While I agree with you regarding the youth being dicks and just taking advantage of a serious issue I also think that the problem goes well deeper.
This is just the culmination of years during which politicians have been ignoring the people who put them there and just thinking about their own good, taking care of their friends.
At the moment there is a dodgy government guided but a half baked coalition, these two parties don't like each other very much but they carry on as the greed and desire of being in government is too strong to let go, see the deputy prime minister (a liberal democrat) who is basically Cameron's (a tory) poodle.
It's miserable to watch as you can read it on the Lib Dems faces that never in a million years they could be a majority government so they thought "let's take advantage of this opportunity to be in the history books, screw our beliefs and ideals". Pathetic really.
It's the result of the Prime Minister silly idea of "Big Society" which basically means "I haven't got a clue so you sort yourselves out".
The government and some important branches of the society are corrupt to the bone (politicians claiming benefits, easy to bribe police, people who have forgotten to do the honourable thing and resign, nobody resigns anymore etc...), a typical hypocritical attitude.
When a government loses the trust of his own people then it fails.
When a government is not the reflection of his own people then it fails (most politicians come from a well off and privileged background, see the prime minister for example).
When a young person thinks it's right to go and destroy shops then it's a signal, it's clear that they don't feel part of the society, they have nothing to lose, nothing to live and work for. This is where the society and the government have failed them.
From Penny's blog:
"Riots are about power, and they are about catharsis. They are not about poor parenting, or youth services being cut, or any of the other snap explanations that media pundits have been trotting out: structural inequalities, as a friend of mine remarked today, are not solved by a few pool tables. People riot because it makes them feel powerful, even if only for a night. People riot because they have spent their whole lives being told that they are good for nothing, and they realise that together they can do anything – literally, anything at all. People to whom respect has never been shown riot because they feel they have little reason to show respect themselves, and it spreads like fire on a warm summer night. And now people have lost their homes, and the country is tearing itself apart.
Noone expected this. The so-called leaders (Prime Minister Cameron) who have taken three solid days to return from their foreign holidays to a country in flames did not anticipate this. The people running Britain had absolutely no clue how desperate things had become. They thought that after thirty years of soaring inequality, in the middle of a recession, they could take away the last little things that gave people hope, the benefits, the jobs, the possibility of higher education, the support structures, and nothing would happen. They were wrong."
Hard and too fast cuts in public services have been a mistake, for example, they want to cut 16,000 police men and women, the number of police on the streets in the last days to keep things under control was exactly 16,000!
See the USA, what a complete joke. The government needed to find money to avoid defaulting so tried to raise taxes (basically asking the rich people to help out) but it failed as the rich said" I don't wanna pay more taxes, ask the poor" so the poor get hit hard.
It's laughable really when you think about it, the whole economic decline was caused by those rich banks and corporations who now don't want to be held responsible.
It's no use trying to feel scandalised, you need to face the problem at the root. Why don't they feel horrified by a society deeply divided into classes? With the rich and posh class owning and ruling the country?
Water cannons and spanking won't solve the problem in the long term.
