Rick Channing

Apologies. I did indeed cut and paste that. It was from Max Hasting's column in the Daily Mail.

If you live a normal life of absolute futility, which we can assume most of this week?s rioters do, excitement of any kind is welcome. The people who wrecked swathes of property, burned vehicles and terrorised communities have no moral compass to make them susceptible to guilt or shame. They are illiterate and innumerate, beyond maybe some dexterity with computer games and BlackBerries. They are essentially wild beasts... I use that phrase advisedly, because it seems appropriate to young people bereft of the discipline that might make them employable; of the conscience that distinguishes between right and wrong. The depressing truth is that at the bottom of our society is a layer of young people with no skills, education, values or aspirations. They do not have what most of us would call ?lives?: they simply exist. Today, those at the bottom of society behave no better than their forebears, but the welfare state has relieved them from hunger and real want. When social surveys speak of ?deprivation? and ?poverty?, this is entirely relative. Meanwhile, sanctions for wrongdoing have largely vanished. A key factor in delinquency is lack of effective sanctions to deter it. From an early stage, feral children discover that they can bully fellow pupils at school, shout abuse at people in the streets, urinate outside pubs, hurl litter from car windows, play car radios at deafening volumes, and, indeed, commit casual assaults with only a negligible prospect of facing rebuke, far less retribution. Anyone who reproaches a spoilt and sociopathically stunted child, far less an adult, for discarding rubbish, making a racket, committing vandalism or driving unsociably will receive in return a torrent of obscenities, if not violence. So who is to blame? The breakdown of families, the pernicious promotion of single motherhood as a desirable state, the decline of domestic life so that even shared meals are a rarity, have all contributed importantly to the condition of the young underclass. They have no code of values to dissuade them from behaving anti-socially or, indeed, criminally, and small chance of being punished if they do so. They appear to have no sense of responsibility for themselves, far less towards others, and look to no future beyond the next meal, sexual encounter or video game.

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Evening, all. I've been so utterly incensed at this seemingly unchecked thuggery, and after reading this thread I felt compelled to break cover and comment! The previous (Labour) government created a society of entitlement. These riots are not a result of social imbalance but simply a taking of advantage against a police force with its boots cemented in the foundations of political correctness. As one born in an age when common sense ruled the day, I really have to wonder what future generations will make of all this. Common sense meant something when I was growing up in the fifties. It means nothing today. Anyone familiar with current police proceedure will know that most are fully signed-up supporters of the doctrine that the police should use force only as a last resort. As one of the famous ?nine principles of policing?, published in 1829 at the very founding of the Metropolitan Police, puts it, the police should ?use physical force only when the exercise of persuasion, advice and warning is found to be insufficient? and to use only the minimum degree of physical force which is necessary on any particular occasion?. This was the policy of the Met during the recent protests against student fees. It had worked well enough a few days earlier when the trade unions held a march against the cuts, but the student protests turned violent. Reluctance to use force is right and we should be reluctant to reproach the police for it. However, a second attitude was at work in Tottenham. Since the Macpherson report of 1999 the police have been hyper-sensitive about race. This attitude has now become so paradoxical that they find themselves standing aside when members of ethnic minorities are being harmed. The people who ran shops, or who lived in the flats above, were not given the protection they deserved. In this kind of atmosphere, it?s not surprising that officers in charge of subduing a riot think it safer to wait for orders from the top rather than use their discretion to protect the public without fear or favour.