An erstwhile colleague of mine, whose politics made those of Genghis Khan seem liberal, had a quaint idea for dealing with people who were frequent visitors to the docks of Scotland’s courts.

He wanted a return to the days when recidivists were held in the stocks on the village green and pelted with rotten fruit by passers-by. Only this time, he said, swapping his pint excitedly from one hand to another as he warmed to his subject, we film it and broadcast it live on the internet so their peers can see the humiliation.

"Think of the message that would send," he would say. "You’d cut crime in an instant."

I would laugh as I got the next round in. Such corporal punishment was not something I would support in modern day Scotland, I told him. I always said that surely as a country we have progressed enough to do a whole lot better than that.

But today I’m not so sure. With the passage of time, I realise he had a point.

The disgusting scenes across the UK - although not in Scotland, where we have our own tribalist expressions of sectarian hatred - in the wake of the Southport tragedy revealed a new low in human behaviour.

Ostensibly the riots, organised online, were protests against immigration and a perceived increase in the Islamification of our communities. If you looked closely they had nothing to do with religion, immigration or the desperate events which claimed the lives of three innocent children, and were instead, purely and simply, an excuse for thuggery and theft.

Happily the media and social media have broadcast far and wide the hit parade of those who railed against authority and law and order for no reason other than they had nothing better to do with their hate-filled existence.

The man who was hit by not one, not two but three missiles thrown by his ilk at the police, the man who was pinned to the deck by a land shark, otherwise known as a police dog, and the woman who said England was sinking under the weight of immigrants, like the Titanic sank because it carried too many people.

But the real masterstroke was the decision to process these oxygen thieves through the court system the day after their crimes were committed and they were arrested, and broadcast their hefty sentencing live on the internet, pour encourager les autres.

Snaffling gingerbread men from Greggs or bath bombs from Lush may have seemed a good idea at the time, but going to jail for two years for it will have dampened many an ardour among those who don’t have the brains to be a racist but who fancied a pagga with the polis.

Social media may well have started the riots. Without question, it stopped them too.