After several days and nights of serious riots in Great Britain there started emerging age-old questions, “Who is to blame?” and “What is to be done?” Last but no least, the big question, “How to qualify the rioters: as thugs or hapless individuals?” Prime Minister David Cameron made a well-expected statement in an emergency debate at the House of Commons: “Territorial, hierarchical and incredibly violent, the gangs are mostly composed of young boys, mainly from dysfunctional homes…They earn money through crime, particularly drugs, and are bound together by an imposed loyalty to an authoritarian gang leader. They have blighted life on their estates, with gang-on-gang murders and unprovoked attacks on police… social problems that have been festering for decades have exploded in our faces.” He went on to say that Great Britain needed a social protection system that would not encourage lazybones. This met with applause followed by an active vote-collecting campaign aimed at the depriving such aggressive rioters of social payments and communal homes. London Mayor Boris Johnson said: “If you look at the position in London we have been able to make significant savings and move money around and expand numbers… If you look at what is happening in Birmingham, Manchester and elsewhere – very troubling scenes – what this needs is a robust police response.”
Some observers pointed out that the riots took place in areas best described as hopeless slums by all social ratings. Nevertheless, the social payments were so good some domestic observers said they were willing to settle there.
Against the backdrop of this fracas, Opposition Labour leader Ed Miliband linked bad youths’ behavior to a bad conduct on the part of this society’s elite, as evidenced by MPs’ personal income tax evasions (ranging from home repair to cat food bills), using government funds to suit their needs, followed by the banking crisis and the Murdoch phone hacking scandal.
There is no way to avoid an economic and sociological analysis, despite London Mayor Johnson’s warning, considering the rioters’ motley social cast, including colored and Caucasian individuals with university degrees and well-paid jobs. Add here the headlines-making arrest of an Olympic athlete, ballet dancer, daughter of a millionaire who was supposed to be an ambassador to the oncoming Olympic Games. Her parents handed her over to the police, reminding one of Yurii Yanovsky’s novel Vershnyky (The Riders), with the emphasis on blood-related individuals who found themselves on the opposite sides of the barricade during the civil war [Russia, 1917-23. – Ed.]. There is this memorable quote: “The same blood runs in our veins, but we belong to different [social. – Ed.] classes.”
Two girls who took part in Monday night’s riots in Croydon have boasted that they were showing police and “the rich” that “we can do what we want.” The pair who were drinking wine looted from a local shop at 9:30 on Tuesday morning, spoke to the BBC’s Leana Hosea. It stands to reason to link the London riots to the acts of anarchist student violence in Greece, caused by the measures proposed by the government to resolve the 2010 Greek economic crisis, precipitated by the 2010 Greek sovereign debt crisis. It is further worth recalling the distant 1968 revolutionary events in France when college/university students used spray guns to smear the walls of buildings with slogans reading “It is Forbidden to Forbid!”
In fact, a closer look at the UK riots shows clearly a trail leading to the Arab Spring, with remarkable changes to the cast. The Pakistani foreign ministry addressed the ethnic community in Great Britain, urging them to advise the embassy of any threat to their life and safety. This happened after three ethnic Pakistanis died in the course of the riots in Birmingham as they were protecting their lawful property.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran criticized the UN Security Council for remaining silent over the riots in Britain (“What else should happen for the security council to react and condemn one of its own members?”)
He explained that the riots in London resulted from the lack of care, on the part of European and US officials, over their people who have lost everything while being exposed to a great deal of economic pressure, while they could not be blamed for the crisis anyway. Too bad Tehran was not a UN Security Council member, otherwise it would have drafted a resolution enforcing a no-flight area over Great Britain and freezing the UK royal and Cameron’s bank accounts, he added. Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Naqdi, one of the ranking officers of the Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution, said he was prepared and willing to dispatch his men to patrol the streets of Birmingham and Liverpool, to secure the human rights of what he described as a downtrodden ethnic group tagged by authorities as rioters and looters. As though to prove this statement, a rally involving thousands took place in London, on Sunday, under slogans blaming the government, not the people or their children.
The Libyan leader, Muammar Gaddafi, and his government sycophants say the riots in London are an uprising of the people, which the international coalition [the UK included. – Ed.] has been trying to crush for a number of months, attributing the recent advance of the rebels on the capital city to close coordination with NATO forces. This explanation is no longer surprising; few if any would bother digging up old records reflecting the reasons behind this invasion, allegedly aimed at protecting the civilian population. Tripoli has enough sarcasm left and the prime minister urged his colleague, David Cameron, to step down, saying he and the cabinet have lost all legitimacy.
British courts of law, meanwhile, have been issuing sentence as though selling hotdogs on a busy street corner: up to 700 court rulings to date, with 2,235 persons detained and even more on wanted lists. In the end, the US expert on street crimes, William Bratton, former commander of police forces in Boston, New York and Los Angeles, was hired, something that could only add to the local police command’s chagrin. To make up for the hurt feelings, they were promised water guns, rubber bullets, and other riot control gadgets. The British government plans to take special care of the social and mobile communications networks, so as to inactivate the rioters’ cell phones. Swedish Foreign Minister Karl Bildt found this encroachment on the freedom of information outrageous and promptly expressed on his Twitter site, failing to notice the fact of police detention of his friend Boris Nemtsov in St. Petersburg, whom he had referred to, during his previous arrest, as a “reforming mayor of Nizhniy Novgorod, a city far beyond the Ural Mountains.”
