Impossible to watch this week’s riotous events unfold without questioning how the future looks from a young person’s perspective. We found ourselves wondering this morning how many of those smashing up businesses ran their own business? We reckoned somewhere between none and zero.

If you run your own business, have grown it with blood, sweat and tears (not to mention exhaustion, no social life and penury) and have taken it from an idea to a going concern, you don’t dismantle it lightly. You have a great deal to lose if something threatens that business, and you have empathy and respect for others who have gone through the same process. You’re unlikely to be smashing their windows, nicking their stock and burning their vehicles.

Self-employed defend their premises

You know they aren’t ‘the enemy’, in fact they’re the very opposite. They’re the people investing in their area, trying to create opportunity and demonstrating a faith in the community. It was the independent business people who were defending their premises, not Tesco’s manager.

Some of those looters have gone straight to jail. Anyone running their own gig would likely watch the whole thing collapse as a direct or indirect result of them having a spell inside. It’s inescapable – if you’ve built and nurtured something, you have something to lose.

Entrepreneurship to the rescue – just one more reason we should be encouraging our young people to start their own businesses. If energy goes into something constructive then more and more of us have a reason to create a peaceful community conducive to prosperity.