Ultimately it will only end when the military is called in and can brandish actual firearms.
My ex was career military. I don't know about the UK, but he always said "You really don't want to bring in the military (for stuff like this). Police are trained to wound and bring them in alive. We are trained to shoot to kill."
This reminds me of the 1998 movie The Siege. Terrorists are bombing New York and the politicians are discussing bringing in the army to hunt them down. Bruce Willis is a hard ass general and this is what he has to say on the subject:
"Make no mistake, Senator. We will hunt down the enemy, we will find the enemy, and we will kill the enemy. And no card-carrying member of the ACLU is more dead set against it than I am. Which is why I urge you - I implore you. Do not consider this as an option."
"There is historically nothing more corrosive to the morale of a population than policing its own citizens."
Another line that is spot on, IMO, from Battlestar Galactica:
> "There's a reason you separate military and the police. One fights the enemies of the state, the other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people."
Yep, and we've been there before, quite recently actually. See Bloody Sunday on wikipedia. Paratroopers killed 13 people at peaceful demo when they mistakenly thought they had come under fire. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Sunday_(1972)
Though I wouldn't call the 1970's "quite recently", similarly, the US had four deaths of protesters in 1970, known as The Kent State Shootings or Kent State Massacre:
I suppose I meant 'quite recently' in that I would never have imagined that something like Bloody Sunday could happen in a modern 1st world democracy, until we studied it in Modern History at school. To put it in context, the next most recent military action against UK civilians was the Peterloo massacre in 1819. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterloo_Massacre
I'm 46. I was just shy of my fifth birthday when the Kent State Shootings occurred. Age surveys suggest that people on HN are predominantly in their 20's and 30's. Attitudes about time aren't necessarily age dependent. I find that people from older cultures tend to have a longer view of time than your typical American. I do happen to be American. "Mate" implies you are not.
I heard this somewhere (quite probably on HN actually)
"In America 100 years is a long time, in Europe 100 miles a long distance"
Your perceptions are shaped by your culture, and particularly in the US people rarely look at history before the revolutionary era (if they even know about that) so 100 years would be almost half of history. Whereas an older empire might trace some of it's roots as far back as the dark ages.
The inquiry into the killings only fininished last year - and, as you would expect, there was a lot of coverage in the UK of Bloody Sunday so isn't something that has been forgotten about (and given the nature of the killings it really shouldn't be):
Military is also supposed to protect a country from outside (military) attackers, police are supposed to protect from domestic (criminal) threats. When you make the military the police you make citizens the enemy the state of their own country.
The military has more functions than that and is very effectively mobilized to assist in disasters, such as fires and floods. My ex participated in such things. Still, the point you make (about it making your own citizens "enemies of the state") is a chilling one and I can't really rebut it per se.
I agree with everything you're saying about helping out in disasters, but when you mix military and police, it's just unhealthy. They have different goals/functions and can't/shouldn't be used interchangeably. Military and criminal threats should not be responded to in the same way. Rioters are criminals, let the police handle it. And if the police incapable of doing so, that is a separate problem in and of itself.
My ex was career military. I don't know about the UK, but he always said "You really don't want to bring in the military (for stuff like this). Police are trained to wound and bring them in alive. We are trained to shoot to kill."