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"Tough love and tougher policing" are David Cameron's solution for "broken Britain", headlines The Guardian, which reports on attempts by the British government to come to grips with the causes and effects of the recent riots. Thousands more police officers will undergo riot training, the left-leaning paper says, while the prime minister has promised to "turn around the lives" of 120,000 families to address what he calls a "slow-motion moral collapse".
Magistrates, meanwhile have controversially been allowed to disregard sentencing guidelines when punishing rioters. One 23-year-old student “was jailed for six months for stealing £3.50 worth of water bottles from a supermarket”.
For a supposed progressive, observes one Guardian writer, Cameron is now sounding worryingly Thatcherite: "cold, cynical and occasionally quite odd". Critics of Margaret Thatcher's reaction to the Brixton riots in 1981 described her "inability to strike the right note when a broader sense of social understanding was required". We might say the same of Cameron today.
