Riots: we deserve this. We brought it on ourselves

It's time to wake up. We sleepwalked into this situation, and we only have ourselves to blame.

I rarely agree with David Cameron, but when he talked about a "broken society", this is what he meant. An article in the Independent by Camila Batmanghelidjh has been doing the rounds on Twitter, with lots of people posting with it that the author is "someone who knows what she is talking about".

Why are we surprised and impressed by being able to read something written by someone with a clue? She doesn't actually say anything that groundbreaking... Lots of us know - surely, lots of us do actually know - what is going on in our society, and that it is broken. We know that successive governments have deliberately neglected the poorest people in this country. It was also surely obvious that things could go wrong in this way if that neglect continued. We didn't need Batmanghelidjh to tell us.

The hard part is who is to blame. I have just read a blog post by Sunny Hundal that makes the point I was about to make: that by sitting at home, tweeting and blogging, we are not part of the solution, so we are part of the problem. We brought this on ourselves, and we need to get out into the "community" and work to support those who need it. Not out of altruism, but out of what we have seen now: if we don't do this, our cities will burn.

We have to take the blame for trying to kid ourselves that we can either ignore the people struggling in society, or rack up huge national debt based on make-believe financial systems to try and pay for it. If we want to maintain our society, our quality of life, our safety, we have to pay for it through taxation. We also need to make sure the banks and multinationals start paying their taxes too.

We must also realise that we are also to blame for voting in these governments that have conned us that all this will work. I like Ken Livingstone less the more I learn about him, but he got it spot on when he called our top politicians a "cabinet of millionaires" - but we picked those people! Until we realise that professional politicians picked out from the social elites who have no experience of the real world are not the way forward, this will continue to happen again and again for generations to come.

We need to build better communities. We need to elect proper people of substance as our politicians instead of the hairdos we've got at the moment.

The important thing is that we now do this. We must not simply talk or type about it. We have to blame ourselves, take responsibility as individuals and a society, and start to become part of the solution.