“Condoning Violence”

Since the recent riots began in London and other large cities in the UK over the weekend we have seen a barrage of opinions of the matter, over how the riots should be stopped, what the police powers should be, what has caused them, who the individuals looting are and much more. However it has been incredibly difficult to actually confront the real issues in this matter in an adult manner, whenever anyone tries to take into account the socio-economic reasons why individuals are rioting they have been accused by Conservatives, the Daily Mail, the BBC, etc. etc. of condoning violence, being ‘loony lefties’ or being soft in a fallacy of an argument.


Take this man here:

Whilst the man is not the most eloquent and I seriously question the idea that the riots are an 'insurrection' like the revolts happening across the middle-east but the reporter seems to be obsessed with telling the man off for 'condoning violence'. The man had been making a valid point that the youth of Britain feel disenfranchised and such feelings can fuel events like this. It is pointless to simply say that these people are 'just vandals' or are 'yobs', completely isolating the fact that the actions were horrible actions away from the other equal fact that riots such as these only occur during periods economic strife.

It is a valid point to say that the individuals were hardly thinking about complicated socio-economic reasons but it is perfectly reasonable to suggest that when one individual sees another smashing a window and stealing a television that the thought processes might twig that there are people who can easily afford those things and those people don't appear to be doing anything for them so they can't see anything wrong with stealing that television. It's not even necessarily greed that drives these actions, resentment is as big a fuel as any in producing this kind of activity.

It is worth noting that not one press or news article, no-one in government, no-one in opposition and very few bloggers have identified the idea of actually talking to psychologists and sociologists about this kind of behavior and identifying why people are doing these actions that way. Furthermore all the talk I have seen has been little better than a troll fight on a forum as very little evidence is being brought to bear 99% of the discussion has been speculative.

As I have pointed out already, I do not condone violence of any sort, I do not believe it is necessary to express your views through violence particularly the sort we have seen over the last week. But I can understand why people feel the need to do what they have done in recent days. These are two completely different and completely compatible views to have, yet I bet someone who reads this forum will disagree and tell me that I'm being a 'loony leftie' or the like.

Clearly no one can condone someone setting fire to postman pat!

The latter viewpoint, however, is the important one when identifying what needs to be done next. Lets compare this to a natural disaster, say a flood, a sensible person will not just say "it's all the horrible water's fault" they would take the next thoughts in saying; why has this flooded? what can I do to prevent it? Notably there are multiple options for reducing flooding, you can make massive flood defences; which are effective in the short term, you can do major reworks of the rivers to straighten them so that water can flow more quickly through them and you can plant extra trees and plants to help trap the water. The same thought applies to riots, yes the actions of the individuals is horrendous but in order to prevent acts like this in the future we need to not only have adequate security from the police but we also need to take into account the needs of a community and to ensure that that community is not suffering needlessly.

Reactions to the Violence in London

People calling for martial law should remember that, unlike american riots, in this country the publicdoesn't have widespread access to guns.

The riots that are currently going on throughout the country are bringing forward a wide range of opinions with the press recalling events in the 1980s, no-one has thought to actually sit down and actually think the events through. The only real variation between the mainstream newspapers is, as usual, between the left and right. The right have called for water cannons, martial law, strong fines for those arrested in the protests etc. with the daily mail calling it a mob and, in some cases, “yobs and chavs” whilst the left have largesy sat reminiscing about the 80s.

An important point to be made is that the press have had their part to play in all of this, by going overboard on reporting the incident the press have successfully inflamed the situation with a singular protest of 5,000 becoming a “national” breakdown. I get particularly angry with newspapers like the Daily Mail in situations like this as they love to inflame it and then come down like a hammer screaming things like [paraphrasing of course] ‘chavs are violent’ although I suppose this is quite a nice change from their usual tone of “bring back the weekly bin rounds” although they’ll probably figure out a way of linking the two together before long.

However, what every newspaper seems to be missing is an opinion about how to effectively prevent this sort of thing happening in the future, many of course have talked about draconian police measures bearing down upon the populace like a police state. But this neither solves the problem nor does it bode well for freedom of speech. No, what has failed to be accomplished, is the analysis of what happened in the run up and why a, relatively, small protest has grown to rioting in several major cities.

It seems logical that areas that need to be looked at are, indeed, police tactics and what has led to people dropping social norms and deciding that they need to burn down buildings. Thankfully we have not reached the level of riots in the 1980s nor the horrific event that was the riot in Los Angeles in 1992 , oddly the latter has many parallels; when Rodney King was beaten up by police officers and after the police officers were acquitted it sparked a fury of outrage that was backed up by guns. The problem is that in cases where the police have been the ones doing the wrongdoing it acts as a strong stimulant to not respect them, particularly in the minds of those who are strongly effected by the economy. Indeed, it may well be that the news that the stock markets are in free fall may have fueled part of this as people are scared for their futures.

It seems to me that the government, police and the press have all failed in their duty to this country and whilst those causing the violence are certainly not blameless the actions of the government in the last year that have increased youth unemployment and the rich/poor divide in London, the poor tactics that the police have been implementing and the press hype have helped to add fuel to the fire.