From Baghdad to Brixton

Colin Freeman, the Daily Telegraph’s chief foreign correspondent, compares living and working in Baghdad to life back on the streets of London,

Britain’s streets may be cleaner than those in war zones, but in the past couple of years they have acquired something of a similar aura of random violence: the surge of teenage knife and gun crime, the nascent street-gang culture that supports it, and most depressingly of all, the risk the average citizen seems to run of being killed if he or she tries to stand up to any of it. In Burma, from where I have just returned, and Zimbabwe, where a colleague was recently thrown in jail, thugs rule in government. In Britain, it seems, they now rule the streets. link