web analytics

Watching London burn

I’ve got nothing to add that you couldn’t find out for yourself by following the BBC online or the Telegraph’s live coverage. Except we’re probably getting more ‘chatter’ (as they say in the intelligence biz).

A lot of this is about straight up looting. The picture above is a game store. HDTV, phones, clothes…some lady said they were forming orderly queues to loot an electronics store (that is so Britain).

But the clashes in the street (and perhaps the arson), pictures show an awful lot of young white faces. Either the papers are choosing photos carefully on that basis, or these are typical anarchist rent-a-mobs from outside. The neighborhoods catching fire are not white neighborhoods.

Nowhere near our old haunts yet, happy to say.

Police say they’ll publish the all photos they can get (like this personable young man cheerfully displaying his loot on Facebook) and prosecute anyone they can identify. I would have doubted once, but some kids from the last riot got jail time.

Beyond that…we’ll see. This isn’t the first time people in London have burned down their own neighborhoods. The reaction before was to hose them with money and ‘understanding’.

This time maybe — just maybe — the law-abiding population is too rattled by a general sense of everything’s-going-to-shit to take it.

August 8, 2011 — 9:34 pm
Comments: 66