Harry Stopes

From Josephine Avenue the first sign that something was up was the sound of a helicopter overhead just after midnight. A Telegraph journalist tweeted that ‘youths’ were throwing bricks and bottles at police. I walked up to Brixton High Street to have a look. Shops near the station like H&M and Vodafone had already been looted and the JD Sports was on fire, with flames spreading to the Foot Locker nextdoor.

At about 1 a.m. a group of teenagers managed to lift up the metal shutter of the Gamesmaster on the corner of Ferndale Road and the high street, attacking the window just off the high street out of sight of the police. There were shouts of ‘quick, quick’, but the police didn’t move and possibly didn’t realise immediately what was happening. One boy of about 14 stood at the corner with his thumb up to signal it was OK to carry on. The smoke from the burning shops was getting thicker and blowing towards us, and the rain was getting heavier.

‘At first I treated you as not an idiot, out of politeness,’ Slavoj Žižek said to Julian Assange last weekend, ‘but more and more I have to admit that you are not an idiot.’ Žižek and Assange were on stage at the Troxy in East London, watched by a crowd of nearly 2000 people who had paid £25 each for a ticket. If Assange changes his mind about not publishing his memoirs, he won’t be short of readers. Amy Goodman, chairing the discussion, asked Assange to respond to Joe Biden’s accusation that he is a ‘high-tech terrorist’. As Assange floundered, Žižek stepped in. ‘You are a terrorist,’ he said, ‘but in the sense that Gandhi is a terrorist.’ He quoted Brecht: ‘What is robbing a bank, compared to founding a new bank? If you are a terrorist, what are then they who accuse you of terrorism?’ Assange looked grateful.