Be careful what you wish for you totalitarian tw~*ts

[Tortington]

becuase that freedom that you want taken away...might very well be

g'night

No-one's going to get shot. This is Britain, not some third-world tin-pot arab dictatorship. Public order here relies on us being an orderly public, most of the time. What we have now are a small number of people and a lot of kids causing a disproportionate amount of damage and threatening lives. We don't have to shoot anyone to restore order. I think they will first go the route of clearing the streets (a temporary curfew perhaps), identifying the rioters and dealing with them in the normal way.

If I were in a restaurant eating a meal and there was rioting going on outside I would make my excuses and leave. I would not sit there and wait for the looters to come in.

Water canons tear gas and the army frighten the bloody life out of the scum.

Any innocent person would not be hanging around on the roadside while this was going on they would be legging it to a place of safety.

why does it seem like it has to be one or the other, are the only options available either shooting them or leaving them to loot and destroy?

it just seems like the gov have kind of said, well we will keep calm and wait for all this to blow over while ferel youths target hard strapped buisnesses and terrorised the decent innocent people that happen to live in london.
they need to be stopped and while there is a part of me that seriously thinks that you give up a certain amount of your human rights when you willfully break the law and indanger lives, i dont think the army should go and just start killing,
but why cant they get the big water guns, or inlist greater number of police and actually arrest them, get a cerfew going, so that if people are out at 3am without reason and there is acerfew, you will be arrested?

I agree with Cogito, that would seem to be the sensible way of dealing with things but I can quite see ALouiseg's point too. These are not protestors and it has quickly moved on from being crimes against property to crimes against the person. Who do these thugs think they are exactly?

We all have rights here.

'and they're having to be out their dealing with this with job cuts hanging over their heads.' Same goes for the Army and their redundancies are being announced on 01/09.

If they cleared it all up quickly we'd all go back to talking about the collapse of the economy.

And of course if the riots manage to burn out and displace entire troublesome communities the councils can start from scratch using private companies.

Am fed up with the use of disenfranchised to describe looters/rioters. They are not disenfranchised...they HAVE the right to vote, assuming are over 18 and UK citizen. Dissaffected, probably, but not comparable to, say the Tolpuddle Martyrs or the Suffragettes.

Pippity, Alouise was discussing removing all their benefits and effectively making them homeless. They would not be on an electoral roll then would they?

How exactly would stopping their benefits help? Surely it would make them even more likely to rob and pillage. Fuckers the lot of them.

Agreed Timewasting, but they are not in that position now. Is silly idea to riot about something that might happen as a punishment for rioting...or am I spectacularly missing the point as usual?

I'd like to see all of the rioters, once identified, made to clean up this mess they've created. Why should tax payer's money go to fund it? I don't know what it takes for some people to feel shame anymore. :(

One of my friends works in a London hospital, afraid to go to work. That's not living. I'm sick of hearing of the rights of the protestors, what about the rights of everybody else to live quietly and without fear?

I wonder at the mentality and the brain capacity of some of these people who don't seem to know what it is to be able to protest, what they're protesting for even. We're so lucky to live in a country where we have that right to be heard and yet these mindless morons are doing nothing useful with it, just thieving and destroying their neighbourhood. How honourable. I hope that every single one of them is publicly identified.

SAF, don't apologise for looking at the political side!
If we looked at the political side of things more often, shit might not burn so often.

Pippity, could argue that the appalling literacy levels already act to disenfranchise large chunks of these communities.

im so proud of the turks in dalston...well done"

Disenfranchised means not having the right to vote. Having the right and not accessing it for whatever reason is a different issue.Access to education is also a right, choosing not to avail oneself of it/being unable to avail oneself of it needs addressing in a different way. These rioters are not protesting about their need for better schools, a louder political voice, etc. In fact, beyond the original issue in Tottenham, what are they rioting about?

I don't know. I doubt anyone will bother to ask them though.
Darcus Howe on Newsnight last night spoke of how his 15 year old nephew has lost count of the times he's been stopped and searched. I can imagine getting to the point of thinking 'fuck it, they're going to keep stopping me whether I break the law or not, why should I go without all the good stuff.'

Of course they have the legal right to vote, what I mean is that the lack of education means they may as well not. It's like having the right to vote and then publishing all the manifestoes and voting papers in Hungarian.

The majority of "us" are too knackered just earning a living and parenting our children to have the time, let alone the inclination to go out rioting, looting and participating in criminal behaviour.

Those idiots obviously don't have to get up for work in the morning, if we removed their benefits they too would have to find some work to put a roof over their heads and food in their stomachs before they could think about plundering other people's property and person.

And to whoever suggested that they wouldn't be sitting in a restaurant while rioting was going on outside just bear in mind that the rioting wasn't anywhere near the area when they entered!

The majority are too knackered to engage in politics whatsoever.

And they have got work, they are looting.
Where do you think all these jobs are going to materialise from that will employ illiterate black youths with criminal records?

SAF, have you read Shock Doctrine?

These 'idiots' don't rely on either benefits or a wage for income...don't people get that? They're part of the London sub-culture where they can make an extremely good living running drugs and guns for the gangs. That's why it's always teens & kids getting knifed and shot on a monotonously regular basis. That's why it's teens out there now walking off with a new I-pad. The stop and search thing is just an occupational hazard for them, not a reason to riot especially. Social deprivation may be why they opt for the gang life in the first place - but there's no job that pays as good as drugs pay The biggest failure has been to let this sub-culture get a foothold. The biggest danger is that they are now semi-organised and working together rather than killing each other..