We address the question of establishing if, and under what physical an
d boundary conditions, the neoclassical transport is quantitatively ca
pable of establishing high gradients in a narrow layer at the edge of
an auxiliary heated tokamak plasma, and of driving poloidal rotation i
n the absence of external momentum input and vanishing parallel viscou
s stress, in a time scale of a few milliseconds. We observe that a tor
que for poloidal and toroidal acceleration with constant parallel flow
is provided by the displacement current at third order of the adiabat
ic expansion. Combining neoclassical transport with a model of anomalo
us transport suppression we show the development, during a few millise
conds, of strong gradients in temperature, radial electric field and p
oloidal rotation at the edge, that are consistent in magnitude nd sign
with observations.