“Young hooligans aged from about 7 to 25 have been a familiar and growing presence on Britain’s inner city streets for the last 10 years. They are called here “hoodies” because they like to wear tracksuits with a hooded top that disguises their face. Most of them come from families that live on government benefits and are part of a large sub-culture called “scroungers” or “spongers” that live on the taxes of working people. The benefits are very generous compared to the former Soviet Union and include free housing, food and child allowance. This has created whole generations who do not work, get pregnant while teenagers and have many children they cannot look after and neither parent works. The children are bored, do not see much in life and become feral. The police have very limited powers against these children. The trend over the time has been for the children to realise this and start carrying around knives and guns and using them against each other. These riots are not really riots because there is no political motive. It is more precisely hundreds of “hoodies” working together in mobs of 200+ enjoying fighting with police, then running off and ransacking shops. The police are limited in what they can do because until yesterday police were not allowed to use water cannons or rubber bullets in England. But now people in England are so angry that these hoodies have become so arrogant and unafraid of the law. I have not met a single person - liberal or conservative - who does now not advocate: 1/ evicting families of looters onto the streets, 2/ putting the children into care, 3/ shooting with rubber bullets looters (some say with real bullets), 4/ drastically reducing the social security network. In the big picture, England has a huge deficit and needs to save money. The benefits system is very expensive and I think these riots have changed people’s perception about it. I think David Cameron will now try to significantly reduce social security payments and housing benefits to stop this culture of government dependency that has led to the hoodie situation. It will also save the government a lot of money. There is an awful lot of anger by people against the hoodies now. The danger is that in certain parts of the country this could trigger inter-ethnic violence - e.g. Asians versus Afro-Carribeans. This is unfortunate as you just can’t help but noticing that a lot of the hoodies you see are Afro-Carribean origin. There is a risk of this in places like Birmingham when black looters killed three of the tightly knit Asian community on Wednesday morning. The family of the dead men have tried to appeal for calm, but the tensions are very high. So, overall, there are two things these riots have done: 1/ make the majority of the country really want to see measures taken to reclaim the streets from the hoodies including attacking the benefits system ; 2/ increased the risk of inter-ethnic violence in certain cities..... Hope that is OK!”