What a miserable summer:\u00a0 the return of famine in East Africa, the murder of demonstrators in Syria, the Eurozone crisis, the collapse of share prices around the world – and now rioting, looting and burning in more and more parts of London and even other British cities.<\/p>\n
As someone who has lived in London for 40 years and is proud of the city and its ethnic diversity, I am stunned by and ashamed of what is happening. Even one of our own local shopping centres – Ealing Broadway – is the location of mayhem.<\/p>\n
At a general level, I guess the dividing line between order and chaos is a thin one, even in developed societies like ours. More specifically, we have to address the sense of disconnection and even alienation that many young people – out of school or college in the summer or out of jobs for so long – appear to feel. But nothing justifies the wanton violence that we have seen where people are trashing their own communities with no cause or provocation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
What a miserable summer:\u00a0 the return of famine in East Africa, the murder of demonstrators in Syria, the Eurozone crisis, the collapse of share prices around the world – and now rioting, looting and burning in more and more parts of London and even other British cities. As someone who has lived in London for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6388","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-british-current-affairs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6388","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6388"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6388\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6390,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6388\/revisions\/6390"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6388"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6388"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6388"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}