Black people make up slightly less than 3% of the British population, but in the CCTV snaps of rioters that the police in London, Birmingham and Manchester have put on the internet, more than half seem to be black

Many of the areas in which rioting took place, such as Tottenham, Hackney and Brixton, are largely black. In Scotland, Wales and north-east England, which have small black populations, there was no rioting. Poverty can only be part of the explanation for this pattern. While blacks are poorer than whites, Bangladeshis and Pakistanis are poorer still. There was no disorder in areas with large South Asian populations, including in London; CCTV pictures suggest that there were few Asian looters - though the fact that the trouble coincided with Ramadan might be a factor in this quiescence. The black community suffers other, older and perhaps related problems, too. Black children are disproportionately more likely to be excluded from school, and black adults are more likely to go to prison. African-Caribbean males are a special worry. African-Caribbean boys do much worse in school than African-Caribbean girls or African boys. The most recent available analysis of GCSE results by race and sex, which was done in 2009, shows that 56% of African-Caribbean boys got five A-C grades at GCSE, compared with 65% of African boys and 70% of African-Caribbean girls (for all pupils, the figure was 74%). Another major problem for blacks is family breakdown. David Lammy, the black MP for Tottenham in north London, where the first riots broke out, and whose father left when he was 11, has spoken movingly on the subject. He points out that, while family breakdown is increasingly prevalent in white society, it is far more common among blacks: 65% of black Caribbean children in Britain grow up in a single-parent family; nine out of ten of those households are headed by women. Children brought up in one-parent families are more likely to take drugs, drop out of school and end up in prison.