The Archbishop of Canterbury observed yesterday on the Today programme that the rioters “defile the flag that they wrap themselves in”.
All of us will assent to that. To pretend that chucking rocks at the police is a patriotic act will not do.
The Archbishop also had a letter in yesterday’s Times in which he, the Chief Rabbi, two Imams and the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster declared:
“We pledge to work with government and all sections of society towards a constructive and compassionate dialogue on immigration and social cohesion.”
They are right that we need to talk about social cohesion. The riots present a picture of social disintegration.
But what, one may ask, is the nation into which we wish people to integrate? Those parents who are not themselves hooligans will certainly not wish their children to consort with the rioters, in order to spend summer evenings looting shops and attacking police officers, mosques, hotels occupied by refugees and anyone out on the streets who looks like an immigrant.
This question of what kind of nation is one which politicians and commentators continually address, whether or not they put it like that.
The riots remind us that the nation is founded on the rule of law. When disorder breaks out, the police have the task of restoring order, which they do as citizens in uniform, dependent on the help and good will of all law-abiding people.
This dependence on the support of the local inhabitants was more obvious in the age before the telephone and the motor car, when reinforcements could not rapidly be summoned and a couple of hard-pressed police officers might find themselves compelled to rely on local allies.
Politicians must support the police and the courts as these bring the rioters to book. The need while doing so to reject any hint of “two-tier” policing was emphatically made yesterday morning on ConHome by Harry Phibbs.
Another role which our politicians must continue to play is slightly less obvious. One of the most valuable ways in which political parties can promote integration is by accepting new people into their ranks, both as members and as candidates.
The British nation is represented by a number of institutions, including the monarchy, the armed forces, the judiciary, the police and many organisations with the word “national” in their name, pre-eminent among these the National Health Service.
But from a political point of view, it is represented most importantly by the House of Commons. Here both the main parties have long been anxious to reflect modern realities by recruiting more women and members of ethnic minorities.
The Conservative Party is proud to have supplied the first Prime Minister of Jewish descent, Benjamin Disraeli, the first woman, Margaret Thatcher, and most recently the first Hindu, Rishi Sunak.
Labour, a party founded to give British workers political representation, in 1945 won a landslide majority by doing so, and for much of the post-war period was seen by Britons of immigrant descent who wanted to get into politics as their natural home.
But although Labour achieved, at the recent general election, a great victory, it did so with fewer working-class candidates than ever before, and also lost a large number of Muslim votes.
Meanwhile the Conservatives failed most signally to repeat the success of 2019, when they won a considerable number of Labour seats by winning over traditional Labour voters.
The trade unions used to give the working class a voice, and political training and a route into the Commons for gifted members of that class.
That element in our politics has pretty much vanished, and has not been replaced. A vacuum has opened up in which shadowy agitators operating on social media set out to incite atrocities.
We see hooligans on our screens who suppose it is a great achievement to endanger life and limb by starting fires, throwing bricks, smashing windows and, as the Archbishop said, defiling the flag.
Sir Keir Starmer proclaims the need to restore order, and stands between two flags as he does so. But the as yet unanswered question is whether he knows how to unite us by appealing to our often latent patriotism, so that whatever class we belong to, whatever faith we profess and whatever party we support, we join in condemning the riots as unworthy of our nation.