I’ve deliberately avoided commenting on the riots so far because, well, there isn’t really anything I can say that hasn’t already been said. So this isn’t so much a comment as a vaguely linked set of observations. But there are a few things which seem to me to be worth saying, anyway.

The police were in a no-win situation to begin with. Had they gone in hard on the first night of rioting, then it almost certainly wouldn’t have spread on subsequent nights. Instead, we’d now be involved in yet another debate about police over-reaction with plenty of ammunition for those who accuse the police of using excessive force. In the long run, there may be a political benefit for the police in that we now know what happens when they choose to stand off instead of responding firmly, so there should be more understanding of the difficult decisions they face in future. Not that that will be any consolation to the friends and family of those who died in the riots, of course, or the business owners and their employees who have lost their livelihoods.

Nevertheless, there are still questions to be asked of the police. This is the same force, remember, that is still embroiled in the News International corruption scandal. Although those on the front line in the riots are not the same as those who have been colluding with sleazy journalists, they all come under the same command. Call me cynical, but I have half a mind to wonder if the decision to avoid rigorous intervention immediately was at least partly prompted by a feeling that there’s no point putting their necks out for politicians who won’t back them. And, although I’m pretty sure that the shooting of Mark Duggan was itself justified, there does seem to have been a real failure to communicate properly with his family in the aftermath.

Equally, senior government politicians had little to gain and a lot to lose. I’m sure that nobody really believes that either David Cameron or Boris Johnson could make the slightest bit of difference by cutting short their holidays earlier, but by not doing so they gave plenty of openings for cynical political opportunism by their opponents. Had they come straight back on the first night, of course, they would have been accused of interfering in operational decisions and trying to hog the limelight. And, having stepped into the action, there’s the usual difficulty of trying to avoid kneejerk reactions while at the same time giving the impression of being decisive. Some of the suggestions made in the immediate wake of the riots, such as blocking Twitter, are truly stupid, but when faced with a baying mob willing to sign semi-literate and entirely impractical petitions the politicians were almost forced into generating soundbites of their own.

Opposition politicians faced a different problem. Their internal electorate won’t stand for them outflanking the coalition from the right, but public opinion won’t support them taking a softer line. Ed Miliband managed to avoid any obvious mistakes, but that simply cost him the headlines. Harriet Harman, by contrast, fell straight into the usual left-wing heffalump trap and ended up looking ridiculous. The most effective, and relevant, comments came from those who genuinely know the area, such as David Lammy.

David Starkey made some pretty stupid comments, and has been widely vilified for them. But it’s interesting how much opprobrium has been heaped on him by people who clearly haven’t either watched the interview or made any attempt to comprehend what he was trying to say. His biggest mistake was not to realise that he was talking to the popular media, rather than a class of postgraduates.

Jody McIntyre, on the other hand, knew exactly what he was doing when he tried to encourage more rioting. Unlike Starkey, McIntyre wasn’t being stupid, he was just being evil. And, if McIntyre isn’t prosecuted for this, then it makes the conviction of Paul Chambers even more unsustainable.

As for my own opinions on what to do next, I don’t really have any. I’m as angry with the rioters as the next person, but on the other hand I’m not stupid enough to think we can solve the problem by withdrawing benefits or other kneejerk responses. I don’t believe the police are perfect, but I do think that they deserve our support when dealing with criminals – and that includes the likes of Mark Duggan, who was carrying a gun when he was shot. Having said that, I’m inclined to agree with those who, like David Lammy, point the finger at a combination of absent fathers, a consumer culture “fixated on the brands we wear, not who we are and what we achieve” and an increasingly influential criminal underclass.

Maybe this will be a wake-up call for the UK. After focussing our gaze on external threats from the likes of al Queda and the (largely imaginary) menace from so-called Islamisation of the UK, it’s a salutary reminder that our biggest problems are home-grown. Don’t be misled by the fact that a majority of those involved in the riots were black; this is not a race issue – the problem is not that, as David Starkey puts it, that the whites have become black, it’s that both black and white have become divorced from the values of their forebears. And the reason for that divorce, like so many, is when people are seduced by the allure of what they don’t have and start to believe that all they have to do to be happy is take it.