Riot on the streets

If anyone knows who owns this photo let me know - it's awesome!

For the last three nights London has been ablaze, and things don’t seem to be getting any better.  Even the Prime Minister has had to come back from his holiday in Italy to ‘address the country’.

It started at the weekend with the shooting of a young lad in Tottenham, but what has happened since can’t be as a result of that – most of the rioting and looting has been in other parts of the capital, and we have even seen looting in Liverpool, Bristol and Birmingham.

John and I started following the news on Twitter last night, and watched as things got worse and worse.  People being mugged in the streets, violence all over the place, looting of shops, attacking police and fire crews – this is anarchy on the streets.

There has been loads of discussion about the causes of this, and I’m certainly not qualified to comment…..but I will put in my two pennith.  We live in a society with youngsters who have been brought up to be believe that the world owes them something, but they are not getting it.  They are taught by the media and society that life is about obtaining more and more belongings – but giving them no way of purchasing these……..so to them taking what they want is okay.

Youth centres and places for young people to go have had their funding cut by 75% in the last year, and so where are they supposed to go?

The Daily Mail and other parts of the media are blaming social media networks for spreading the violence, and whilst I do concede that BBM and Twitter will have been used to spread information; it has also been used for good – many people were using them to let their friends and family know that they were okay, and passing intell to the police.

Hopefully tonight will be quiet, and that people can start to rebuild their lives.  Many innocent people have lost their businesses and livelihoods – there is one business that had been in the same family for five generations and is now a smouldering heap.  People’s lives are being ruined, and that’s not just the victims, many of those who are causing the violence will be caught had then punished.