Question: What’s the difference between having a child who is a mass murderer and a child who is a rioter?

Answer: A roof over your head.

That’s because sharing a home with a mass murderer won’t get you and the rest of the family evicted from your council house.

But having a child who took part in the recent riots could cause you to be made homeless.

How has this come about? The green light has been given to local councils to evict tenants who were involved in the recent riots in London and cities across England.

Wandsworth in London has become the first council to serve an eviction notice to a tenant – a mother whose son has appeared in court in connection with the disturbances.

It’s a policy supported by none other than our prime minister who, fresh from his holiday in Tuscany, has come back energised to fix what he alliteratively calls Broken Britain.

David Cameron told the BBC that people who ‘loot and pillage their own community’ should be evicted from council housing. Evictions were a way of ‘enforcing responsibility in our society,’ he said.

Too bad if the rioters’ siblings have to change schools.

Too bad on the parents, too, if they have to move away from where they work or lose their support networks.

After all, the rioters ‘should have thought of that before they started burgling,’ Cameron said.

But they didn’t, of course, no more than they ‘thought’ about being caught and convicted. That’s the nature of the beast.

Cameron’s policy, however, is already fixing Broken Britain.

Already one mother, as the Daily Mail reported on 19 August, has allowed her 19-year-old son to stay in prison rather than use the family home as a bail address.

He had appeared before magistrates in London in connection with the riots and his mother didn’t want to risk being evicted – she has younger children to look after.

And this is just the beginning.

The most popular e-petition on the government’s website currently calls for convicted rioters to lose their benefits. Good idea, so long as when they are strapped for cash they don’t mug you or me.

But why stop with benefits? Let’s deprive them and their families of treatment on the National Health Service.

Not to mention free schooling at state schools. That’ll teach them a lesson they won’t forget.

There will be no more Broken Britain – just a sub-class of people with even less engagement with society that those rioters demonstrated.

I’m not, to paraphrase Cameron when he was in opposition, suggesting we hug a rioter. They should be punished – and hard.

But unleashing the spirit of the vigilante mob is not the solution.