UK “broken society” will be repaired
The situation in Britain is still alarming, although the night of August 11 is the first in the last few days, after the pogroms began, which was calm. English Prime Minister David Cameron at an emergency meeting of Parliament proposed to take a number of measures that will help the police to more effectively solve the problem of confronting unrest sweeping the country.
David Cameron's suggestions:
- When repeating the unrest, bring an army to policing, so that the police can send large forces to fight against the rioters.
“The police will get the right to remove masks from participants in street riots,“ if there are reasonable suspicions that these people are involved in criminal activities. ”
- The ministries will work with the police and Mi-5 (the state agency of British counterintelligence) to monitor relevant information on social networks and block information that represents a threat to public safety. In the future, law enforcement agencies in England may receive additional powers in the area of controlling Internet space.
- The rule by which the publication of images from video surveillance cameras was prohibited will be canceled. This will allow law enforcement agencies to "get on the path of bringing these criminals (participants in the riots) to justice."
- Theresa May, head of the ministry of internal affairs, and Ian Duncan Smith, head of the ministry of labor and pensions, will have to create anti-gang programs. The creation of this "anti-gang" program will become a "national priority". In October, May 2011 will have to report to the British Parliament and talk about new methods of dealing with gangs who organize pogroms, rob shops, attack policemen.
- Any homeowner or businessman who suffered material losses from pogroms will be entitled to apply for compensation even if his property was not insured.
The prime minister promised that the criminals would surely catch punishment: “As for the criminal law of the minority, the criminals who grabbed what they could reach, I will tell them the following: we will watch you, we will find you, we will judge you, we will will punish. You have to pay for what you have done. " According to Cameron, the main causes of the riots are caused by the poor upbringing of young people, problems in the school system and too generous social welfare systems, allowing for the mass of the population that does not work, mostly emigrants or their second generation.
Therefore, it is necessary to change the system of social benefits in order to encourage working people, more discipline in schools, to work more effectively with problem families, to change the criminal system: "In short, we need to repair our broken society." The prime minister correctly noted that the blame also lies on the culture of the young people: “A culture that glorifies violence and disrespect for power speaks about rights, but not about duties.”
How it all began
The reason for the beginning of the riots was the killing of a black taxi driver by policemen - Mark Duggan was killed on August 4, the patrol tried to stop the taxi car, according to the police, a gunfight ensued, during which a policeman was injured. In response, on Saturday evening several hundred people took to the streets demanding "to restore justice." Initially, a peaceful rally quickly turned into a real riot - the demonstrators burned several police cars, began to smash shops. Stones, “Molotov cocktails,” flew to the police; as a result, only at the beginning of the unrest, 26 police officers were injured, and 42 people were arrested. Buildings were set on fire, according to a London fire brigade report, that night, firefighters put out 49 fires at Tottenham.
The situation resembles the events of six years ago in France, when the death of an immigrant at the hands of the police becomes a catalyst for mass unrest in the so-called. "Colored" - the citizens of England from its former colonies. According to Scotland Yard, by the morning of 7 on August in Tottenham, order was established, in fact, the rioters and marauders had only transferred their actions to other areas - Enfield, and then Edmonton and Dalston. They were joined by new rioters, and already they smashed not only shops, but also private houses. On the same day, Scotland Yard had to repel an attack on the business center of London in Westende, where pogromist groups attempted to defeat the largest shopping center in Europe, Westfield. The police repulsed the attack, the pogromists managed with the help of Molotov cocktails and stones (how not to recall the famous - “cobble - weapon proletariat ”) damage the lower floors of the building and set fire to elite cars parked nearby.
On August 8, riots broke out in Birmingham, the second largest city in England, crowds of masked young people attacked McDonalds stores in the city center, and there were minors among those arrested by the police. It cannot be said that the situation did not inspire fear, because a riot had actually begun, the pogrom-mongers not only robbed, set fire, smashed houses, shops, cars, but also entered into confrontation with the police. Whites from leftist movements joined the rioters from the “colored” population - they oppose the rich. Deputy of the British Parliament Nick de Bois described the events as follows: "This is not mass riots, but serious unrest." The Prime Minister of England David Cameron and the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, who were on vacation, were forced to leave the vacations for work ahead of schedule.
The first to be able to stop the unrest in London, on the streets of which on the night of 10 August introduced additional forces, increasing the number of police officers from 6 thousand to 16 thousand. In other cities, they broke the wave only the next day, also adding additional forces and allowing the police to use water the guns.
As a result, more than 1600 people were detained (and up to half of all detainees are young people up to 18 years), the British judicial system switched to around-the-clock work - charged with theft and theft, disruption of public order, damage to someone else's property of almost four hundred people. According to British insurers, the damage caused by the pogroms exceeded the amount of 200 million pounds or 320 million dollars.
Features of unrest
The “Arabian experience” was used, the mob and marauders used the latest communication tools to coordinate their actions - the BlackBerry smartphone group chat, the Facebook and Twitter social networks.
The passivity of the police (here, in fact, not their fault), their fear of "exceeding their strength" are caused by previous years of the victory of "tolerance and political correctness." The police in the first days did not actually intervene in the pogroms, the defeat of shops, houses; arrests were made after the pogroms themselves.
The dispute over the main causes of unrest, as the English Premier has already correctly voiced some of the prerequisites, is the degradation of culture and, first of all, youth culture, the priority of rights, not duties, an erroneous system of social benefits, a drop in the level of discipline in schools. But there are others as well, the British themselves noted that there is an economic prerequisite: every fifth young man is unemployed, high inflation first of all touches the lower classes, the poor. There is a strong social inequality in society: in the cities, the palaces of the rich coexist with the dilapidated houses of the poor, young people from disadvantaged neighborhoods have little chance of self-realization.
In many ways, this is a youth riot, which shows the level of the number of young people arrested. Among which were the children of 11-14 years. This led to a long crisis of the youth culture of Europe. Thus, according to Sergey Mikheev, Deputy General Director of the Center for Political Technologies: “The European youth subculture is a subculture of violence, latent extremism, a little powdered banditry - and this is also very significant against the background of our beloved self-criticism”. As a result, this subculture has generated whole generations of young people who are ready to respond with wild acts of violence to any social upheavals. For Russia, this is a very bad signal, since our society and the state have adopted this model for our youth since 1991. Its essence is excessive humanity, lack of discipline and self-discipline education, unhindered access of children to games, the Internet, videos that promote violence, debauchery, cruelty, lack of high moral principles. Children and young people have almost no high ideals, orientations to which they should strive.
The reaction of Iran and Libya
These countries have accused London of hypocrisy and double standards. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad condemned the actions of the British police during the dispersal of riots in London and other British cities and urged the British government to deal with the affairs of his people, and not engage in "theft of oil" from the Libyan people. And the Iranian parliament announced the establishment of a special commission that will investigate cases of human rights violations in England.
The Iranian Keyhan newspaper compared the unrest in England with the unrest in the Arab world, concluding: "Outrage over unfair laws found its way into the heart of Europe."
And in the official media of Libya, the English unrest is presented as a legitimate protest of the population against social injustice. In addition, Lebanon television said that English Prime Minister David Cameron used Irish and Scottish mercenaries to quell unrest in the English cities. Responding to London with the same coin - earlier Western and British authorities, the media accused Gaddafi of using African and even Belarusian mercenaries.
Information