The riots should challenge everyone's default mode, but a word of caution...

TO watch the UK in its present state from the vantage point of a holiday is a matter of shame: the images of crowds rampaging and threatening are on TV screens across the continent.

- Anne McElvoy

The British state looks slow-footed, the police at the edge of control.

A lot of people, it seems, take joy in responding to the dreadful events of the past days after the horrifying Southport killings of three small girls by making the mood worse.

Nigel Farage’s “don’t say I didn’t warn you” trope about the “politics of the subcontinent playing out on the streets of Leeds”, seemed to be referring to Muslim-Hindu tensions in India and Pakistan and/or Kashmir (precision is an elusive quantity in this debate).

Elon Musk thinks there will be a “civil war”, the stir-upper of someone over-keen to impose Alex Garland’s eponymous dystopian film on brawls in British towns, while Musk’s own X social media platform among others hosts some of the main voices driving confrontation.

This is a test, too, for a Government which is, at its heart, the home of people of liberal inclinations facing challenges to their worldview (it’s telling how often Starmer talks privately of extreme forms of populism emerging if his policies aren’t successful).