By Bagehot
RETURNING to Britain at the weekend from holidays in France, Bagehot had a sobering drive from Dover up into London, past boarded-up shops and restaurants and van after parked van of police officers with unfamiliar cap badges and uniforms: officers on secondment from Hampshire, Wiltshire and beyond, helping to bring calm to the capital by sheer weight of manpower. Much has been written and said already by commentators and politicians of the left, right and centre. Keeping in touch with the news from home by Blackberry, I saw the disorder and looting variously blamed on gangs, bad parenting, rap music, computer games, consumerism, moral breakdown, softy police chiefs, coalition cuts, unemployment, racism, anti-racism and the bad examples set by bankers and expense-fiddling MPs. I read an article comparing London to Mogadishu (by a correspondent for Der Spiegel), and asserting that terrified residents were fleeing for the continent by Eurostar.
