Technology - Blackberry will try to assist police in tracking down the ... what ever they are called. Em, but not important enough to shut down the messenger network. Again, what price capitalism?
I have to say that I'm not surprised by this outbreak of bitter rage.
The model by which the economy and social fabric is managed is just not viable.
All (most) of the unskilled jobs or entry level jobs and low skilled jobs are taken by foreign immigrants. A very large proportion of the skilled jobs in the field in which I have worked are taken by people from the Indian subcontinent. Some other skilled areas are similar. By the way, this applies in particular to banking where whole teams can come in from the other side of the world to work with their manager, and no one will bat an eye lid.
The economic theory is that if a shop (say) is run more efficiently with good workers it will make more money and therefore be able to spend more, hence building the general economy.
Somehow the idea is really preposterous.
Anyway, all those who beat the totem drum of evidence are now presented with the evidence: Capitalism is a huge unsavoury lie.
The reality is that business has argued for the supply of cheap labour without a care about from where they find their workers. Most of the time the cry has been dressed up as a lack of skills.
Frankly this is shit.
Why? Because it was the same cry eleven or twelve years ago and that means that no attempt has been made in the interim to address this issue. How could it be addressed when, at the same time, businesses cry that they have to compete on the world market and be competitive.
Now, tell me how this is going to work?
We now have a situation where we have to import labour to do jobs that otherwise we would pay ourselves too much to do, and we disenfranchise a whole generation of youth quite knowingly while dressing this up as a soft middle class concern not to show discrimination or prejudice.
What cynicism there is in this reasoning, a reasoning that knows no proper human dimension, loyalty or bounds to its overarching arrogance.
Which, at the same time, expects these youths to want to have the (literal) goods of this society while offering them no legitimate means to acquire them.
That bombards them with images of things that they are 'supposed' to have so that they cannot distinguish between having and owning, grabbing and buying.
Because that is exactly what has happened to them, now for some one or two generations in this country. Their lives have been grabbed by the self same people who condemn their 'evil', and repeat, ad nauseum, that there is no excuse for this criminality.
Why do people put up with this?
How can it be right in any sense that can be understood as a human being, for teams of people to be flown (or boated as in one or two other incidents) in to take over work that would naturally be done by people who have lived here? That was being done up to this point by people living here.
It is true that the UK economy can expand, that, with a larger population, there may be disproportionately more jobs. That could happen. But has it happened? Have opportunities for working class kids expanded? Or for University educated young people? And, if the answer is 'no', is this just the result of the recession now?
What indicates to me that this is not so are the types of jobs taken by the groups of people I have referred to (there are not an infinite number of shop assistant jobs, or building site jobs to be had, but each of these could be a start on a carer ladder), the time period in which the flight of work to the non UK born, non UK educated, has taken place, and the persistence of the disaffected throughout all these different periods.
One further point is the difficulty in finding accommodation - another example of an area in which we are more interested in profit than solving problems and where we allow the issue of immigration to exacerbate our problems to that end.
If it is pointed out that Eastern Europeans do work more reliably than these kids might - well it is not as simple as that. The problem is that these kids have been bashed about and pushed about. They feel that they were promised in some way to be able to belong and take part. From a position of not feeling they necessarily belong or can take part.
Eastern Europeans, who come over as young adults, do not have that problem.
That is the difference.