You're right Kate - it does sound like excuses.

It's a shame though because the page is showing how many people support the police and not the rioters.

I get dozens of jokes sent to my mobile and appearing on my FB feed, some have been those above - even verbatim. I don't find them funny and I don't pass them on but I also don't think any the worse of friends and acquaintances for posting them. It's cultural: some simply receive them and send; others receive and delete. I'd question whether either act is an indicator of political leaning. Purely anecdotally, most of those I get are from a steelworker who confronts and destroys any discrimination he encounters in public, thrashes me at chess yet sends these daft jokes because twenty years in a steel mill has left him immune to any effect - they're just words. (A more interesting debate is why online many people comment in a way they'd never dream of doing in public.)

Sean Boscott did a good thing in setting up the page. It must be assumed that every BNP, EDL and rabidly-facist site has been trawled for entries by him - yet this was all that could be discovered - a few stupid and unfunny jokes that will be on half a million phones all over the country.

If all you can find to show your superiority is a few daft jokes then you're behaving nothing other than predictably. Showing poor judgement and forwarding stupid jokes to 'impress' your friends is not the same as racism. Get off your high horses.

It is 'Like' the group rather than 'Like' Sean. He is the creator of the group but the two are not mutually exclusive to me. I clicked 'Like' on the basis of the group and the updates. I don't normally 'vet' the creator, who does?

Unbelievably, members of Boscott's page are so upset at articles revealing him for the nasty racist pig that he is, have set up a Facebook appreciation group: http://www.facebook.com/groups/223042494408691/ - funny that it only has 3 members so far, though :D

1. These jokes are sick, racism, rape, having a go at disabled, jewish, you name it, it's there on his twitter feed (and it's still there, he has just protected his tweets). He says he's been hacked but these offensive jokes go back months whilst at the same time, he has been talking to his mates, arranging his social life etc on the twitter feed. If his account has been hacked then its been hacked for a very long time with the person concerned pretending to look like Sean and steal Sean's social life!

 2. What has wound up a lot of people is that Sean has started to use his million likes as some sort of mandate to talk to the press, pretending to represent a million people. Well even though I clicked like on his page, he doesn't represent me. He now has hundreds of people telling him to go into politics, people who I assume are totally unaware of his views.

 3. Sean has also used his facebook page to promote racism - any questions about his tweets are immediately deleted and those posing the questions are banned. Yet there have been lots of threads on that page that are racist or are even supporting the EDL or BNP. Whilst some of these had been deleted, many racist comments have been left up for all to see.

I thought the Planet of the Apes joke about Obama was quite funny: 6 out 10.

But of course you don't need to make jokes about Obama because Obama is already a joke.

Well, I'm not a friend of his but still like the page.

I feel that, if I unliked it now, it would seem as if I was withdrawing my support for the police.

Why would anyone click like on that group? Race hatred is not acceptable, but class hatred is? The Met police are racist classist scum.

Roger, no offence taken. I'll see how it goes and leave if I don't agree with the content.

There certainly won't be a phase 2 for me.

@Carol: I did take time to read the jokes - unlike you did with my name. I stand by what I said earlier: stupid and lacking in judgement but no evidence of anything more. Go back to your chardonnay.

That said, all the hand-wringing and indecision being displayed in the above comments about a simple f**king decision is truly pathetic.

'Failure to unlike the page would leave you guilty of moral cowardice.' - Jeeeesus, listen to yourself!

Many of you (including the author of this non-story) need to work out your priorities. Or maybe you should just join Carol in a quick visit to Threshers and settle down for the evening with some old episodes of 'Bremner, Bird and Fortune' on the DVD recorder?

@ Ian

Humour is not ‘all about insulting someone’. If you think that, I must assume that you have never seen a baby giggle, or a child laugh at something. How sad. If you can tear yourself away from Facebook for a minute to witness it, it's really quite magical and life-affirming.

(Or maybe they have just been receiving these racist texts and emails that everyone else in Britain apart from me apparently gets on a regular basis, if posts on here are to be believed?)

@ The other page-mourners

Tariq Jahan lost his son. Your group lost its page.

I think you’ll get over it.

So, let me see if I've got this straight. Basically, what Tom is saying here is that we're not allowed to agree with someone on the topic of the riots because they have other views you find objectionable?

*Cheers!*

Back in your ivory tower now dear.

I've noticed that this article was published thanks to the influence of a group of overly liberal middle-class individuals who could not be further removed from the incidents. The same people are bragging about sending this information over to their "friends and contacts" in The Guardian, Independant and New Statesman, using their influence to discredit a nation getting together to portray their disgust at the current circumstance.

While the creator of the group may have published some highly offensive "jokes" his viewpoints are not represented by its members. If any of these people and whoever wrote this article had bothered to do any research, they would find that individuals making racist comments on the "Support The Met" page are immediatley shot down by contributing members.

As a regular purchaser of The New Statesman, I'd have to say that if this is what passes for journalism then I'll be thinking twice about picking up any more copies on a future basis.

@Roger: You really can't bear it that someone with bad taste did something demonstrably good, can you?

The originator of the page is irrelevant; his sentiment was sound, as was almost a million peoples' reasons for joining. No amount of jealous, McCarthyite carping stemming from your own cynical inactivity can change that.

You are just another one of the pathetic and impotent little people that crawl out whenver such 'revelations' come to light, frantically desperate to find imperfection in others to obscure your own.

@Jericho: Marvellous. Well said.

http://minority-of-one.com/2011/08/12/liberal-laughable/

People are saying it's good to support the police but not to support Boscott and his fb group. I agree up to a point: but what do we mean by supporting the police? I have to ask, because on Question Time there have been loads of audience members saying that we have been too critical of the police in the past, that we were wrong to criticise police brutality, that we should encourage them to be "heavyhanded", and that we should turn a blind eye if the police kill a few people? Now, I find all that rather difficult to swallow. I think we were right to criticise the treatment of Ian Tomlinson and I still think it is right that the CPS seriously consider bringing manslaughter charges. The police simply cannot be given carte blanche to get away with anything. Yes, it may be a tough job in the famous cliché, but no one can have outright immunity from the laws of the land. The police cannot be allowed to think they can get away with unlawful killings.

Crutchbender reveals himself/herself as a racist. Cue a hysterical denial,

Because a guy has a sick and warped sense of humour that makes him a racist/sexist/homophobe whatever? Pretty much all he did was copy-paste jokes that can be found on the sickipedia website or that you might find on millions of mobiles across the country.

Get a grip, humour is all about insulting someone, you cant tell a joke where someone or something is not the butt of the joke. He didnt make up the jokes, just repeated them, Hell I'm sure most of us have told some pretty close-to-the-edge jokes in the past. Let he who is without sin and all that.....

I was told once, by a visitor from Johannesburg, that in South Africa they called Lord Baden Powell the 'Laughing Hyena'. That he was resolutely hated by the black natives, and it was opinion he earned. The creator of the scouts was, apparently, a terrible racist.

It was some time ago, but I seem to recall that she told us that he would laugh as they would get whipped.

So the scouting movement was bad. Right? This man, with the views that he held, educating them without parental supervision. Writing books about conduct. Making them swear oaths. All bad, right?

If you want your child to not grow a racist, don't let him enter the Cub or Scout movement. That probably should be the title of your next article. I'm looking forward to reading it!

You see, you have resolutely convinced me that just because someone holds a set of views I find distateful, then they must underly every action that person ever makes.

Previously, I had thought that the scenes that upset me on Monday night would be equally distressing to anyone, regardless of whatever their race, age, religious, or political views were.

How silly of me to assume that a racist when confronted with images of the events transpiring would not have human feelings or human responses.

I was naive to not realise that if a person holds racist views... then they must automatically respond to every sensory stimuli in a racist way.

Oh, we better close the Ford factory in Dagenham while we're at it. It may be helping the community but what is more important is that it's stopped because it was created by someone with racist views. As we all know, he must have had a racist agenda when he created those factories and we can't allow that to carry on!

Oh wait, sorry. For a minute there I began to think like a reactionary sensationalist journalist. Forgive me but I didn't realise that we were in such a slow news week...

The postings from the page in question, as far as I remember, never made any racial distinction.

Nearly a million people found a way to share a sense of community over what had happened in many different ways. Not everything was positive, or for that matter constructive. It did, however, bring people together and allow them to appreciate that enough people actually cared.

Based on this, I'm not going to persecute everything a person does for holding a belief I find distateful. If I met a racist, I would likely attempt to educate him. However, I would not generalise every single thing they do as negative, and assume that somehow it was rooted in something I don't agree with.

If I did that, in essence, I would be taking that one tiny part of a person I didn't like, and then judging them on that alone.

Then I would be no better than him.

He posted that his Twitter account had been hacked - I wondered what it was all about.

So ignoble people are not capable of noble actions? Name me a single person on the planet who's maintained ethical consistency in every aspect of their life. Steve is correct, let's try to have a higher standard of ethical sophistication shall we? Judging wide-ranging concepts on sweeping and spurious accusations is getting extremely, extremely tiring.

Anyone noticed that the group which started the accusations against the 'Support The Met Police Against The Rioters' has quickly closed down?

Given the fact that they were responsible fo the closure of a group which brought a nation together, you'd think they'd stick around a little longer.

Such acts of bravery leaves a lot to be desired.