Welcome to The Spectator podcast. I'm Katie Balls. On this week's episode, we're talking about riot chic, the problem of electric cars, and how women's sport has won our hearts. First, is rioting becoming fashionable? That's what Cosmo Landisman asks in the week after Dahlston was rocked by

unrest. He believes that the middle classes are swarming to these disturbances to express some

apolitical anger. So is he right? Cosmo joins me now along with Tom Gash, author of Criminal,

the truth about why people do bad things. So Cosmo, in your piece this week, you say rage is now

all the rage. What happened last weekend to get you thinking about rioters, riots? Who was the

kid you were speaking to? Well, this is an old friend of mine, his son, was in his 20s. We were

talking, I was talking about this wonderful festival I'd been to it. I was sort of making

conversation. I said, well, have you been to anything exciting lately? And he said, yeah, I went to this riot. I asked him what that was,

and it was the Rassan Charles riot that had happened. And what struck me as odd as the way he

talked about it, you know, he talked about the excitement, the buzz, and the solidarity of everybody

coming together, as though he'd been to Glastonbury

or to a great rock concert. And that started me thinking is that many of the demos that we see

today, they become riots because they're not really about politics so much. They're about

a kind of collective group therapy where people get to express their anger.

Anger becomes the central force in this world as opposed to argument.

That was the sort of kernel of the idea.

Yeah, so with protests, we often see S. W.P. Placards pop up at every protest.

But what is riot sheet? Is it a small middle class phenomenon? Who are the people who are

attracted to this? Well, it's a lot of middle class people who, young middle class people,

who see and joining forces with groups like Black Lives Matter and whatever, or getting

involved in things, is a kind of more authentic idea of politics. They buy into the idea that democracy has

failed, that there are no longer the legitimate avenues by which protests established the way,

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