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Forget the silly copycat virtue signalling on the streets of London - I think this was merely our exuberant minority having a post-lockdown knees-up - but the riots in the US really do point to an endogenous problem in American policing. A comment to the post below reminded us that the opposite to love is not hate but indifference. It was indifference that gave us Bergen-Belsen and the casual murderous brutality of the Nazis; they simply didn't care enough even to feed or keep alive their victims. The worst crime in the eyes of these beasts was not to be Jewish or Communist but to be inconvenient. This I think is also the problem at the heart of US police violence - indifference.
Many aspects of the US are counter-intuitive. I love this map -
It shows the predominant ethnic origin of each county and the most common is ... German. Apart from Utah and the old states of the NE coast, the English are nowhere. So prevalent was German culture in the US that on the eve of the Great War, the country was ambivalent as to which side to support. This has nothing to do with the seats of the riots, the major conflagrations in LA, NY, Chicago, Atlanta and of course Minneapolis, but I throw it out as an explainer of a cultural difference between the UK and US that we sometimes cannot quite understand.
We have of course no equivalent of the National Guard either. The ease with which the US has used these armed citizens in the past decades, including for those who recall it the shooting dead of 13 students at Kent State University in 1970, is also utterly alien to British culture.
Our own most recent riots in 2011 proved the efficacy of the country's mass surveillance systems. Some 1,292 persons were jailed for a total of 1,800 years. This at least must prove some sort of disincentive to the anarchic inciters, even if it also poses civil liberties concerns for the rest of us.
David Lammy may be happy to be seen trying to start this disorder in the UK, but we really are very different nations.
If one thing is clear from the chaotic scenes on TV and social media of the undisciplined selfishness at our supermarkets, it is clear that the UK is not the place that many liked to think it was. And London, filthy, crowded, raw London with the highest multi-drug resistant TB rates outside Iraq, Ethiopia and Afghanistan, is worst of all. When Quentin Reynolds described the resilience of Londoners on Humphrey Jennings's 'London Can Take It' he was documenting a very different London to today's city.
Watching the fights break out over toilet roll at a time when there was no food shortage and the chip shops were open, one has to wonder what it will be like when food shortages start to bite, as they surely will. People who have never used their kitchens in London will be lost. Me? I love to cook. So my shelves are already full with dried ingredients and the staples - polpa, coconut milk, onions, dried onions, garlic, garlic paste, tomato paste, and herbs and spices in ranks of big Kilner jars (tip: never again buy those sully little supermarket bottles. Order your Turmeric, smoked Paprika, peppercorns, Garam Masala, mustard powder etc in 200g packets - 200g of Turmeric is the same price as one of those little curvy 28g jars.
When the pizza and cocaine run short - and you can bet the crisis is affecting the supply chains for illegal drugs as well as everything else - then tempers will also run short. Someone will pull out a zombie knife in Tesco. A shop worker will die in a pool of blood, and armed troops will be posted to London's supermarkets. A wilding gang will run at a guarded supermarket entrance, and a young soldier will open fire.
