As far as I can tell scanning a few articles it seems the entitlement culture isn't doing too well with the bad economy. But frankly I don't read the news much because I put very little trust in any media these days. I would very much like to hear from those actually in England.

I also have to wonder how store owners are to protect their own stores in a situation like this in a country where they don't have the right to bear arms.

I sincerely hope the situation is worked out and that no one that doesn't deserve it is seriously harmed.

The flash point for the original riot was the death of Mark Duggan a person killed in the back of a taxi by the police. Rumours spread that he had been assinanted and there was issues about the family not being told. Once one riot started the rest seem to be just oppertunistic looting but picture is unclear. Will let you know more later.

@Alderian:

"As far as I can tell scanning a few articles it seems the entitlement culture isn't doing too well with the bad economy."

One of the professors I know from the Eng. Dept. at my college went over to England the semester before last to teach with some other students from our campus who went there for the semester--damn them, wish I could've made that trip!--and he said there were some student mini-riots about financial aid and tuition and all that...breaking windows and all that...

I ask this with all the sincerity and non-inflammatory care I can muster...

How "entitled" do these English rioters--in either instance--really think they are? The most we get here in the US is a whiny protest here on the UC and CSU campuses about tuition going through the roof...whcih bites ME directly in the ass, yeah, but I'm certainly not at all of the mindset that I have an inalienable right to go to those colleges, and certainly not cheaply (though cheap-ER would be nicer and more reasonable) so...???

Again, not an anti-English stance AT ALL I'm taking here...

I just don't get that attitude of entitlement you speculated on and my professor described as well.

(And if the flashpoint was one guy getting killed by the police...is this going to be the English equivalent of the Rodney King Riots?) :/

The rioters should all be shot dead on sight. Scum of the earth.

I believe same as Maniac a bunch of people turned what was meant to be a peaceful protest about an innocent man being shot into a riot when they were left standing outside a police station with no response for 4 hours.

After that, it seems to have been people taking the opportunity to loot stores, set fire to things and commit violence. Without trying to be stereotypical, in the majority these appear to be people who have little or no "cause" or "justification" for their actions merely a desire to do harm.

There are then certain politicians etc who are keen to do damage to the current Mayor of London and the Prime Minister by trying to justify it in terms of benefit cuts and rising cost of living. In reality there appears to be no clear message. This article gives a brief overview:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-14450248

Lol. The authorities are warning that if it keeps up... They "might" use rubber bullets. That explains a great deal. That said, hooray for the Muslims. Seem to be the only ones fighting back.

I'm confused... How did the man get shot in the back of a taxi by police when police don't generally carry sidearms over there? I'm not trying to be sarcastic or facetious. I'm truly inquisitive.

He was a known drug dealer, known to carry a gun. So the police were appropriately prepared.

Ah! OK. Your drug dealers are no different than our own. Good to know.

So they are all up in arms that a seriously violent criminal got killed? Good Lord. Over here, that would result in cheering in some neighborhoods where the residents are trying to clean up their streets despite their socio-economic situation.

But it sounds like it was an excuse that popped the cap on some other stuff that was building up.

Stay safe, my friends. Don't take any unnecessary risks.

"Your drug dealers are no different than our own."
LoL, globalisation I guess.

Hopefully there will now be a change in british law to actually deal with these little 'wankers'.

"So they are all up in arms that a seriously violent criminal got killed? Good Lord."

Exactly, you americans can scarcely imagine how soft in the head countries like britain have become. And they used to rule the waves..... sniff

@obi - The English riot are not england's Rodney King moment. In Britain the Police police by consent of their communities. What appears to have happened is that a peaceful protest about the killing of Mark Duggan turned violent and when it did the police were unprepared. This resulted in mainly young people rioting and looting with impunity for hours while the police stood back. Copycat riots and looting has broken out because it became obvious the police couldn't keep order. These do not seem to be polictically motivated riots about race or inequality, but nor do they exist in a vacuum. The socio-economic situation of the community does have an impact as does the perceived injustice of the cuts. Many people in the UK are enraged that the people alledgely responsible for the recession (the bankers) got big pay offs and the people who bailed them out (joe public) had benefits and services and the like cut.

The mini-riot that you referred to about student tuition wasn't solely about the rise in tuition fees although there was some anger that tuition fees were historically paid when only 10% of children went to university (mainly from affluent backgrounds) and when more working class kids got to university they were expect to pay. What insensed the students and would be students is the political system. During the election campaign the LibDems said they wanted to abolish tuition fees if they won (they were never going to win) and they also said they would vote against any increase in all other events. As you know they formed part of the coalition and vote for big increases (from £3000 to £9000pa) When politicains lie and chnge their policies straight after elections it does cause a lot of anger and I think that was reflected in the student mini-riot.

I've been paying about $50, 000 for the last four years of university so it's hard to understand 9000 pounds as a big deal. Lol

@otto - if a political party said they would either reduce your $50k or not increase it would you be annoyed if they increased it after they were elected - like a week after they were elected?

As a Brit living abroad, I've been trying to keep up to date with what's going on with these riots via the BBC website and was stunned by the clip subtitled "Two 17 years old said..." on the right hand side of this page:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-14460554

I know I'm going to sound like a stereotypical grumpy old man, but these spoiled little brats need a cold, hard dose of reality. What a brutal condemnation of the current state of English society those two girls are.

lol. youth are always like this, methinks.

dont think for a second that this wouldnt have happened anywhere if it got like that.

among all youths there are troublemakers and devil may care types. i dont think the fact that there was looting and rioting is indicative of much of anything at all. call it a random occurrence. things like this sometimes just happen.

also what do you mean about muslims fighting back? can you explain a little further?

news is hard to get in senegal when you get on the internet maybe 30 minutes a day

''also what do you mean about muslims fighting back? can you explain a little further?''

There is a deprived area of London around Dalston and Stoke Newington which lies between the two epi-centres of the riot: Hackney and Tottenham. Here the largely Turkish, and presumably Muslim, shopkeepers succesfully protected their own property with organised patrols in the absence of police protection.

No doubt this was in direct response to the senior policeman who said that the protection of property was not his chief concern. I wonder if this view would pertain should the swanky shops of the West End/ Hampstead etc. be attacked?

For some reason, this reminds me of my AP European history class, and why Napoleon kept his army so big, even when he wasn't at war with any countries. Its because from the Revolution he understood that lots of unemployed young men will cause violence and destruction, so he kept them busy. Sadly, this a different age, with no debtors prisons, and many people just don't want to work, so government work programs don't affect those who are most likely to cause trouble. In those days, you worked or starved to death.

I hope the police get the situation under control over the next few days. I hear London is tripling its police force on patrol tonight. Time to let the (rubber) bullets fly and reign in this chaos. To those in London (or Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol, and Liverpool) stay safe.

Not horces, bullets, nor police batons can stop a good old fashioned English mob. Only drizzle has the power to put an end to this. No one wants to riot when it's wet. Anyone know the forcast?

@maniac - I think you might have an idealized view of the Rodney King riots. While the triggering event was a racial injustice issue, the street-level reality of the riots were largely a bunch of young people looking for an excuse to loot and vandalize. There actually are groups of troublemakers who travel from protest to protest hoping to tip one over the point of violence/riot, and don't really care what the basis of the protest is.

@hanged man - thanks for the heads up - it is interesting that as a distant observer at the time of Rodney King, I, lik many others took the media line that Rodney King incident was race related.

I live in Manchester and seeing my city center so badly torn apart is shocking. I'm glad there's a thread about this to discuss it.

Firstly @obiwan: a little bit disappointed at the news services you must be using if all you could find about England was articles on cricket! This is obviously much more serious than that but thankfully people have begun to address that and explained some of the causes in this thread.

@fulhamish: I also heard about the shopkeepers of Hackney who gathered together to defend their stores, good on them!

@Otto: £9,000 is approximately $15,000. Consider on top of that the average wage in Britain is 25% lower than the US but that food prices are double - this hits students here hard. So, whilst $15,000 might seem petty to you compared to your $50,000 costs, the circumstances around those tuition fees will make life hard for University students in Britain. This is also a major shift in University education costing - only 5 years ago, tuition fees were £1,500. They then went up to a top-upped cap of just over £3,000. Now, despite the Liberal Democrat party saying in their election campaign that they would stand against any rise in tuition fees (even touring University campuses, including my own, signing massive 'pledge' boards), they broke that covenant and voted in favour of sharp rises in tuition fees.

This is why students protested as obiwan's professor noted. However, I think the term 'mini-protest' is unfair. The vast majority of British students are not 'of the mindset that education is an inalienable right, and cheaply' - most students accept as fair that they need to make a contribution to their education but the way the government has been selling the tuition fee increase was wholly misleading. They said that only a handful of universities would charge £9,000 but now almost all of the top 40 universities will charge that rate. Worse than that, the government pledged money to help poorer students from working-class background but that pot of money was not ringfenced as they promised and will not be enough to cover the amount of universities that intend to charge the maximum fees. That comes on top of the complete break of trust that the Liberal Democrats made to students, it's core voting group, when they broke their election promise.

However, like every other protest in Britain in recent past, the student protests fell on deaf ears. Unfortunately, there is a feeling in Britain that the public voice is rarely heard by the political class. Last month, a massive strike and protest was organised by teachers and public sector workers to protest on the drastic and harsh changes to their pay and pension plans. Little changed. Millions of people marched against the invasion of Iraq, but their voices were not listened to then either.

When time and again the public aren't listened to, it is no wonder people feel frustrated and despairing. There is no justification for the violence across Britain but the government should realise at least some responsibility for the effect that its policies have had. The government has cut youth job programmes, they scrapped community libraries, youth centres and citizen's advice bureaus, they cancelled the EMA (the Educational Maintanence Allowance that gives 16-19 year olds from poor working-class backgrounds the money to attend college. As remember, good colleges aren't in poor neighbourhoods, these students have to pay for buses and with the libraries cut and closing, books as well)...but after doing all this the government then has the cheek to complain that there are too many youths on the streets and that we have a youth/gang culture problem.

Unemployment is at 8.8% in Britain, with around 60 applicants for every job in most areas and if people were as annoyed about that as someone taking a TV from a superstore chain than perhaps the social inequalities that led to this problem would be attended to in the first place. There should be more anger about council chiefs leaving with £200,000 bonuses at the end of their year whilst their staff are being made redundant in their thousands. The peaceful march before Mark Duggan was shot wasn't even covered by the national/international media - the issues being raised now only get raised when people riot in this way, when direct action is taken. It almost begs the question, is it any wonder it comes to this?

Unfortunately, communities like Brixton, London and Salford, Manchester have had a long history of inequality and a cycle of unemployment and state benefits - but because it is just the way it is people don't get annoyed about it or seek to change it. The violence angers me deeply and having our neighbourhoods and city centres smashed up makes no sense at all but it angers me deeply that so much corruption persists in our political and financial system and that people think it is ok to simplify and use binary breakdowns for something actually very complex labelling these working class people, who always suffer the most when times are tough, as mindless idiots who should be shot and that the army should be called in. Such rhetoric doesn't support community cohesion and only helps fuel the class tensions on the ground. Places like London and Manchester need to address the huge wealth gap in their cities that leaves people feeling so desperate that they loot a supermarket for a bag of rice. The wanton violence and theft of luxury items such as TVs (and indeed theft of any item) is obviously bad, but when you see women going into the broken shops to steal bags of potatoes (which has happened in my city) then something much deeper is going wrong, not just mindless thuggery and it is this desperation that I find most worrying of all.

@The Hanged Man: As a side issue, Hanged Man mentioned the groups of troublemakers who travel to protests, any protests, trying to incite dangerous violent behaviour and this is definitely a side-problem that needs addressing completely on its own. These people do need punishing severely and this issue requires more attention unfortunately by our already stretched and cut police services.

Protesting is protesting (nothing wrong with that)... Looting is not protesting... Looting is looting. I think lots of petty crims are taking advantage of the situation.
The UK is a democracy. If you don't like the government vote for a different government. If that doesn't work. Tough. It might not be a perfect system, but it is one of the best in the world. Most people in the world have it far worse.

'in the majority these appear to be people who have little or no "cause" or "justification" for their actions merely a desire to do harm.'

Not harm. Self-empowerment.

"These do not seem to be polictically motivated riots about race or inequality, but nor do they exist in a vacuum" - This does seem to be about inequality and lack of equal opportunities - and the fact that these are political problems is not irrelevant. The rioters may not be part of some political movement, but they all likely share some political apathy - they are all likely disenfranchised by their democracy and the power they don't hold within it.

''a long history of inequality and a cycle of unemployment and state benefits - but because it is just the way it is people don't get annoyed about it or seek to change it."

- well they are annoyed now, at least they are demonstrating that they are useful and can do something - even if it is just pure destruction and looting. This is the only demonstration they can make to get onto the news....

I have to say this reminds me of the 'love ulster' riots in Dublin 5 years ago. Inner city people who had nothing better to do heard there was a riot and joined in for the craic (fun). These are people who who no investment in the city they live in, they don't care if the damage costs the city and businesses millions because it will have no effect on them, except the personal gain of a small amount of looted goods. (the businesses could likely give away the goods without too much worry - though usually shoplifting takes care of this sort of give-away - except in argos i imagine)

"Tough. It might not be a perfect system, but it is one of the best in the world. Most people in the world have it far worse."

other people having it worse doesn't make your situation look any better. Those people are far away. From the perspective of the rioters the system is crap and they are having their day out. Their time to shine, and show 'the system' what they can do.
And just because it is the best system there is, doesn't mean you can't strive for a better system... what an arguement, you could have said that in Feudal Europe. circa 1,200 - it's a shit system for the commoners, but it's better than not having the protection of your feudal lord...

http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/08/201189165143946889.html

As usual orathaic you display the usual PC drivel completely divorced from reality.
Completely typical of you to apologise and excuse these scumbags.

All I see is some scumbags looting and burning - is there a good reason to steal and destroy others property? - NO. Is there some constructive purpose? - NO.

Have you seen the video of the bleeding kid who is helped to his feet so the scum can steal from his backpack? I guess according to you, that's some poor deprived person having their 'time to shine'.

"it's a shit system for the commoners, but it's better than not having the protection of your feudal lord..." - correct, what's your point?

Some people have real problems you know - perhaps you should visit the local cancer ward. Better yet, have some cancer.

@orathaic: The Love Ulster situation does sound similar to Rodney King. From what I saw, RK was about 10% "real" protesters trying to make a political statement, 10% intentional anarchist/agitator riot starters, and 80% poor, disenfranchised people who saw an opportunity to get free stereos and Nikes they could not normally afford with the added zing of being able to do it right in front of the hated police who were ordered not to intervene unless it was to prevent someone from getting harmed. Of course, the media only interviewed the first segment to portray the whole thing as a political protest.

@maniac: My point of observation was a little closer. I worked the RK riots on the police side, but in Berkeley, not Los Angeles. Still plenty of looting and destruction.

"And just because it is the best system there is, doesn't mean you can't strive for a better system... what an arguement, you could have said that in Feudal Europe. circa 1,200 - it's a shit system for the commoners, but it's better than not having the protection of your feudal lord..."

Looting shops and burning down building is not "striving for a better system". It's not a legitimate way to protest. Is that shopkeeper, whose business was just destroyed, responsible for "the system". Looting is not defensible.