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The right’s knee-jerk response—that this is criminality, pure and simple, and that to seek a deeper explanation is to excuse the culprits—is also wrong. There is clearly a cadre of young people in Britain who feel they have little or no stake in the country’s future or their own. The barriers that prevent most youngsters from running amok—an inherent sense of right and wrong; concern for their job and education prospects; shame—seem not to exist in the minds of the rioters. Britain needs to try to understand why that is so.
The right’s knee-jerk response—that this is criminality, pure and simple, and that to seek a deeper explanation is to excuse the culprits—is also wrong. There is clearly a cadre of young people in Britain who feel they have little or no stake in the country’s future or their own. The barriers that prevent most youngsters from running amok—an inherent sense of right and wrong; concern for their job and education prospects; shame—seem not to exist in the minds of the rioters. Britain needs to try to understand why that is so.
You get some good articles in there. I particularly agree with this below as a cause:
"Perhaps it has something to do with the changing nature of the economy and consequent shortage of low-skilled jobs, or the long crumbling of family structures and discipline."
Automation and outsourcing among other things are making less-educated young men in particular redundant - but they have to live on something, and turning the sort of people who would have been fulfilled and given a sense of discipline and self-worth by working in steelworks and mines etc in a previous era into can-I-help-you-Sir supermarket or call centre customer service drones is just not going to happen easily, and I can only see this becoming a bigger problem.
Also "Near-American levels of inequality may have combined with laxer European attitudes to criminal justice to create an incendiary mix of rage and boldness."
Rising inequality never helped anything. How to change that without killing the goose that laid the golden egg?
Nobody is giving these rioters a 'pass' - what they are doing is unacceptable, and yes, they should be punished. I think what some are trying to say is that doing this is only dealing with the surface of the problem - its like dealing with football hooligans at one game.. that's all well and good (and necessary) but its part of a bigger underlying problem.
Some reactions on this thread remind me of our reaction to 9/11 i.e lots of our population wanted to react with a 'hit em back', 'blow em up' mentality - and look at where that has gotten us! GITMO (as an example of just locking people up) has achieved little and has done more harm than good.
Violence is completely unacceptable and these rioters should be punished as such, but lets look a bit deeper into what is driving this level of anger at the same time.
On a side note: its interesting to see reactions to obvious harmful acts whilst corporate welfare etc goes unnoticed
I dont think its gone unnoticed, its just unfortunately the veil of incorporation means so long as its done in the businesses name, bankers can extract millions/billions from companies that are otherwise hugely in debt.
Besides, it was the bailout that cost us trillions. Iceland didnt bailout and are doing better than any of the countries who did. Inflation spiked and then fell and they have since been able to reduce interest rates while we are forced to contemplate increasing ours.
Government is what cost us trillions. Gordon Brown, Alistair Darling, and all the Labours, tories and Libdems who voted for their bailout should be the ones behind bars.
Could we maybe move on from the bankers and their bonuses and concentrate on what the thread's actually about, before one of the mods gets as bored of hearing about it as I am.
And here I was thinking that only the US when compared to England, was the only place that shoots and kills Black people for no reason. It looks like England and the US are more similar than I thought.
The thread title asks what can be done to reduce the risk of future riots.
In 66 posts thus far, there has been precious little, if any, material which actually addresses that topic.
Either deal with the thread topic or we'll pop a lock on this one
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