Much was made this week about the news that, out of every seven people in prison for offences connected with the August riots, one was a foreign national.
I wonder what those same commentators make of the fact that, in many of the poshest areas of London, a very high proportion of residents (a lot more, I would guess, than 1 in seven) are also foreign nationals, born ‘as far away as Cuba, Samoa & Vietnam’, not to mention China, Russia & the Middle East.
Why are commentators much less concerned about the foreignness of these people & the effect they have on our way of life & property prices?
Even David Aaronovitch concluede that the lastest figures just go to show that the rioters were just the usual suspects.
Too right they were - three-quarters of all those who appeared in court had a previous conviction or caution. For adults the figure was 80% and for juveniles it was 62%.
But this cannot be taken to represent rioters as a whole.
Given that you were a rioter, the chance of getting identified from film & cctv footage & picked up by the police, was much greater for those ‘already known’. Those who were ‘not known’ had a much greater chance of melting away.
