Don't worry Don. Your government will do it in stead, albeit the burning will be metaphorical. Steal from the poor, give to the rich.


It's nice if your forbears succeeded and rose by honest diligence. Indeed it's admirable. But nowadays that is quite rare, indeed almost impossible, unless you have a spectacular ability or run of luck.

The dishonest and unprincipled like Lord Sugar or Rupert Murdoch or Russian oligarchs who applied the skills learned as illegal black marketeers (or mobsters) to steal state assets control our lives, and thanks to the media they and cronies run (not to mention the Sunday Spurt), bling is the thing. The media teach that Jordan is a success, as are premiership footballers, and that success or prestige is not about diligence.

But those like Norman Tebbit (of whom I am sorry to feel that I hear an echo) tell the less fortunate to "get on your bike". That will not create successes but at best wage slaves with ever fewer rights as successive governments and union busting imported American lawyers castrate labour laws.

The rioters (rightly) feel (I infer) that they are not in control of their lives, that the only times they will be are in these riots, and the only other times they will feel so is after artificial stimulus. They are each a "king for a day". These are problems not born of former socialist governments, but of the ethos of the Thatcher generation. Blaming the powerless for feeling powerless is not the answer.

The police certainly have the shitty end of the stick - but that does not mean that the answer to the riots is to laud our magnificent boys in blue and give them a bigger stick. Eventually that leads to the Peterloo massacre.

While it is not yet wholly clear that the illegal firearm found was Duggan's, if it was then that should make his death a righteous shoot, just as the attempt to arrest a long standing member of a violent weapons and drug-dealing gang was a righteous arrest. But that does not mean that there is no root cause for the riots. There is. It is the fact that the rioters can see (and they are probably right at present) no way for them to attain the things that society tells them are the only measures of success and respect.

Society is broken. The rioters may be criminals but repeating that and threatening state violence is not the answer. Their anger must be understood before it can be controlled or disarmed.

Rule is a compact between rulers and ruled. When enough of the ruled do not obey, there are not enough forces of the state to compel obedience. Surely we in England learned that in Ireland in 1922.