WATCHING PARIS BURN HASN’T BEEN ENJOYABLE AT ALL:

Watching Paris burn at the weekend, it occurred to me that saying ‘I told you so’ was a lot less fun than I thought it would be.

I surprised myself by not emitting a bitter cackle at the viral clip of the young French woman trying unsuccessfully to reason with looters. She is seen repeatedly shouting things like ‘C’est pas la cause!’ (‘This isn’t the cause’) and ‘Pourquoi vous faites ça?’ (‘Why are you doing this?’) and seems incredulous as her world view smashes rudely into reality.

Incidentally, what exactly is ‘La cause’? The media are still, incredibly, referring to the riots as ‘cost-of-living demonstrations’. This is a fantastic new euphemism for urban destruction. I look forward to hearing it in different contexts – how about ‘In 1940, London suffered greatly from the Luftwaffe’s cost-of-living demonstration’?

The combination of mass uncontrolled immigration into the West from the Third World and socialist economic policies has been giving me the heebie-jeebies for a long time. I couldn’t foresee it ending any other way than this. And I thought I would get a cynical little kick when these incidents finally arrived. But no.

It turns out that when all your predictions were gloomy ones there’s not actually much pleasure in them coming true. I felt only terrible pity at the humanity of that video, along with generously sized dollops of fear and anxiety.

It’s not so much “la cause” as it is “la omnicause:” The Riot Coalition.