What Car? has an article for those worried about riot damage to their cars. They point out that those with comprehensive insurance should have no worries, but insurers should be contacted as soon as possible.
On the subject of the riots, I was thinking of Victor Hugo’s description of certain elements of society in Les Misérables. Even though it was written in 1862, it is remarkably accurate in describing these rioters:
These beings belonged to that bastard class composed of coarse people who have been successful, and of intelligent people who have descended in the scale, which is between the class called “middle” and the class denominated as “inferior,” and which combines some of the defects of the second with nearly all the vices of the first, without possessing the generous impulse of the workingman nor the honest order of the bourgeois.
They were of those dwarfed natures which, if a dull fire chances to warm them up, easily become monstrous. There was in the woman a substratum of the brute, and in the man the material for a blackguard. Both were susceptible, in the highest degree, of the sort of hideous progress which is accomplished in the direction of evil. There exist crab-like souls which are continually retreating towards the darkness, retrograding in life rather than advancing, employing experience to augment their deformity, growing incessantly worse, and becoming more and more impregnated with an ever-augmenting blackness. This man and woman possessed such souls…
The wild spectres who roam in this grave, almost beasts, almost phantoms, are not occupied with universal progress; they are ignorant both of the idea and of the word; they take no thought for anything but the satisfaction of their individual desires. They are almost unconscious, and there exists within them a sort of terrible obliteration. They have two mothers, both step-mothers, ignorance and misery. They have a guide, necessity; and for all forms of satisfaction, appetite. They are brutally voracious, that is to say, ferocious, not after the fashion of the tyrant, but after the fashion of the tiger. From suffering these spectres pass to crime; fatal affiliation, dizzy creation, logic of darkness. That which crawls in the social third lower level is no longer complaint stifled by the absolute; it is the protest of matter. Man there becomes a dragon. To be hungry, to be thirsty–that is the point of departure; to be Satan–that is the point reached. From that vault Lacenaire emerges.
What is amazing about these riots is the incident which apparently started it. The police shot Mark Duggan – a man who they had had under surveillance, and who had links with London gangs and gun crimes in the black community. He appears to have been in possession of an illegal gun. Of course, his family claim he was a loving “family man who would not have shot at police”.
I’m expressing my own opinion here, but he had a gun. Quite frankly, I don’t care whether he shot first or not, you don’t carry a an illegal gun around with you if you are a “loving family man” who “wouldn’t shoot at police”. You carry it to shoot people.
Ironically, the police are being slated for not acting sooner on the riots. But what could they have done? They’re already being slated for shooting a lunatic with an illegal weapon, so can you imagine what would have happened if they’d have waded in and cracked a few skulls and prevented this whole sorry situation? The Bleeding Hearts Society would have had a field day.
In any case, you can’t just “arrest” a mob which is armed with bricks, knives, definitely guns (several people have been shot), firebombs, and so on. Officers’ lives would then have been compromised.
The police should be given firearms and allowed to open fire on these morons. Society would be better off without them particularly as it appears to have come to murder. Every one of the scum taking part in this is responsible for any death which takes place
Mind you, the riots have had one amusing effect. People who for whom politics is high up on their List of Things They Don’t Understand But Talk About Anyway are having enormous fun.