But all this expenditure looks increasingly like thick icing on a cake which is rotting away on the inside. I couldn't get near McDonald's on my visit this time as most of Powis Street had been cordoned off. About every third shop had been looted, one had been torched, and a taped-off burnt-out police car was being guarded by police like some exhibit in an achingly relevant art show. Groups of people wandered aimlessly about, cheerfully sizing up the damage. There was plenty of joking and laughter, and not a hint of an acknowledgement of the gravity of what had happened. It was difficult to determine what was more depressing — the events themselves, or the reaction to them among these onlookers. There was no sense that something terrible had happened to what BBC broadcasters relentlessly term their "community". Instead, there was a moral and social vacuum.

The police, standing like Whitehall sentries, were anticipating more trouble, first at 2pm, then at 5pm, but which, by the time I spoke to them, had yet to materialise. They were faultlessly polite; one sensed that they had all gone through some kind of Rank charm school training. But underlying all this courtesy was an almost beseeching quality, a sense that somehow if they were nice enough then people would not misbehave towards them, rather like the way a liberal-minded teacher tries to get troublesome pupils on side by being "down" with them. It was irritating because it stank of weakness, and more importantly, it was not working. They were obviously being regarded as mere curators, impotent, on the back foot, not to be remotely respected, let alone feared.  

I asked a couple of policewomen to confirm who had been doing the rioting the night before. "Don't know," was the immediate reply. I said it seemed to me just from the YouTube clips that they'd been mostly young black males. They nodded grimly. "I think everyone's frightened to say that," said one. Everyone, it seems, and especially the police. Rendered paralysed and apologetic by political correctness, they have appeared in Woolwich, as in the rest of the capital, to be mere bystanders to social carnage. And the rioters knew that they, like the public, were frightened.

For the most part the make-up of the London rioters was in line with the kind of social grouping you see every day in the south of the city, but writ appallingly large: gangs of young blacks with a contingent of white stragglers who have adopted the demeanour of the now dominant youth culture around them, right down to the ridiculous so-called "Jafaican" patois. Cringing multiculturalists have over time failed utterly to condemn the imported gang culture which has played a part in these riots, but which has in any case become a part of everyday life in London (one of the capital's most infamous gangs is the largely Somali Woolwich Boys). 

While condemning and poking fun at those ghastly (white) chavs, metropolitan liberals have turned a blind eye to the aggressively materialist, misogynistic, homophobic and infantile mood music favoured by these gangs, on the basis that this is "their culture" and should therefore be understood, and by implication accepted. Indeed it goes further than that: there's a sneaking admiration for it to be found in many a young middle-class liberal media white boy. I met the type on a daily basis when working in television: there was an awe and sublimated envy for the cartoon masculinity and swagger of gang members and rappers who were seen as somehow more "authentic". Well, they should have got their fill of authenticity by now. 

Awe, envy — or perhaps just fear? The looting and takeover of the streets we've seen in places like Woolwich was in many respects an extreme manifestation of the low-level but grinding anti-social behaviour which most people tolerate nervously on an everyday basis and try to ignore. If faced with a group of gang members in a car playing music unbearably loudly next to them at the traffic lights, I personally know of nobody — nobody, from Daily Telegraph to Guardian reader — who would risk asking them to please turn it down.  The Telegraph readers would complain about it afterwards, the Guardian readers, though equally intimidated, would pretend they hadn't noticed it.