David Cameron is out of his depth here. He didn't fly back from his holiday till the situation was escalating out of control and yesterday he took no concrete action to empower the police, he just made a short speech warning people that they would feel the full force of the law and would potentially be ruining their own lives.
Well the scallies in Manchester, Nottingham and Birmingham just LOLed at that. They see Cameron, and the British government and police, as a joke, and it sends a message now what you want to do you can do. Dangerous given that the action of these scallies will embolden people who actually do have sinister political intentions, it shows how easy you can cause carnage. Whats going to happen now if Islamic groups start organising a "Day of Rage" on facebook like they have been doing in Arab countries, or if the socialist workers party start organising a "day of revolution", students start going on a rampage about tuition fees, trade union groups organise a day of "stop the cuts" action. Have the police got enough resources to deal with these if they all decide to start smashing things up?
For all Tony Blair's faults (and I disliked him intensely when he was PM) I have to say Blair would have been much better dealing with this. Blair never missed a trick when he sensed the public attitude might have been supportive of a crack down on civil liberties, when the anti globalisation peace type protestors were out, Blair had the police battering ten shades of crap out of them, and I don't think under Blair the police would have been fannying around like they are now.
