Muammar Al Khadafi

"Common sense. If riot info and fear is spreading by Facebook & Twitter, shut them off for an hour or two, then restore. World won't implode" - Tory MP Louise Mensch, somewhat ironically posting on Twitter.

It seems that Cameron may well agree with her as well, his kneejerk speech - as usual devoid of anything even remotely akin to fixing the issues underpinning these riots - referred to restrictions to social networking services under certain circumstances.

China anyone? It certainly has shades of handing the government the right to control the free flow of information and conversation, a road which often ends in unpleasant places.

One would of thought Facebook and the like are actually a boon to policing.

Look at most of the muppets on there, posting photos of themselves holding a TV they just ripped off from Curries, or gloating under an easily identifiable profile about how they're off for a riot.

Morons like that do the polices work for them, it'd be so much harder to catch them if they went underground and stopped posting their criminal triumphs.

Quite besides which, proxy anyone? 10 minutes of Googling is enough to get anyone around nearly any kind of localised site blocking there is going.

Not to mention, how many sites are they going to block. There are more flavours of social networking sites than there are non English speakers in a typical Bradford primary school now.

It's doomed to fail, and all it will do is punish the innocent, the old granny who uses Facebook to stay in touch with her family, the children who spend all their time on there telling their mates how much they fancy the latest pop sensation.

Every time the government is faced with a major event such as these riots, one which it dare not admit the true causes of nor take the necessary action to remedy, it reacts by sweeping measures that will target all irrespective of their involvement.

Once it has those powers which the new measures grant, well, who can look at history and say that governments don't have a habit of abusing those powers?

Would you want to trust this lot with what would effectively be an internet kill-switch to 'temporarily' block all, including the law abiding, from any site which officialdom judged was causing trouble - how long before that moves from supposedly preventing riots to suppressing opposition?

Although, the idea of being able to turn something off for a few hours does have some appeal - if we could get a switch to turn off politicians every time they gathered together then the British people would probably get screwed a lot less often.