London's Burning

Rolling BBC News coverage

LONDON descended into a third night of looting, fires and general violent disorder as the light declined on the capital city tonight.

Fresh riots erupted on both sides of the Thames in Lewisham, Peckham, Clapham Junction and in Hackney, Chalk Farm and Camden.

The BBC news channel carried dramatic footage of a family-owned furniture store in Croydon being incinerated in a huge blaze.

And, for the first time, the violence spread today outside of London to Birmingham city centre. 

It seems that the "summer of rage", as previously predicted by Met Police chiefs, simply took two more years to arrive than they had expected.

These are the worst cases of civil disorder since the early 1980s when Britain was also in a recession.

The first sign of the disorder arrived on Saturday night in Tottenham when a protest march linked to the fatal police shooting of Mark Duggan last Thursday turned nasty.

Since then, though, there has been little pattern to the violence and the original link to Mr Duggan's death seems to have been long ago forgotten.

The rioting and looting is now completely indiscriminate with the outnumbered police largely powerless to prevent it all from happening.

Scotland Yard has confirmed 225 people have now been arrested over the three days, though only 35 have been charged. West Midlands police in Birmingham has made a further 87 arrests tonight.

But, while the police response has been wholly inadequate, the politicians cannot even claim to have reached that level.

Of course, August is usually the month in which MPs choose to take a break as they are not required to sit in the House of Commons in Westminster.

However, to borrow a phrase, there is a feeling that many of them have fiddled while London has burnt.

For instance, while parts of the capital resemble a war-zone with running battles between the police and looters, Prime Minister David Cameron was sunning himself in Italy.

And, amid this week's financial gloom and impending financial collapse, the Chancellor George Osborne has been in Los Angeles.

Meanwhile, in the interests of political balance, it must be said Labour leader Ed Miliband has also been very quiet in Devon.

At least there has now been some movement was made by the powers-that-be as Mr Cameron and London mayor Boris Johnson joined Home Secretary Theresa May in cutting short their summer break.

Tomorrow, Mr Cameron will hold an emergency cabinet meeting at 9am.

I suppose it is better late than never but, so far in the crisis, the members of the government have hardly given the impression, as they like to remind us, that "we're all in this together".

Meanwhile, some sympathy has been expressed for the youths causing the violence and the social deprivation which they face.

True, there is an argument that a whole section of society has completely forgotten, left to live an almost pointless existence permanently on benefits.

But a few hundred hooded hooligans are hardly representative even of the underclass and the real victims here anyway are the tenants and the home-owners who have been displaced and distressed.

Indeed, not every shop which has been damaged, destroyed or looted has belonged to a multi-national corporation as the furniture store owners will vouch.

Now, Charlton Athletic and West Ham United fans have also been affected by the riots. The Addicks were due to play Reading while the Hammers faced Aldershot but both matches have been postponed on police safety grounds.

The current fear is that the riots will not stop until someone is killed. And, in that respect, the Met Police has utterly failed to protect its people while the politicians have been non-existent.

On his election last year, Mr Cameron promised to build a Big Society.

Tonight, though, that vision seems more vague than ever - in fact, as most suspected all along, it is a complete pipe-dream.