Torching Northern London

There was once a phrase associated with England "staid old Britain". That was away back when it was an Anglo-Saxon country of refined tastes, a social-standing system, of country estates and gentility and fox-hunting and deliberate ignorance of the presence of the teeming streets of its cities.

No one in present-day Britain can any longer ignore the teeming streets of its cities. And England is no longer staid.

The kind of rioting and looting and torching that afflicts the banlieues of Paris with its disaffected, poverty-stricken immigrant populations, and its vast unemployed; restless, shiftless youth is now present in London. These blighted neighbourhoods teem with resentful youth, out looking for some diversions from boredom and poverty.

Drug-dealing and other diversions which draw the attention of the law ensures that many faces are well known to the law-and-security authorities. Who know that their society sits on a tinderbox of aggrievement and contempt for societal values and priorities that exclude those of other cultures who have migrated to those shores.

It's simply the way the system works; not to be taken personally.

The Metropolitan Police have acknowledged their inability to cope with the sheer numbers of rioters that electrified the Tottenham area, then spread elsewhere to equally vulnerable places. Insufficiently alerted to the potential of mayhem, with inadequate numbers of police in place, they watched as cars, including their own, were torched, along with shops and homes.

Stood by as electronics stores, clothing and sport shops were casually looted, the looters in no great hurry, since the police were not responding. There were police and protester casualties and hospital admissions, but these were sustained in response to the riots and the rioters which the police identified as their main concern, not the youth having "fun" burning down peoples' homes.

Things were so casual that an orderly queue formed to gain entrance to stores being raided. The youth gangs could muster the patience to wait until those before them satisfied their acquisitory urge, leaving some stock over for those to follow to purge from stores' inventory before torching the shops, emptied of their merchandise.

"This is opportunistic criminality. These individuals who stole, looted and rampaged through businesses took advantage at a time when police were dealing with some serious incidents that posed a threat to life. Police officers have to remain in position even after the initial violence dies down. It is a very delicate balance." Metropolitan Police Commander Adrian Hanstock

Evidently. Obviously it is a very delicate balance. And yes, most certainly those "individuals", the goons, the gang members, the morons who looted and torched "took advantage". How utterly amazing. How utterly unforeseen, that a first night of rioting would morph into a second, and then a third...

Might that be what results when police hesitate to act immediately and forcefully?

Photo by Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Image