"Looting 'fuelled by social exclusion'", "Blackberry messenger used to co-ordinate trouble"

[schomberg]

www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/aug/08/looting-fuelled-by-social-exclusion?intcmp=239

www.guardian.co.uk/uk/blog/2011/aug/08/london-riots-third-night-live?intcmp=239

The concept of a riot fuelled by poverty and exclusion being organised on Blackberries is doing my head in. Is this unreasonable?

i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01967/jump_1967358c.jpg

Sums it up, really.

I suppose if you are born into a family with no effective ambitions you are likely to end up that way, The gravy train is usually inherited. While we have alost one million unemployed under 25s we will have trouble.

I don't think the riots have anything to do with the amount of cash or otherwise these people have. It's because they don't care about anything. They have bad attitude because the way they have been raised and joblessness.

The amount of youth unemployment is shocking, yet the government does hardly anything to address that.

x posts with chasingthedevils :) She was more succinct though!

Spot on mrsT

Sorry, msT

These aren't rioters, they're looters. I hope they catch the bastards who burnt down that shop in Croydon, and anyone who caused damage. This is not about politics, it's about getting something for nothing and causing trouble. I have no problem with protesting at all, but destruction of property and violence is another matter.

This is an interesting article about the psychology of looting

I agree with alot of the article. I made the point ealier that what was said on FB last night reminded me of the football violence, it wasn't unemployed mindless thugs, these were working men who normally wouldn't be involved with criminal activity. It all started off as a joke but then sort of got more serious, and i know that some of them did go and join in (i am up north), a Tesco's was looted as well as other shops.

It makes me so cross when they come out with such utter nonsense.

Bloody do gooder on sky news, "these children deserve an education" EDUCATION is FREE

Sorry but stop making excuses for the feral ilk.

bromley is hardly an area of high poverty/social deprivation.
Too right Nancy, my husband is from there and in laws still lives there. Nice enough place.

These riots are caused by small minded idiots with too much testosterone and too much time on their hands. Send the lot of them out to Afganistan and see how long they bloody last with real men!

My conspiracy theory(!) is that it's organised crime lords (or unions) paid by the govt paying little no neck scroats to cause trouble to hide something bigger...The plot thickens!

You can get a Blackberry on contract for £15 or possibly as another poster said, £10. But to have a contract phone you have to have a credit history. A member of the so-called underclass (for want of a better word) is very unlikely to get that.

Having been around in the days of the last Tory government, that of Mrs Thatcher, having seen the cuts and the erosion of ordinary working people's ability to live comfortably (having to worry about the price of fuel, food, energy) it was predicted that riots and civil unrest would follow. They did - Brixton, Toxteth etc etc. I have predicted that it would happen again, and now it has. People can only tolerate a government treating them like sh*t for so long.

Or we could go down the route of blaming greed and a sense of entitlement.

Last time in 1981 Thatcher got us into a war roused national pride protecting the Falklands, leading people to believe that we were going to war to protect British people (less than 100 of them or something, and a bunch of sheep), not oil interests, oh no. We are now sending boys the same age as the rioters to Afghanistan but the sense of national pride is not there to dissuade us from rioting as no-one knows why the British Army is in Afghanistan anyway.

Now if this was one of those totalitarian regimes (where the British Establishment congratulates citizens who rise up against their governments incidentally) you can bet that with so much proof of rioting and looting being organised on social networking sites that those sites would be closed down or mobile phone/wireless internet jamming equipment brought in PDQ.

£15 a month is still a lot.

I have a very basic PAYG phone and I pay far far less than that.

My sister has just linked on fb in support of that Camilla article in the independent, but I am struggling in the same way msannthroppy describes. Whilst I accept that a lot of these kids will have grown up with terrible parenting, lack of love and care, feeling socially excluded etc, I cannot believe that all or even most of them have. I think so many of them are just joining in with the destruction through ignorance, mindless greed and disrespect.

I am a teacher in newcastle so as yet very distant from all the trouble, but I keep thinking about a kid in my pastoral group, I know he would jump at the chance to join in the violence. Last year with the Raoul Moat saga he told me that he was a hero as he "'made the police look stupid". He had a blackberry, incidentally. One day at school he lost it, then, The very next day, came in with a brand new one! I was flabbergasted. I would have been punished for losing it, never mind rewarded with a new one! He was 13.

Well said MsAnn totally agree with you. I doubt any of the looters give a monkey about the original grievance which was the shooting of Mark Duggan. They are theiving opportunists who want something for nothing and blame the goverment for their own lack of backbone to get off their arses and work.

There is a huge difference between explaining something and excusing it, we should be able to separate the two or there is a problem with our education. For example an abuser may have been abused themselves, that in no way makes it okay for them to do it to others, but does help explain the "why". Unless you think certain people are born to do bad things, we are always going to try and break things down to an understandable level - it is the only things we can do to try and prevent repeated problems.

I doubt someone socially excluded, with a pent up sense of injustice could articulate their exact reasons of why they were pissed off, doesn't mean they are pissed off though. There are better ways to go about things, I don't support the riots at all but do think if you are so quick to read an explanation as excusing their behaviour you have brought yourself down to their level or base reaction and outrage.

Are these sort of people actually employable though??? Do they even want to work or do they prefer to exist in a self-imposed gangster society that's glamourised by Hollywood and certain types of yoof music??? It's much more fun for some people to go on a "robbing" bender than to turn up to a 9-5 daily, because they love the bad ass image. Their values are different to most peoples and they find that a thrill.

I think we should stop blaming society and the government for everything and look to the perpetrators of these crimes to place at least a sizeable degree of blame. It's an insult to decent, honest people on low incomes to link this sort of behaviour to socio-economic factors, especially when, as people have pointed out, these rioters don't seem to be particularly poverty stricken. They're nicking plasma screens, not loaves of bread.

They're a disgrace.

There are 50 applicants for every job in Tottenham

Well try applying for a fucking job somewhere else.

Scum. stop excusing this scum.

I am not excusing what is happening. That's my hometown that's being burned and pillaged. But without trying to understand the psychology behind this sort of thing, we have no hope of ever stopping it. It's not good enough to just say 'scum'.

Btw..in reply to a few comments on page 1, riot/civil unrest is a standard cover on a commercial insurance policy. Would be very unusual for this not to be covered/for policies not to pay out.

im fed up with hearing the excuses,they saw theriots saturday and thought oooo we can do that to get some free stuff,its that simple.I dont think they are socially deprived either-they are clearly the majority which is why this has happened.
I will be feeling quite socially deprived when go on holiday next week with my dd's alone asdh's leave has been cancelled,obviously in the grand scheme of things thats selfish but still sad for us,just another very minor symptom of these thugs.