I have been struck by the uncomfortable parallels between the way Arab despotic governments and our own oh so much more enlightened government have responded to unrest on their city streets in recent months. Replace the word 'riot' with 'uprising', as I heard one speaker do on Radio Five Live last week, and you may get a different perspective on Britain AD 2011.
What was the first official reaction to the discovery that the British anti-government protesters used social media to mobilise? We must block them from using Twitter - maybe even suspend the networks altogether for a while... Now where have we heard that one before?
Next we must 'criminalise' the perpetrators and stamp hard on the suggestion that these protests may have been political in origin. Maybe the ultimate political protest in a hypercapitalist society like Britain is to have a consumerist riot...
Then, the way to crack down on these insurgents is to indisciminately dish out summary justice to avoid any repeat in the future. Attack the syptoms of the problem, ignore the causes. Stifle all reasoned debate. Create a climate of hysterical overreaction through state-sponsored media propaganda (avoid any objective news coverage and make sure every news report adopts a moralising tone). Introduce martial law by suspending any separation of powers between the legislative (the government) and the judiciarly (the judges), and by directing police operations agains the intifadists. And then hope against hope that everything will die back and that all this unpleasantness will simply go away, and everything can continue as before.
One final comment on British justice in the world at large today. If you brutalise, torture and kill an unarmed, defenceless civilian in a far-off middle Eastern country, you will serve one year in prison. If you make an innocuous comment on social media about a British riot that doesn't even happen, you get sentenced to four years.
Are we heading for a British Spring?
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