As I watched the carnage unfolding on the TV from the relative safety of Sydney, it was gut-wrenching to see the lawless chaos gripping the streets of London, Birmingham, Liverpool and Bristol.
The vision was compelling, yet utterly repulsive. Kids as young as 10 were roaming the streets as the baying mob burgeoned, looking for an excuse to pillage, cause wanton destruction and commit violence against their fellow countrymen. And all because an alleged gangster was shot by police in Tottenham. Give me a break.
I made the point on Facebook yesterday that while millions are fighting for democracy and a better life in the Arab Spring revolutions, the little bastards on the rampage in England seem to be only interested in getting the latest iPhone or a LCD TV. These reprobates don't know how good they've got it.
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With it being the summer holidays in England, youngsters are upwardly mobile and on the lookout for mischief. Back in the day, we would we be chased out the parks by police clutching our bottles of nasty cider and our packets of cheap cigarettes. But we would never have the gall to take the fight to them or to trash our neighbourhoods. We respected authority.
Fast forward ten years and the haunts I used to frequent have become running battlegrounds for youths to display their hatred and flagrant disrespect for the establishment. Showing little regard for their communities, they tore up the streets for ammunition against a stretched police force battling in vain to quell the resistance.
Several friends who years ago would have been 'legging it from the filth' are now upstanding members of the force that have unfortunately been caught up in the violence. Most have been at work for longer than 24 hours in trouble spots such as Croydon, Clapham and Hackney. One acquaintance went to work Sunday morning, and hadn't been stood down from duty until late last night, such is the strain on the emergency services.
Having lived in Australia for the past four years, I feel somewhat disconnected to the motherland. But thinking about it, the riots have been a long time coming. When I left England in 2007, I felt I was departing an angry country. There was no sense of community spirit. National identity had been eroded in a politically-correct drive to appease all ethnicities that called Britain home.
Britain was bereft of pride, with discontent slowly simmering away over the incompetencies of a bungling Labour government who at the time, had been in power for a decade. Unemployment had risen, education standards were in decline, the welfare state was the subject of mass-rorting and the government was unable to stem the high crime rates, particularly, the soaring use of knives and guns in violent offences.
But there was another key factor that seemed to be at the root of this silent seething. Under Gordon Brown and Tony Blair before him, Labour threw open the doors to three million immigrants during their time in power. Most were legitimate EU migrants in search of work and companies lapped up the low-paid workforce, but the knock-on effects were devastating.
It drove down wages, loosened IR laws and decimated the working class, forcing unskilled workers onto benefits. For a country with a population of almost 60 million, the unsustainable influx of migrants placed immense pressure on public services that were already under strain. The slackening of border control also paved the way for hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants to pour in from eastern Europe, parts of Africa and the Middle East, causing further unease.
And all this was pre-GFC. When the credit crunch played out it left some 2.5 million people on the dole. Hundreds and thousands of people that were lucky to hold on to their jobs were forced to take pay cuts or had their hours slashed. All this at a time when £50 billion of taxpayers' money was used to help finance the bailout of UK banks.
As a result of the crisis, Britain is now on an austerity drive, with the Coalition government under the stewardship of PM David Cameron committing to the largest cuts in public spending since World War II in a bid to slash £81 billion from the British deficit of £1105.8 billion. And we think we're in trouble here in Australia.
All these conditions have fermented the social unrest we are seeing being played out today. Ten years ago, most youths would have been working summer jobs, not roaming the streets. They would have had a modest disposable income to do as they please, albeit with just as few outlets of expression.
