Is a Four-Year Sentence for Inciting a Riot Too Harsh?

This Post is Brought to you by Frank Lefty, of The Urbanite

I have been away from blogging for the past week, due to a combination of excitement at return of the football season and not being able to put my ipod headphones down whilst listening to the new Game album. 

Yesterday’s news on the sentences of two lads who organised and encouraged people to riot on Facebook has, however, caught my eye and led me to question the impartiality of our court system. 

Even though no trouble resulted from their actions, in part due to the fact that the police were one step ahead and had by then been monitoring sites like Facebook, Jordan Blackshaw and Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan (pictured above) were both sentenced to four year’s in prison after pleading guilty to attempting to organise a riot via Facebook. 

According to The Guardian Blackshaw, aged just 20, had set up a Facebook group called ‘Smash Down in Northwhich Town’ and encouraged people who wanted to riot to meet up behind a McDonalds in his town centre.  Unluckily for him, no one else turned up other than the police who duly arrested him. 

Sutcliffle-Keenan, aged 22, set up a Facebook page called ‘The Warrington Riots’ which was sent to over 400 of his Facebook contacts.  Apparently he woke up the next day with a hangover and deleted the page immediately.  The riot, again, did not materialise.  The courts were told that his page had caused immense panic in the town and led to shops closing early that day. 

Both were sentenced to four years in jail for their crimes.

Miliband’s Moment

This post is brought to you by Frank Lefty, of The Urbanite

“This is not about poverty, this is about culture”

And with those words, Dave ‘hug a hoodie’ Cameron set the tone for the debate in the House of Commons on Thursday on what went from being called the ‘London Riots’ to the ‘UK Unrest’ in the media.  To be fair to Dave he did manage to perfectly capture the public mood when he eventually returned from holiday in sunny Italy, even if it seemed too late for many of his detractors on both the left and the right.  I admit, his speech on Tuesday in which he promised to track down and find every rioter sounded George Bush-esque.  But by that time things looked so severe, with the country on the brink of what seemed like internal civil war, that part of my left wing self prayed for a George Bush type Prime Minister, complete with cowboy hat and pistols drawn, to fly down from the skies and take out the rioters one by one. 

All in all, however, it appears that Dave did well.  He managed to sound both tough and understanding at the same time, although his refusal to admit that police cuts are having an effect on the morale and capability of the police is akin to Arsene Wenger claiming that Arsenal do not need to spend money.  They do. And the police need extra resources to ensure that something like this does not happen again. 

But what about my main man Ed Miliband?  Well after coming out with the predictable soundbites that the riots were ‘shocking’ and ‘unacceptable’ (no shit!) Miliband seemed to find his feet during the week and unlike Cameron actually attempted to find a cause for the riots. As Miliband correctly stated, to seek to explain the riots is not to seek to excuse them.  And unlike his Labour counterparts Harriet Harman and Ken Livingstone, he wisely avoided blaming cuts to EMA or youth clubs for the disturbances and correctly sought to identify other underlying long-term issues such as social inequality and a lack of ethics in our society.  He also correctly identified that this lack of ethics is not just rampant amongst the ‘underclass’ section of society that most people blamed for the riots, but also amongst the upper echolons of society; from irresponsible bankers to expense fiddling politicians.