If you were Priti Patel, of course, this was, if not exactly a desirable ending, certainly a helpful illustration of what the Policing and Crime Bill can claim to be defending the public from. Of course the right to protest is a sacrosanct part of an open democracy, she said; but not this thuggishness, not this criminality, not this violence. Whoever argues against the bill now — and there are serious arguments to be made — will have to make their case against the image of a police van blazing in the night while protesters cheered the destruction.

But while you can make a cynical argument that the scenes in Bristol serve Patel’s more authoritarian interests, you can’t accuse her of having willed them into being. There was violence in Bristol because some people came out wanting violence, and they got it. Protests attract a kind of hanger-on who don’t truly care about the politics, but love a ruck. They don’t usually have anything as ostentatious as a homemade spear to give themselves away, but they’re always there, a shadow of aggro trailing every left-wing demonstration.

Violence is exciting. That crackle in the air, the surge of adrenaline: it feels good. The pure purpose in making a weapon of yourself. The very few times I’ve successfully faced down a physical confrontation (and being five-foot-one and female, it’s not exactly something I’ve gone looking for) it’s always left me shaken but elated. Staying on my feet when muggers tried to snatch my handbag, or shouting something sarcastic at masked anti-feminists who’d turned out to disrupt a talk I was giving then scampering to safety — those are things I remember with a shiver of pleasure as well as fear.

So I suppose I can understand a little of what drives the troublemaking element. I can understand, too, why some people are so infatuated with violence that they look for ways to justify it. Someone broadly supportive of the Bristol protests has two options when it comes to the subsequent riots: you can defend the principle of dissent while deploring the bad actors, which sounds mealy-mouthed and prissy even if it is right; or you could go big and argue that not only is the violence justified, but it actually further demonstrates the justice of the cause.

It’s that latter approach that you’ll find on the far-Left of British politics. After the 2011 riots, there was an impulse to weave the looting and destruction into a story about the deep suffering in British society: if people were compelled to act so outrageously, went the reasoning, they must have something powerful to be outraged by. One of the more bizarre examples of this was the claim that, because most of those arrested in the riots were men, they must have been revolting against the “feminisation” of the economy — as though it isn’t always men who commit most of the violent crime.

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In the same spirit, this week saw hard-Left outlet the Canary claiming that: “The people who besieged Bridewell Police station were fighting against state violence and authoritarianism, standing up for freedom and for the oppressed.” In this circular logic, the fact of the riots proves that the riots were legitimate: the violence of the rioters is evidence that they were reacting to the violence of the state.

Sisters Uncut complained that “the media drew a contrast between a moral majority and a small number of violent protesters”, and then set themselves resolutely on the side of the rioters: “The stigmatisation of protesters is a tactic of division that we won’t stand for. It is a fearful response by a state that thrives on division and scarcity.” Meanwhile, Novara hosted a discussion about the “utility of riots”: perhaps this had been counterproductive in the short term, it was mused, but would go on to drive a wider movement.

It’s always easier to see the “utility” in the violent actions of someone you suspect might be on your side, of course. None of these outlets were offering apologias for the Capitol rioters in Washington at the beginning of the year: the violence then was not obvious evidence of a populace confronting a state’s oppressive force, but of entitlement and delusion. Instead, the Bristol riots were blessed with comparison to the Poll Tax riots, the prime example of explicable political resistance expressed as destructive impulse.

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The point here is not that the Left is uniquely enamoured of its own aggression, but that the hard Left is labouring under a specific kind of hypocrisy — a hypocrisy that allows people to claim to be against violence while at the same time celebrating, relishing and instrumentalising it. It is a recipe for bad faith. It means never having to ask the question “is this violence politically justified?”, because you’ve always already decided that any violence is really the responsibility of the “other side”; and if the other side hasn’t committed anything close to actual violence, you can always upgrade words or even beliefs to the status of “symbolic violence”.

Whatever “your side” does is vindicated in advance, so long as you can make it part of your preferred story. The stories can be flexible here, because they have little to do with principle: the only principle is the pleasure of destruction, the longing to warm your politics in the glow of arson.

As for the people who actually have to live in the wreckage, well, they hardly count: after the 2011 riots, the Left fostered a particular strand of contempt for local residents who went out to tidy their own streets. (“Symbolic cleansing”, one blogger called it, as though the proper Left-wing thing to do was pick your way through broken glass in your neighbourhood indefinitely.)

The ecstasy of violence in Bridewell will probably have ensured support for the Policing and Crime Bill, but the point of the riots was clearly never to persuade parliament. The point of the riots was the riots themselves, the pleasure of destruction, the joy of the flames, the satisfying crunch of a body against another body. The point of the riots was to claim violence, and the point of those defending them is to turn that violence to their own ends.

Until now. While the tearing down of the Colston statue may have superficially burnished the city’s hip, progressive credentials, it also illuminated the city’s dark side: a history of brutal imperial exploitation, worker rebellion and rampant inequality that never went away.

The city, in 1889, just before the statue was erected, had been described as “a seething centre of revolt”. Britain was in its imperial pomp, but the servants’ quarters were in revolt. The subversive creed of socialism was gaining ground among the West Country’s working class. Respectable Victorian society sought to counter that spirit of rebellion by promoting philanthropists and the paternalistic values of ‘great men’ – men like Edward Colston, who now finds himself sitting in the bottom of the marina while a new generation of rebels cheer.

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Today, Bristol is a ‘cultural hub’ in that rather hackneyed term. The artist Banksy, another Bristolian, is a representative figure when it comes to the pseudo-revolutionary aesthetic that seems to emanate from the city’s pores. It is beloved by a stratum of the upper middle class – which is smug, complacent, and not quite as revolutionary as it would like to think.

Because the poor are still very often airbrushed from the city’s public image. Behind the street art, cobbled lanes, ludicrously expensive housing and overpriced drinking dens is a city where many residents struggle to make ends meet.

This is an image carefully curated by the city’s last mayor, George Ferguson. Known for his bright red trousers, Ferguson’s agenda was notoriously light on substance. He created a buzz around the city, while increasing inequality and gentrification — as well as the hole in the city’s finances. Pedestrianisation, tree-planting and the promotion of high-profile festivals were all celebrated achievements – and largely preoccupations of an outer-suburban middle class who made up Ferguson’s voter base.

But five years ago, he was ousted by Marvin Rees, the son of a Jamaican father and British mother. He couldn’t have been more different from Ferguson; Rees was brought up by a single mother in the deprived areas of St Pauls, Lawrence Weston and Easton.

Rees won by focusing on two policy areas which had been neglected for decades: housing and transport. Back in 2016, when he was elected, house prices were increasing by 17%  a year. Great news for existing homeowners but less so for the city’s low income residents — and nearly a quarter of Bristol children (21%) live in low-income families. Rees has, since his election, overseen the building of 200 council homes with a further 900 currently being built. But it’s still not enough. There are 13,000 families currently on the council’s housing waiting list in Bristol.

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And yet the image the middle classes cling to is of high levels of life satisfaction. In fact, Bristol was recently voted the happiest city in the country to live by its residents; but, tellingly, it has also been voted the worst city in which to use public transport. And public transport is vital for those commuting from the deprived outer boroughs into the city centre. But services designed for the poor, are generally poor services. Buses are late or don’t turn up. And for those travelling to work, a frequently late bus can be the difference between a warning and a sacking.

Bristol is certainly a diverse city — 16% of the local population belongs to a black or minority ethnic group. Yet the fact that a statue of Edward Colston stood for 125 years ought to temper the idea that the city is some exceptional progressive ‘hub’.

Indeed, much has been made, since the toppling, of the importance of removing offensive monuments consensually. But that approach had already been tried in Bristol — over and again. The most recent stalemate was over a contextual plaque intended for Colston’s plinth. The Merchant Venturers — the organisation to which Colston belonged — engaged in filibustering pedantry in an attempt to water down the wording. Meanwhile,Tory councillor Richard Eddy, who said on Sunday that he was “horrified and appalled by the rank lawlessness” of those who threw Colston’s statue in the river, had encouraged pro-Colston vigilantism, saying in 2018 that vandalism of the new plaque “might be justified”. In other words, the status quo in Bristol has its own militant wing.

There was, of course, an element of revolution as play at work among those who romped around central Bristol at the weekend. A few of the white arms pulling down Colston’s statue were doubtless attached to hemp-shirted, dreadlocked out-of-towners who came to Bristol for the ‘vibe’.

To focus on them, however, and to obsess about “process”, is to ignore the fact that Bristol’s social problems run a lot deeper than statues, concert halls and road signs. Yes, black locals hated that statue — and for good reason. But they have other pressing concerns, too. A 2017 report by the Runnymede Trust ranked Bristol as the seventh worst local authority for racial inequality out of the 348 in the UK – and the worst ‘core’ city (self-selected core cities are: Belfast, Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham and Sheffield).

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Growing up poor in Bristol is hard. And growing up poor and BAME is a constant battle, despite the popular image of the city as ‘open’ and ‘tolerant’ and [insert woke corporate buzzword]. Bristol has 41 areas in the most deprived 10% in England. Despite graduates of Bristol’s prestigious university earning above the national average three years after graduation, Bristol was ranked in the bottom third of all local authorities in England by the Social Mobility Commission.

Because political activism is dominated by university students, more deep-rooted inequalities are sometimes passed over by campaigners in favour of headline-grabbing stunts. Spectacular public actions can galvanise opinion. But race equality campaigners will want to ensure that superficial change is not a substitute for what has been correctly identified as structural and institutional racism. Too often mere cosmetic change is a feature of liberal identity politics: the diverse boardroom but the overwhelmingly black, poorly paid shop floor. That isn’t equality; nor is the act of pulling down an objectionable statue in a city where residents from Black African and Black Caribbean families have persistently high levels of unemployment.

Another bleak irony about last weekend’s protests, was that so many protesters seemed complacent about the spread of a virus which, while perhaps not affecting them, has been disproportionately killing the old, the infirm, and, yes, black people. To point this out while protests were taking place was frowned upon as ‘inappropriate’ or ‘insensitive’ — further proof perhaps that we live in a shallow and unserious culture where raw feelings are given much too much credence.

Bristol at times encapsulates our culture’s contemporary shallowness. The city has a propensity to sate itself on its own progressive reputation – while simultaneously ignoring glaring inequalities that exist just beneath the surface. We must hope that the carnivalesque removal of Edward Colston from his plinth at the weekend will not adhere to this familiar Bristolian type: a self-satisfied pat on the back that quickly slips into complacency about the city’s more deep-rooted inequalities.

Like a badly loaded barge, national life is made lopsided by London’s dominance. It affects the way others see us and the way we see ourselves; everything that matters seems to happen in London, an illusion fostered by the overwhelming concentration of the national and international media in the city. Despite the well-meaning attempts of that same media sometimes to include ‘the provinces’ in their output (how often, for instance, in the current Brexit debate have you heard a ‘vox pop’ illustrating Leave sentiment from some neglected quarter?), the end result often reeks of metropolitan condescension.

Britain has, to coin a new meaning for the word, a very severe case of ‘Capitalism’: a complaint which magnifies London’s importance whilst diminishing everywhere else. It would be a salutary corrective if some other city were given the chance to shine, and I have just the place in mind.

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An Oxford-educated Scotsman I once knew sneeringly dubbed Bristol ‘the Birmingham of the West’ after I had confided my affection for the place. Unwittingly perhaps, he had doubly offended me, for I have lived in both Bristol and Birmingham and found much to admire in each of them. But I do think that in one sense at least, he spoke a truth. For Bristol is – like Brum – a hard-working, feet-on-the-ground sort of place which goes about its business without too much fuss. But which, as a result, consistently punches below its weight.

Unlike say Liverpool or Newcastle, Bristol lacks definition in the national imagination. This is partly to do, I think, with the national obsession with football. Though Bristol has in Rovers and City two well-established sides, they both haunt the lower divisions and have never thrived in the modern era. And this matters in terms of national visibility. Imagine Liverpool or Manchester without their football clubs: each would be much-reduced and would count for less on the national stage. And yet Bristol is, by many other measures, a much more successful city than any of its northern sisters. Economically, at least, Bristol puts its rivals in the shade.

The Bristol city-region (which includes three other councils – North Somerset, South Gloucestershire and Bath, and North East Somerset) has, by far, the highest productivity of any big conurbation outside London. Household incomes are correspondingly the highest outside the capital. On a measure commonly used by economists – gross value added – Bristol comes top of the so-called ‘core cities’ league. What all this adds up to is a thriving regional economy based on an enviable mix of  industries.

Bristol’s long and successful tradition in aerospace (Concorde first flew from the runway at Filton, in the North of the city) showcases its precision-engineering prowess, but the city also has a thriving financial services sector and a growing reputation in the creative industries: it is home to Aardman Animations – the creators of Wallace and Grommet – and that success has initiated a cluster-effect. There’s a real buzz down in the imaginatively restored city docklands, which have come back to life in recent decades and where many of these creatives work.

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But the case for Bristol does not rest on the grey substrate of economics alone. There is also its matchless topography – the sheer beauty of the place. If on a sunny day you walk from the centre of Clifton – along, say, Royal York Crescent (the longest symmetrical crescent in Europe) – up through Clifton village to Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s suspension bridge, there is delight at every corner. The views across the city, the solid dignity of the buildings and the swooping grandeur of the Avon Gorge lift the heart.

The gorge is a natural wonder and very few cities can boast such a wild treasure in their midst. Amongst British cities only Edinburgh, with Arthur’s seat rising gaunt and untrammelled, can really compete. A few months ago I took that very walk, extending it down through the dense woods that cloak the steep sides of the gorge, and was reminded just how special a place this is.

Since 1952, the gorge has been designated as a site of special scientific interest and it enjoys a unique micro-climate, which makes it home to an unusual variety of plants and animals. In its sheltered crannies, botanical rarities with wonderful names like Spiked Speedwell, Autumn Squill, Honewort and Bristol Rock Cress thrive whilst Peregrine Falcons soar in the air above.

As you descend to the muddy waters of the Avon and approach the old heart of Bristol’s port, there are reminders everywhere of the city’s nautical heritage. For Bristol has played a central role in Britain’s long history of exploration and naval endeavour. It was from here in 1497 that the Italian navigator and adventurer John Cabot set sail under warrant from Henry VII and, in a remarkable feat of seamanship, sailed with 20 crew in the 50 ton Matthew right across the Atlantic, making landfall probably in Newfoundland.

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The sea and the trade it carried have long been at the heart of Bristol’s prosperity. In the mid-eighteenth century Bristol was the centre of the slave trade and grew rich on the profits of that cruel commerce. Correct modern sensibilities deplore the fact of the trade and in Bristol, as elsewhere, attempts are underway to expiate the sins of our fathers in a flurry of fatuous gestures. For instance The Colston Hall is being renamed, because the merchant Edward Colston was involved in the trade.

However, Colston’s case illustrates the absurdities of airbrushing history in this way: for he was also a great philanthropist who devoted part of his wealth towards – among other things – educating girls in the city. History tends to be more complicated than the protagonists in this debate allow. But as Louise Mitchell, the chief executive of the Colston Hall, so tellingly puts it:

“It’s very important to us as a progressive forward-looking arts organisation, that we include everybody and people felt uncomfortable entering the building because of the perception that it had in some way profited from the slave trade.”

As it happens the Colston Hall was actually named after the street in which it stands – Colston Street –  but mere facts count for little in such  overheated controversies.

Given that Bristol also profited greatly from tobacco (the Wills family – great benefactors to the university – made their money from the deadly weed) it might seem that its historic prosperity is mainly rooted in trades now deemed dubious. But that should not be allowed to cloud the issue. Bristol’s long and illustrious history as an entrepot is woven into the wider history of the nation.

Though fashionable opinion may now deplore some historic aspects of the city’s commercial vigour, there is no denying that it exemplifies a particular kind of English entrepreneurial-ism that makes it well-suited to be a new capital city. The phrase ‘ship-shape and Bristol fashion’ supposedly derives from the particular robustness that sailing ships needed to withstand the rise and fall of the Avon’s tide; I can think of no phrase that better sums up the qualities our new capital would need.