Enough can't, David

He was warned well in advance what his quack medicine would do; he was told that creating conditions where youth clubs, playschemes, community projects have been forced to close would have consequences.

If he and his allies where shocked last week, I wasn’t – you could see it coming if you knew where to look.

In Haringey, the flashpoint for the riots, eight of its 13 youth clubs closed down between December 2010 and June 2011 due to the cuts.

Blaming it on ‘moral breakdown’, ‘in some parts of the country’, (pray, which?) is sheer cant and feeble excuse.

Removing the Educational Maintenance Allowance angered and dismayed those who do not have the silver-spoon-in-mouth privilege that gave him his education and life chances.

It has happened on Mr Cameron’s and Mr Clegg’s watch, not Tony Blair’s or Gordon Brown’s.

Oh, they made mistakes... not ensuring the growing divide in this country was tackled enough, not building council houses.

But when this coalition crew blame Labour’s over-spending for the riots, was it because Labour put money into new schools after two decades of Tory neglect? Set up thousands of Sure Start centres?

Gave pensioners a better deal?

Got our national debt ratio to GDP better than in Maggie’s time and better than Japan, France, Germany, the US etc? Put money in for a huge increase in police numbers?

Looting and riot?

Yes awful, unacceptable.

Mind you, I saw looting in this town in Queensway on the morning of the Great Storm in 1987, and older-timers than me recall similar in the East End after Nazi bombing in the war.

Britain was described in the 19th century as ‘an oligarchy tempered by riot’. How true.

Jan Cosgrove,

Longford Road, Bognor