Britain’s 2024 riots are a surprise national crisis. There was no particular buildup, no clearly discernible pressure cooker process. No one appears to have warned that riots were imminent. Plenty of efforts, some irresistible but some dubious, have now been made to explain them. Yet, more than a week after the first violence in Southport, Britain is only at the start of an agreed and effective response.

This is almost always the way with riots. Riots take many forms. Almost always, though, they come as a shock. Nevertheless, riots are not unknown, either in postwar Britain or in British history more generally. The idea that Britain enjoyed a seamlessly peaceful path towards the blessings of parliamentary democracy, tolerance and the rule of law is simply untrue. There was never a riot-free golden age. But each generation is surprised anew.

Years ago, researching a book on the 1981 Brixton and Toxteth riots, the length of some of these arcs struck me forcefully. In that summer, London, Liverpool and other cities were battered by riots that did £216m worth of damage at 2024 prices, and led to more than 3,000 arrests, many of black people. These events, though, were occurring, almost to the day, on the 600th anniversary of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, in which armed crowds marched from rural England and took over the capital city for three days, looting and burning as they did so.

In 1981, a mainly black British march protesting about what was dubbed the New Cross massacre, in which 13 young people died in an arson attack, clashed with police trying to prevent them from crossing London’s Blackfriars Bridge. Not only were those 20th-century protesters facing exactly what a massive and angry Deptford unemployed march of 1886 had also encountered from the police as they also tried to cross the Thames, they were echoing the long distant battle that occurred as Jack Cade’s Kentish rebels fought their way across London Bridge in 1450.

The riots of 2024 are very different. Their motivation and their aims are racist. There has been racist rioting in Britain’s past too, including against African-Caribbean people, Jews, Irish and Catholics. But there are also other similarities that unite most forms of rioting, past and present, whatever their motivation. Most rioters are young men. Most riots take place in urban areas. Most take place in the evening or at night – the dark favours violence and drinking. Most take place in good weather. Many trigger opportunist crimes such as looting and arson.

Riots are invariably a challenge to the state. They pose, in the most direct form, the question of whether the state can carry out its fundamental tasks of maintaining individual freedom, the public peace and enforcement of the rule of law. If it cannot, the legitimacy of the state comes into question. That was obviously true in 1381, when Richard II’s crown itself was at risk. But it was also true for Margaret Thatcher in 1981, and it is true for Keir Starmer in 2024.

Starmer’s task is twofold. On the one hand, he must reassert the rule of law and public order over the rioters. This is the absolute precondition for everything else that may now be required, so it must inevitably come first. Starmer’s language has been unequivocal so far. He grasps that he must grip the situation and be seen to do so. If the state’s authority is not upheld, nothing else is certain.

One option for Starmer is to summon the army. He would be right to be cautious. Even if they were armed, which they might be, soldiers could not be permitted to deviate from police tactics and orders. And bringing in the army might seem like a premature embrace of an act of last resort that could expose a new prime minister to charges of weakness.

Another would be to give the police more destructive weaponry. Boris Johnson wanted water cannon to deal with riots, but sceptical police chiefs and the then home secretary Theresa May stopped him. Starmer will be cautious too, not least because he knows how often the use of weapons with the power to disable could make things worse in Northern Ireland.

Instead, Starmer is focused on the criminal justice system. He seems to be starting to get his way here. About 400 arrests have been made. Others will follow. Courts have sat quickly, and are beginning to impose heavy sentences. It is claimed that prison places will be made available as a priority. One Southport rioter, Derek Drummond, 58, was jailed for three years yesterday on violent disorder and assault charges, even after handing himself in and pleading guilty. Two others were jailed for 30 and 20 months respectively. They are likely to be the first of many.

Courts often impose heavy sentences after riots, sometimes excessively. They are under public and political pressure to do this now. Riot, damage and assault are serious offences, carrying heavy maximum sentences. This may have an immediate deterrent effect. Once defendants who wore scarves or balaclavas in the 2024 riots realise that the online instruction to “mask up” can be taken by courts as an aggravating factor in sentencing under public order laws, others may grasp how much they are risking. If the government exempted all riot-related convictions from the plan to reduce prison terms to 40% of sentence served from September, Starmer would strengthen the point further.

But being strong in the aftermath of riots is not sufficient. In 1981, Thatcher was adamant that the riots were purely criminal acts. She refused to allow that they might have had causes. “Nothing can justify, nothing can excuse and no one can condone the appalling violence,” she announced. She was upbraided not just by Labour, which argued that the riots were a response to economic and social deprivation that she was determined to ignore, but by the Times. “She failed to raise the tone of her remarks to the level of events,” it said. “Not for the first time she was unable to strike the right note when a broad sense of social understanding was required.”

Starmer has a second task of this kind. He has to find a way of ensuring that such events are less likely in the future. This is a much longer term challenge, and the possible solutions go beyond the use of the criminal law. Again, there are many options. He can take punitive action against rightwing influencers and organisations. He can make life more difficult for the social media sites that they use. He can look for ways to move asylum seekers from vulnerable urban hotels in towns to more easily defended sites. He should do all three. They are not mutually exclusive.

His biggest challenge, though, is to start the process of doing what few western governments have managed to do. He must find ways of reducing rather than fanning public anxieties about migration, but without legitimising either the rioters or their hatred. No one pretends that this will be easy. He would be starting a new national conversation in a place which the country should never have been brought to under the previous government. But it cannot be ignored or treated in the old way. If it is, the riots will happen again – just as they eventually did after 1981.

• Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

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