And we're back

View Initial London riots / UK riots in a larger map
Dear God in Heaven.

It's the first day back from my holiday.  No, that's not right.  Yesterday was my first day back, but I had a deadline with a client in Hong Kong, so I didn't have a chance to post anything.  Hang on.  That's not right either.  In fact, clients kept popping up like weeds all month, I had to deal with throwing together a sudden children's birthday party after the trip to the cinema fell to logistics, and a battle erupted with the local water company that must have learned how to keep books in Fred Karno's Army, so my actual holiday consisted of a couple of days reading books somewhere between the 5th and 10th of July. 

In fact, it's my first day back from doing a load of other things and I still have a stack of e-mail to catch up on, so I think I'll call it my "ignoring most of my e-mail and deleting the press releases from my RSS feed month".

Doesn't sound quite the same, does it? 

The most disturbing recent news (following mass murder in Oslo and Mr Barack Hussein Obama's crowning achievement of throwing his country into the toilet) is the wave of rioting, looting and burning in Britain.  At first, I wasn't too bothered by the events over the weekend.  Occasional riots in London have become something to be endured in modern Britain.  However, that changed as one riot became dozens around and outside the capital.  Worse, a State that prides itself on being able to literally dictate an Englishman's every thought stood helplessly by while modern day Visigoths plundered and burned.  This was no longer breaking the law or failing to keep the peace.  This was a collapse of order and an utter disregard for authority.  Not surprising when the Home Secretary wrings her hands about whether or not to deploy water cannons and rubber bullets as if she was dealing with a nursery school uprising.  Never mind that whole buildings have been burnt to the ground, that innocent people have been stripped naked by robbers or that those who haven't been burned out of their homes are cowering in terror against what the night might bring.

This paralysis, this loss of confidence, is appalling and uncalled for.   There are three reasons why governments exist and abandoning any means they cease to have legitimacy: Defend the realm, prevent crime and preserve contracts.   From the videos I've seen that are less like Britain than Beirut in the '80s, I'd say that all three parties have come pretty close to abandoning pillar number 2.  Why Cameron, Clegg and Milliband aren't walking around with wet trouser legs because they're terrified of what the public will do to them in return for leaving the streets to the barbarians, I have no idea.  And how in God's name Britain ended up with this collection of wet slaps as a political class clearly shows that we haven't been paying attention.  This is indeed a sorry state to be in for what was once the greatest city in the world and capital of the greatest empire in history.

But I'm not going to leave things at that.  Britain is down, but far from out.  Now is not the time to throw in the towel.  What we need more than anything else is not this policy or that.  We don't need the "right" people in office or to say the "right" things.  We need to remember who we are and where we came from.  We need to recall what made Britain great and to embrace that greatness.  I don't mean in some silly Mussoliniesque attempt to recapture faded imperial glories.  I mean in recognising the tremendous legacy that our fathers and their fathers before them left to Britain and the world and to try, try very hard, to make ourselves worthy of it.   If we stiffen our backbones and our upper lips; find the spark and truculence that made an Englishman worth ten foreigners on any day*, then we'll have won half the battle against the nation's rot.

*Yes, I am being poetic.