The riots in London

Water cannons are only really effective against static crowds. The crowds rioting in London and elsewhere were fast moving and mobile crowds, so the cannons would be ineffective. They are used in the UK, in Northern Ireland, when there is rioting in Belfast (e.g. in the Ardoyne area around 12th July each year)

 

my opinion on the country itself or its people is the same as before, my opinion on the current government went down a bit but its not really their fault.

 

The police already have water cannons in their arsenal - they don't need to have the pms permission to use - most of what Cameron has said over the last week and a bit is pure political posturing.

One thing the riots have proven to me is how much the media manage to twist the news and make it sound way worse than it is - the national news were reporting that five local police stations had been "fire bombed" - the only damage was smashed glass and soot round the door! Fortunately the local police had Twitter and other social networks to get their side out (their website naturally falling down under the strain) and the local BBC News were doing a reasonable job too.

The underclass in this city have also proved how inept they are - the looting they attempted to commit resulting in them trying and failing to break into a sports shop, and being caught red handed nicking stuff from a jewellers.

The best thing to come out of this was that the vast majority of people showed they abhorred this behaviour with a number of people dobbing there own kids in and people using social networks to arrange a clean up of their own cities after they were damaged. At a local football game between the cities two clubs the police got a standing ovation when the read out there plea for calm and dispite football games normally resulting in a few arrests at least and the best part of 20,000 people leaving the game and heading straight towards the trouble (on their way home) nothing happened and the police praised them for the complete lack of trouble - the presenter on the local BBC station was going on about how the fans seamed to be on their best behaviour intentionally. I also loved the way that the top trend on Twitter at the time was "Operation Cup of Tea" - typical British reaction summed up in a single hash tag!

Fortunately this city did get off lightly compared with various parts of London, I do know that the situation down their was significantly worse in places.