the pathetic. Men reduced to pathetic acts are a dangerous and sorrowful sight. There is something cruel in responding only with contempt.