He's still a chav, would it be such a great loss really.

What difference would a baton round make to stopping someone burning a building down or rioting?
If the police are close enough to accurately fire baton rounds then they're close enough to arrest the arsonist/rioter.
Plus the debate was about whether use of baton rounds would have been a deterrent to and stopped the "Riots" earlier this year. Considering the vast majority of people on the streets at the time were not doing anything close to rioting or arson it seems a bit daft to restrict the scenarios to only those situations. As mentioned before the Police have authorisation and equipment already to stop those kind of things. Plus no amount of baton rounds or water cannon can stop a crime the police don't know is taking place or make up for a lack of police deployed to the streets.

I'd love to hear what what some posters would suggest is reasonable force a homeowner could use to stop someone setting fire to their home , containing their family ?

Lethal.

You'd have thought that after a couple of months it would have sunk through even the thickest scull, we didn't have water canon available to mainland forces at the time and even now they are only available at something like 24 hours notice.

The fact he suggestd their use would suggest he considers they should be available

The fact that they weren't available and have never been available kinda negates that.

Is that so? [urlhttp://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201012/cmselect/cmhaff/1456/1456vw.pdf[/url

32. The senior police officers we spoke to made it clear that the power to use equipment
such as water cannon and baton rounds was available, but such equipment was not used
because it was not considered suitable in the type of situations that they encountered.

Yes, it was available, but they chose not to use it.

As for inflaming the situation, well they shouldn't have been rioting in the first place.

In words so simple even you can understand, the power to use something doesn't make it available for use, if you can show me where, on the mainland, water canon were based and able to be used you might have some argument.

This isn't about whether they were located in mainland britain, this is the fact that if the police had wanted to, they were available to have been sent across from Northern Ireland to be used. Therefore they were available to the police to get and use, or is that too simple for you to understand? The riots weren't just a one night showing.

"Hang on you rioting chaps, can you come back in 24-48 hours so we can sort out the water canon, see its in Northern Ireland at the moment and we need time to get them here"

Yup, I'm sure that would have worked...

funnily enough, the rioters did do that.