Clearly where we have been going wrong all these years is in trying to let politicians and qualified individuals spend millions of pounds failing to solve a problem that is so simple some talking head on Newsnight can solve it in half an hour.
Lesson One - unless you equate David Cameron with Darth Vader you need to accept he, and all the politicians before him are trying to do what they think is right.
Politicians love success - and the easiest success - the "low-hanging fruit" comes from the easy things to fix. If it was easy, we wouldn't be having this problem.
Lesson Two - various people all have to take some responsibility for this to a certain extent.
NOTHING as far as I am concerned excuses the behaviour of the rioters themselves and some of them will sadly have their lives ruined by prison, conviction, eviction etc. This is a great shame when we are talking about teenagers, but it was obvious the State would come down on the ones who got caught like a ton of bricks.
Where the blame must start to be spread around is in looking at why this happened.
Did those who rioted know they were breaking the law? Probably not much debate about that.
Did they think that a hood and mask gave them Harry Potter-style invisibility? Perhaps - but in the most surveilled society in the world you'd have to assume some people are going to get caught.
Regardless though, if they knew it was illegal, why did they behave in that way? This is the thread I have seen emerging in society - of action without regard for its consequences.
Lives are taken for mobile phones, people are stabbed for being disrespectful. Shops are torched and looted. Most of the time someone - and usually someone young, is caught and convicted.
So the blame we as a society bear is for allowing a situation where people put so little value on life and property that they behave this way. Not just value on other people's property, value on their own lives, that they would make their future prospects much worse for a free new phone.
We have failed - as parents (we are top of the list), as educators (because whilst it's not easy, we simply haven't got through to a wide range of kids), as politicians (14 years of injecting money into the system has done nothing) and as a society in general.
As the dust settles, let's not jump to conclusions and solutions. Short term fixes may cure the symptoms, but we have got to diagnose the root causes and fix those if it is to work long-term. Look at LA, look at Paris - if there are answers they aren't quick and easy ones, and anybody expecting them is extremely naive.
