Think-tank: Acute grievances underlie UK riots

There is a real risk that last week's riots across England will become “more militant and sustained” unless the British government addresses the underlying causes, according to a UK-based Islamic think-tank. “Mass rioting always has a catalyst and usually a set of acute underlying grievances,” said the managing director of Global Vision 2000, Moeen Yaseen. “The fatal shooting of Mark Duggan caused tensions between the police and disenfranchised young people who have never known discipline spill into violence,” Yaseen said. “From principled protest to mindless destruction, the anger became general and directed at the government,” he said, comparing the series of events with the police killing of Rodney King in Los Angeles in 1991. After four days of the worst rioting seen in Britain in living memory, the Independent Police Complaints Commission has admitted that it misled the media about Duggan's death, who was shot dead by police and not in an exchange of fire as previously claimed. In an interview with IRNA, Yaseen said that the anger of British youths was “misplaced in wrecking their own neighbourhoods as opposed to the City of London bankers who are the cause of their misery.” “Unless the underlying causes are addressed there is a real danger that this violence takes on a more militant and sustained form which paves the way for the British army to intervene to maintain security of the British state,” he warned. The riots, Yaseen suggested, “revealed greed and looting and appear to be symptomatic of the take what you can culture as seen in the banking crisis, MPs expenses and phone hacking.” “That is why there is a need for a new paradigm and a global moral political economy which we have been advocating.” he told IRNA.