HQ Interview With Looters & Rioters In London. These riots reflect a society run on greed and looting | Seumas Milne. David Cameron talks to acting borough commander superintendent Jo Oakley during a visit to Croydon to view the destruction from the riots. Photograph: Wpa Pool/Getty Images It is essential for those in power in Britain that the riots now sweeping the country can have no cause beyond feral wickedness. This is nothing but "criminality, pure and simple", David Cameron declared after cutting short his holiday in Tuscany. The London mayor and fellow former Bullingdon Club member Boris Johnson, heckled by hostile Londoners in Clapham Junction, warned that rioters must stop hearing "economic and sociological justifications" (though who was offering them he never explained) for what they were doing. We can't be ordered to police in a certain way Now is not the time for police to use water cannon and baton rounds, writes Sir Hugh Orde, president of the Association of Chief Police Officers We'll hear a lot more of that when parliament meets – and it's not hard to see why.
London Riots. (The BBC will never replay this. Send it out) David Cameron and Tony Blair clash over cause of riots | UK news. David Cameron has reaffirmed his belief that the riots were symptomatic of moral decline in Britain as Tony Blair dismissed this argument as a "highfalutin wail" that ignored the true cause of the problem. In a relatively rare intervention in the world of domestic policy, Blair said that there was no problem with moral standards in society generally.
The riots, he said, were primarily caused by a minority of disaffected and alienated young people who were outside the social mainstream and who constituted "an absolutely specific problem that requires deeply specific solutions". Cameron and Blair set out their rival analyses in articles in Sunday newspapers. They clashed as Scotland Yard revealed that 3,296 offences were committed during the rioting in London, leading to 1,875 arrests and 1,073 people being charged.
More than 1,000 of those offences involved looting. In an article for the Sunday Express, Cameron said that the riots illustrated the need to "reclaim" society. Behind the London riots a multitude of causes.