“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.