http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_London_riots

Well, so far they're confined to England anyway…
What began inTottenham three days ago has spread all over London and has allegedly spread as far as a few streets away from where I live (Even though the news focusses mostly on London and Birmingham, it's being confirmed that Liverpool is getting it's fair share, too). Hundreds of people are being displaced by fires and people already struggling to keep their businesses have lost them altogether. At a time when England is rocked by cuts and job losses even more are going to go and as a whole nobody has the money to rebuild what's being lost. People are even having their houses forcibly broken into.
This is what happens when you have an entire generation with noprospects and nothing to lose. When I was little I heard about riots on the news and it's an odd comboof nostalgia and horror that I'm feeling right now. But they were localised, organised. People knew what they were rioting about.
Here? Not so much. There's people speculating about it being race riots but it's obviously false considering most video reports and eyewitness accounts show and state that no particular race is involved but most of what I've seen on TV is white people.
It's most likely in my opinion that this is rioting for the sake of rioting. Letting out anger at whatever is in the way. Mass blind rage. This is a whole other league of riot compared to the ones of 20/30 years ago. And it's altogether much more socially destructive. It doesn't even LOOK like a riot. It has the external appearance of the beginnings of civil war.

Confined to England?Only this week.

Past year: Tunisa, Egypt, Syria, Iranand France… sure there are others but mobs are funny things. All you need are a few rabble rousers and one guy break a window or fire a building and before you know it everything is in flames and everyone is looting big screen TVs.

At least they're not tearing people apart and putting heads on pikes but I'm certain there's quite a few assaults and rapes.

Obvious damage to property is only the tip of the icebergto mob behavior. A whole lot of people are being damaged and very few by police shootings or beat downs.

The riots in the middle east and north africa were almost completely justified in those countries.
If you're not allowed to peacefully protest you get out there and you get angry to try and change things.
There is a peaceful option in this country, however. And if it only keeps escalating we're going to LOSE our right to peacefully protest.
As for the possible cause, there's a video on the BBC website with an interview of two girls saying that they were doing it because of the rich screwing up the country and this is them showing the rich“we can do whatwe want”.
Not only is that a STUPID excuse to cause trouble considering that LOCAL businesses are being hit more than big chains, but there's been barely any if noBANKS on fire at all!
There's also a crazy stigma in the UK that just because somewhere is CLEANmeans that it's a posh place or if youhaveMANNERS thenyou're rich. My family was a frequent target of thieves for those reasons even though the kids doing it were able to goto Disneyworldtwo times a year and we couldn't even afford a camping trip.
Shows you the kind of folks doing this are probably the same. "Hey, rich-looking kid bleeding onthe ground. Let's MUG HIM!"

Rioting in England is a really stupid way to justify the actions of the government. They just don't realize that the businesses they destroyed are the businesses that paid the tax money. Some amount of the tax money is actually distributed as grants for their unemployment.

I read the newspaper today that a youth went out to riot and loot stuffs because he told the reporter that he's jobless and had problems supporting his family members. Instead of making full effort to look for jobs, he spent most of his days watching TV and lived off USD$100/++ grants from the government every month.

Even if you make a full effort for a job it's still not easy to find one. They all require previous experience. Even before the economic downturnwhen I was first unemployed there was the same problem. And there's no drive to get a job anyway when you're worse off with one. Unemployed people get paid more than my mum does when you count all the stuff they don't have to pay or get reduced prices for.

A culture that glorifies violence, shows disrespect to authority, and says everything about rights but nothing about responsibilities. The young people stealing flatscreen televisions and burning shops that was not about politics or protest, it was about theft.

—David Cameron

The bolded portion pretty much sums up a big part of what I think the problem is.

I don't understand how people try to justify rioting. There's nothing romantic or noble about it, because the people getting vandalized/raped/beaten/displaced are almost never the people who the mob is supposedly angry at. It's humanity at its worst.

Hey, maybe somebody can organize a counter-mob and you guys can all go at it in the streets with clubs and brass knuckles? Kidding.

If that were to actually happen it WOULD be civil war.
Hopefully the bad weather will stay for a bit longer and keep people from doing it again for now. You can say it was the police or politicians butin my opinionbased on research I've seen regarding temperature triggers for riots,the rain is what stopped it. Hard to start a fire in a downpour like the other day and it's been a steady run of it one day after the other all over the UK.
Probably also explains why Scotland didn't have any trouble. Colder and wetter up there.

A Clockwork Orange.

I live in Croydon, and if you saw in the news, we pretty much blew up in flames and stuff. Totally what I needed.
But I think what's important is not finding and excuse, but more an explanation as to why these looters did what they did.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YItK1izQIwo
Ironic that HE predicted it would happen 17 months ago.
But it hapened in a whole different way than expected. It wasn't much like the riots in Greece, either from what I remember of them.
So yeah, it wasn't Athens. So we didn't get Athens-style rioting.

I'm not sure why it is but some populations can hold revolutions, protests, marches, demonstrations etc really well, while others just fail absoloutely…
I'm pretty sure that it has to do with the age and the ype of people in the crowd.
-For example, in Britian what you basically have are people that are younger, stupider, less educated and mainly want to make trouble. Lots of moron anarchists seem to be the main drivers there and the rest just follow that example. While in other countries the issues are more defined and the people getting behind the protests are older, or just generally better educated and more informed so the things have quite a different character.
But to put what happened in the UK on the same level as what happened in the middle east is to do a big diservice to those people in the middle east.

The sad thing is, as a riot is a part of my comic down the road, I kinda wanted to do something like this amongst the character… :/ …I guess it might be in bad taste.

Not at all, if it is true to the story that is…

I don't wanna give much spoilers, but eventually, my character and the prisoners and orphans he's with who were wrongly treated eventually break out. There's more to it, but I'll leave it at that.
I guess it just feels kinda awkward, sometime back in January 2011 being all, “Hohoho man, big epic tale here…”
…and then like, lol, the riots actually happen over the summer or whatever. I found out about it super late, as I said on Harkovast's forums. :/ I'd hate to wind up doing it, and then get someone be all like, “Hey man, I was involved in that, what the f*ck.”
I guess we'll see. This isn't for another… I dunno, but much later issues in.