A robust moral spanking

Comment of the week, from fridgepunk on David Starkey's comments about last week's riots:

Well it'd make sense to have a tudor historian on Newsnight if they'd brought him on to provide the historical context, given that the tudor period had some pretty good london riots and a notable youth crime problem, and to point out that this london riot was especially pissant given that REAL london riots have traditionally involved mobs of angry rioters hanging people off the side of bridges over the Thames. After all during the prototypical london riot (which is obviously the one that went on during the peasant's revolt) the contemporary accounts talk about how you couldn't walk across london bridge nor walk on the deck of a boat passing underneath without being hit in the head by the swinging body of a dead bishop^*. What is this country coming too that we've so forgotten our ancient and noble british traditions of murdering members of the clergy en mass and hanging their corpses off the side of bridge that the total casualty figures from 4 nights of rioting amount to a guy who was randomly shot for reasons unrelated to the rioting and an old man who overexerted himself while fleeing a burning building and suffering a heart attack?

Of course you'd also think that the only reason anyone would quote enoch powell^† in relation to the riot would be to make the valid point that riots perpetrated by a coalition of ethnicities, ages and socio-economic classes prove, once and for all, that the only thing liable to turn the Tyber red in the near future will be blooms of cyanobacteria.

But then if you take into account the actual historical context and annoying things like facts and stuff, then you can't talk about how "society has broken down" or about how "bits of society are broken" because both framings of the rioting explicitly imply that society was ever fixed during some previous edenic epoch during which you could leave your front door unlocked in london without getting all your stuff nicked and no one had to worry about creepy tory MPs chasing them down the street with a child catcher net so that they could administer robust moral spanking.

^* Some of whom ended up with signs attached to them advertising the wears of local merchants who'd set up stalls nearby, because tradition doesn't always have to be impractical.

^† Enoch Powell I.E. the bloke from Wolverhampton who predicted that massive intercommunity conflicts in britain would erupt into wide spread murderous violence… in england, who then went to MP for a consituency in northern Ireland just as the troubles kicked into high gear.

QFT

[Via Jetamors, commenting on a post by Ta-Nehisi Coates about Starkey's comments on last week's riots.]