More to the point, I don’t think the campaign was meant to be a reconciliation between the “classes”, more of a display of solidarity for anyone who was opposed to the riots and rioters – whether it be by liking the FB page, adding the hash tag to a tweet or by wearing a branded t-shirt – just choose the method that suits, there’s nothing more to it than that.

From my side, it’s not a go at you, it’s a challenge to a council that spends far more time on this sort of thing than fixing some of Manchester’s deep social problems. You were commissioned for a brief, I take it, fair play – and you defend that well.

What do we take all this energy to do tho? How do we fix huge problems in education and health?

Standing up for the issues in Manchester tends to gets you accused of “running down Manchester” in the places where it matters (town hall etc).

That’s my experience and part of the slant I took from the article, that time and effort should be better spent on these issues (or at least raising awareness of them) rather than campaigns targeted at the middle classes. I love MCR, that’s why I want to improve it, and have better chances for it’s children.

What is easy is for everyone to stand back, with hindsight, and say “Could have been better/different.” To everything.

MM had to do something, and quickly. Maybe next time (let’s hope there isn’t a next time) they might act differently. But they simply couldn’t have done nothing. But it’s fair to say that it did make a lot of people think about Manchester, and many publicly and openly responded positively to it.

The causes of the riots – or should we say in Manchester, the causes behind a significant amount of law-breaking – are deep-rooted. We’ll have to find out why people feel that it is okay to do what they did. We’ll have to try and understand why it seemed highly organised in certain cases. What’s clear is the Social Contract broke down on that day.

Unfortunately for the liberal-minded, it will mean visiting some things that they find uncomfortable – that there is “a” criminal element. For the hardened neo-con, it will mean that the same thing – that simply being hard on people won’t stop criminality. It’s not going to be done quickly, via Twitter or any marketing campaign. And given the current fiscal circumstances, it’s not going to happen any time soon.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_class

What I find the most interesting here though is the unfolding debate about what class people consider themselves to be and requests for definitions. I do spy more than enough chips on shoulders to open a chippy…well perhaps 2 chippies, one for the self proclaimed middle class in the NQ and another for the proud working class in Salford.

The Wikipedia entry is rather interesting. According to that I’m working class – GSCE education, I rent my home and don’t earn all that much – but I’m not really ar*ed about what class society thinks I am. I prefer dogs to people anyway. They don’t give a crap what you earn or ow you speak innit.

I think the #ilovemcr campaign was a fast, decent response using appropriate tools to communicate it. It would NEVER be as big as riot communications; negative messages always spread quicker than positive ones. QRcodes? Let’s put things into perspective. I like my posters to say what they mean, I’m not going to scan it with my phone. To most people a QRCode looks like a printing error.

Saying that I would have been impressed if the rioters had used QRcodes

Fab discussion.