“Things got out of hand & we’d had a few drinks. We smashed the place up and Boris set fire to the toilets,” today’s British Premier David Cameron told a gathering at Oxford in 1986.
During the recent rioting in London, the same man said, “The looting and arson last night were criminality, pure and simple. Justice will be done and the people will see the consequences for their crimes.”
David Cameron has brought insanity and humor both to 10 Downing Street. No wonder, the man might have seen with great interest acts of looting for some time in nostalgia before some advisor sought his advice or passed a suggestion.
Nonetheless, ‘reputed’ electronic news outlets in Britain need sensitization how not to cover riots. While London was burning, the live news sources were uttering racist and class stupidities.
The insurrection began after a 29-year-old black man named Mark Duggan was shot by the British police in the London borough of Tottenham. Social scientists, politicians and social media activists analyzed the riots from their respective stand points. Clearly, the rioting youth was not politically minded. They were engaged in ‘anarchy for the sake anarchy’. Given uneven austerity measures adopted by the sitting government, like Premier Margret Thatcher in early 1980s, the marginalized and restless youth exploded in anger and exhibited lawlessness.
The no-color, no-gender uprising would never be easy to explain and deconstruct. However, drawing parallels with Tunisian, Egyptian or Syrian protests is way too off the mark. However, Premier Cameron should be extra cautious in lambasting at multi-culturism. Even the most conservative dailies in the UK could not ignore Sikh immigrants in Southhall with swords and hockey sticks, Muslims from Bangladesh and Somalia in Whitechapel armed with sticks, Turks, Kurds, Egyptians and Poles defending their residential and business centers in uncompromising manner.
Multiculturism has won and Cameron has been the loser. British society has an increasingly mature immigrant population which needs better prospects for integration instead of exclusion.
If Cameron pays attention to the challenge posed during the recent riots without looking through racial and religious lenses, the reality suggests that austerity measures should be equally applied for all segments of society if not more for the capitalist elite.
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