The British policeman was, within living memory, an object of fascination to foreigners. The fascination was with how he worked, not how he looked. That the bobby travelled unarmed, alone and on foot among the people he was supposed to police was a matter of constitutional, not just touristic, interest. Whatever problems Britain might have, governmental legitimacy was not one of them. Armed police were sometimes necessary but the bobby dominated police culture. His existence was proof that the gap between The Law and The People was narrower in Britain than it was any place else on earth.

This week, the Guardian posted videos of a police attack – unprovoked, by all appearances – on Ian “Tommo” Tomlinson, 47, an alcoholic news vendor who seems to have wandered unwittingly into the demonstrations held to protest the meeting of the Group of 20 in London on April 2. Tomlinson died minutes after being clubbed and thrown on his face by a policeman in riot gear. Newspapers have been unanimous that the episode “raises serious questions” about the state of policing in Britain. That is too optimistic a view. The questions raised are constitutional and social. Britain is not the only place to face them. In France, the website rue89.com posted videos of confrontations in Strasbourg, where police pelted demonstrators with rocks, and in Corsica, where police fired teargas grenades at crowds.