The United Kingdom will be arguing for a long time about the causes of this week’s riots. Was it the dismal economic situation, elucidated by Ed Conway at Sky News? Was it “criminality, pure and simple,” as David Cameron, back from Tuscany, put it on the steps of No. 10? Was it, as I suggested yesterday, some combination of the two? .........
The front pages of most of today’s newspapers featured this picture, of a woman jumping out of a burning apartment into firefighters’ arms, but the image that will haunt me is this one, of a slight, disoriented boy. He seems to have wandered into the fray, perhaps on his way home from school. He is bleeding from the face. He is wearing flip-flops and a backpack. A bigger boy, part of the roaming crowd, approaches. He helps the boy up from the sidewalk. Then he and another man unzip the boy’s backpack, and look through it. The second man pulls out a couple of things and steals them. He chucks the boy’s Tupperware lunch container on the sidewalk. There’s little to say about why this happened, except that it did, and that the end of the riots will come late for that boy. It’s also too late for another man, a twenty-six-year old, who died of gunshot wounds last night in Croydon.
