Following on from the the many articles written about the UK riots and social media’s involvement, I felt compelled to share an article about my understanding of the cause and effect that lead to the UK riots.
Looking back I hope that anyone searching for information about social media in association with the UK riots will read the text below and thus have a better understanding of events proceeding. Yes, social media was used during the riots both for good and bad, but to lay the blame at technology and Generation Y is incredibly short sighted and to not understand the wider context.
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But what should WE expect – what example is being set by the politicians and public figures.
The riots started in Tottenham, scene of a most brutal riot during the recession of the 1980s during Margaret Thatcher’s premiership.
For the past thirty years we have been governed by the children of Margaret Thatcher – she was Tony Blair’s hero – she and Tony Blair are David Cameron’s heroes.
Remember Margaret Thatcher’s quote “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. -people must look to themselves first. It’s our duty to look after ourselves.”
And so that is what they have been doing ever since – looking after themselves.
We have bankers who have taken taxpayers money – OUR money and plunged the world into the worst financial crisis in the last eighty years. No political party has felt the need to challenge them or make them pay. These bankers are still being allowed to pay themselves fat bonuses out of OUR money, but the austerity measures with government spending cuts are targeted at US.
We have one individual banker, Sir Fred Goodwin, who as Chief Executive of Royal Bank of Scotland presided over the largest annual loss in UK corporate history. And yet he walked away with a pension of £703,000 per annum paid by a nationalised bank, funded by US, the taxpayers. One year of his pension represents more than a lifetime of benefit payments for three people – yet it is the benefit claimants being targeted by the politicians as “scroungers”. So they have to be reclassified because WE are told by politicians that the government cannot afford to pay them.
We have politicians, who appear to be in politics for what they can get out of OUR money, paying their mortgages, paying their partners, buying private items, with the expenses that have been stolen from US, the taxpayers.
We have the forces of democracy itself that have been hijacked by a megalomaniac media organisation. Successive governments have pandered to its demands and defended the rights of big business above the rights of US.
Even the rule of law has been hijacked by this same organisation with a revolving door between its offices and Scotland Yard.
We have had successive governments who have spent billions of OUR taxes on supposedly protecting the democratic rights and welfare of individuals in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya but argue that the government cannot afford OUR welfare nor the resources of OUR police force to protect US.
As a result of successive government’s policy over the past thirty years we have the greatest social inequality in Europe – yet this current government is ignoring this and insisting on a crackdown on US through the welfare system and government induced unemployment whilst at the same time ignoring the tax avoidance schemes of their paymasters, the big corporations and non-domiciled high earners.
And don’t forget we now have Government Ministers and a Mayor of London who are no strangers to damaging property for their own amusement. Remember that as students, David Cameron, George Osborne and Boris Johnson were all members of the Bullingdon Club – proud of its reputation for trashing restaurants. Of course when well-to-do young students do this it can be called a “right of passage” or “student high jinks” but when WE indulge in this behaviour, it is called “criminal.”
When WE see all these suited gentlemen walking away with so much of OUR money. Or politicians buying private items out of OUR taxes or Government Ministers and Mayors who have trashed restaurants while they were receiving Student Grants paid out of OUR taxes then surely a pair of trainers from JD Sports is small beer by comparison.
Politicians of all parties should stop treating these riots as just mindless criminal activity and address the wider underlying problems of OUR poverty, OUR unemployment and OUR frustration with their lack of interest in US.
But, in the meantime WE should not forget “We are all in this together” as part of David Cameron’s “Big Society” and WE should set an example to THEM and therefore ‘Hug A Hoodie.’
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