Britain licks its wounds

"Our sick society," headlines The Daily Telegraph, reporting on the aftermath of riots in the British capital and across the country. As the prime minister condemned "sickness" in parts of Britain, the right-leaning daily reveals, police and courts were processing some 800 people arrested during the riots. Among them were teaching assistants, students, a grammar-school girl and a boy of 11, whose appearance left the judge “nonplussed”. “I can’t even detain someone who’s under 12,” he said.

In Birmingham, meanwhile, continues the Telegraph, the father of a man killed defending property in the riots called for calm. “Blacks, Asians, whites -- we all live in the same community,” Tariq Jahan said. “Why do we have to kill one another? Step forward if you want to lose your sons. Otherwise, go home.”

The rioters “are not protesters,” runs the paper’s editorial, “they are looters, vandals and thieves.” Social lessons can wait: right now we need “the restoration of order to our streets”. But that’s just what the Turks, Poles, Kurds and Sikhs who resisted rioters around Britain have been doing, notes one commentator. Britain’s immigrants “have shown themselves to be not just as law-abiding as the Anglo-Saxons, but far more inspiring.”