The Great British riots

[Kevin S. Assilleekunt 1]

Has it been confirmed that Duggan was shot multiple times in the face? They initially said he was shot once in the chest.

[Tom 14013]

He was shot in the face according to Newsnight.

 

I've just watched that on youtube - what's the point if nobody actually listens to anybody? There's no room for genuine discourse if you get interrupted half way through a sentence. I've just watched a clip of David Starkey & Owen Jones plus a lady I don't know the name of. I didn't learn much at all, it was merely a shouting match.

 

The news presenter in the middle didn't give anyone a proper platform to express their views.

[NJS 4411]

It's about time someone mentioned that the coppers deliberately held back so they could use their performance as an argument against the cuts.

[Tom 14013]

I have no doubts - or at least they were operating at minimal risk.

 

I wonder how they put it across to the officers?

[Kevin S. Assilleekunt 1]

Hitch posted an article today regarding the riots:

 

I realized that the collapse of British society into a Hobbesian nightmare of mutual predation and despair was still some distance off when I caught two little straws in the wind. The first was a well-framed photograph of a badly scorched bit of London, taken on the morning after a night of riots and vandalism. Apart from heavily accoutered cops, the only human figures on the scene consisted of a forest of sleeveless forearms, all brandishing the long handles of mops and heavy-duty scrubbing brushes. The ordinary working day had scarcely begun, but the process of digging out and cleaning up, inaugurated by the volunteer locals, was already under way. Of course, I thought to myself. Inflict a physical disaster on any British city, but especially on London, and the inhabitants seem to know, without any previous training for the role, that they have been cast in a remake of Britain Beats the Blitz.

 

The second exhibit you may already have seen. If not, then make haste to YouTube and watch the video of Pauline Pearce. Pearce is a resident, of West Indian descent, of the London borough of Hackney. She is a woman suffering from a physical disability and on an early night of the disorders, she had found herself confronted and menaced on the street by crowds of young hooligans and help-yourself artists. By the time the next day rolled around, the whole area knew of the terrific on-site harangue she had delivered and of the vials of shame that she had upended over the heads of the offenders. She was being stopped in the street and invited to revisit the high points again. For undiluted outrage and brilliant street humor, the result is hard to beat. Interviewed the next day, Pearce took a strong line on property rights, demanding to know why, if people worked and saved to buy a car, anyone should have the nerve to come along and set fire to it. She then pointed across the street and asked how the thugs knew there weren't babies asleep next to the windows that were suddenly red with arson.

 

It was quite something and, again, there is nothing the British like more than the sight of a tough motherly figure giving the layabouts a piece of her mind. So perhaps the resources of civilization are not yet exhausted. Still, this leaves open the question of why so many British people also enjoy battering and maiming strangers, destroying or damaging landmark buildings (probably without knowing that that's what they are), and pretending to come to the aid of wounded foreign tourists, the better to lift things from their backpacks.

Advertisement

 

There are two unhelpful approaches to this, the first of them based on the assumption—still very widespread in the American press—that there is something essentially un-English about gratuitous violence. A second approach makes the opposite emphasis and consists of saying, in effect, look up your Dickens and your Mayhew and your Engels: The London of a few generations ago was a scene of mob rule as well as class rule. Life was cheap, justice was expensive; nobody was more cruel to children than the English; and no peaceful citizen was safe from the footpad, the highwayman, and the pickpocket. This "nothing new under the sun" theory is too callous and doesn't really succeed in explaining anything. But nor, necessarily, does the alternative theory that blames all the "new" violence on the "old" vices, of selfishness, greed, the decline of family values and religion, and so forth.

 

Last year, I had a debate with my brother Peter at the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. (His contributions to the current argument, which are among the most cogent being offered by anyone on the British right, can be found on his blog at London's Mail on Sunday.) Curtain-raising these questions, Peter led off with some recent crime statistics and accounts of criminal incidents that were quite hair-raising. He basically challenged me to say whether I would have believed such stories, or ever expected them to come true, in the more innocent England of our boyhood.

 

Without resorting too glibly to the Dickens/Mayhew/Engels defense cited above, I found that I could. Vicious crime was constantly spoken of in undertones—and the names of "bad" neighborhoods in quite respectable towns were likewise whispered about—by people who quite genuinely feared the underclass and in particular its violent children. In more famously "bad" cities, like Glasgow and Liverpool and Belfast, one heard credible reports of whole streets and areas and housing estates where it wasn't worth chancing a visit. (These same districts of urban blight, as I hastened to remind the audience for our debate, tended also to be the setting of very dogged traditional, religious, and family values, often expressed by Protestant-Catholic warfare of a sort that was later to mount a real challenge to the British state.)

 

Then there were the successive panics about feral youth. In the mid-'60s, street and beachfront clashes between Mods and Rockers petrified the respectable and set magistrates competing with each other in the stiffness of their sentences for fans of the Who. Pure panic in the early 1970s effectively banned Stanley Kubrick's version of Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange. More recent was Britain's most disgusting export as well as a poisonous recreation: the mobilization of huge squads of ugly drunks at soccer matches. More recently, though, the introduction of mass CCTV has allowed an amazing degree of crowd control even at this level.

 

So how much fresh bad news is there really under the sun? Friends of mine tend to stress the laws that are never enforced, the grinning bullies who walk free, the waste of police time on politically correct trivia, and the general "defining down" of unacceptable behavior. But the only really new development, without historical analog, is the emergence of gangs and even small-scale "communities" that feel they owe no civic or political or in many cases religious loyalty to the state or its institutions. These groups and areas often detest each other as much as they do the wider society: There has been graphic violence, for example, between Afro-Caribbean and Asian Muslim factions. Clearly, also, these are the sort of rank, polluted waters in which white supremacist and jihadist groups can find their fishing grounds. I remind you that all of this was already an extremely clear and present danger, long before the all-purpose expression "the cuts" was being used for all-purpose purposes.

 

http://www.slate.com/id/2301920/

[Guest alex]

Two interesting takes on the riots there. Cheers.

[LeazesMag 0]

It's about time someone mentioned that the coppers deliberately held back so they could use their performance as an argument against the cuts.

 

one day we might have a society with no coppers and everybody will behave like lovely little boys.

[Meenzer 15737]

It's about time someone mentioned that the coppers deliberately held back so they could use their performance as an argument against the cuts.

 

one day we might have a society with no coppers and everybody will behave like lovely little boys.

 

And we can all get on with attacking straw men undisturbed.

[adios 717]

I was as guilty as the next man for scoffing at twitter (Twatter etc.) when it was starting up, but it's bloody good when shit like this is going down. I hardly watched any of it on the news channels where the same pieces of video are recycled interminably for 24 hours a day.

Me too, best website on the internet by a mile if you sort through the many mugs and add the right people.

I very rarely even use the website tbh, browser add-ons and apps all the way.

 

Do you use chrome? Mostly use the phone app, but looking for an extension to use on the PC.

try 'silver bird' if you haven't found one yet

[Happy Face 29]

I was as guilty as the next man for scoffing at twitter (Twatter etc.) when it was starting up, but it's bloody good when shit like this is going down. I hardly watched any of it on the news channels where the same pieces of video are recycled interminably for 24 hours a day.

Me too, best website on the internet by a mile if you sort through the many mugs and add the right people.

I very rarely even use the website tbh, browser add-ons and apps all the way.

 

Do you use chrome? Mostly use the phone app, but looking for an extension to use on the PC.

try 'silver bird' if you haven't found one yet

 

I'd found one, and silver Bird it was. It's good. Cheers.

[Matt 0]

That NS article is utter bollocks- effectively any wrong-doing in the riots can be explained away by horrors committed by the rich. In a typical ultra-left reaction (note the sarcastic use of the word 'entrepreneurs'). And its attempts to criticise those who chose to stand by their communities as unintentionaly complicit in some kind of oppression only serves to underestimate the genuine feeling of people in London to these events.

 

And just serves a nice reminder why Darcus Howe is a cunt. He doesn't like black people being written off, but he was more than happy to it to plenty of white-majority towns (including Newcastle) in his miserable 'White Tribe' series.

[LeazesMag 0]

That NS article is utter bollocks- effectively any wrong-doing in the riots can be explained away by horrors committed by the rich. In a typical ultra-left reaction (note the sarcastic use of the word 'entrepreneurs'). And its attempts to criticise those who chose to stand by their communities as unintentionaly complicit in some kind of oppression only serves to underestimate the genuine feeling of people in London to these events.

 

And just serves a nice reminder why Darcus Howe is a cunt. He doesn't like black people being written off, but he was more than happy to it to plenty of white-majority towns (including Newcastle) in his miserable 'White Tribe' series.

 

yes, but only the ultra-left are educated and have a brain you know.

[Billy Castell 0]

And you prove that Leazes .

 

The rioters were bored chavs and nobheads wanting a new TV and some Basmati rice. If there was a 'class war' element, they'd have attacked banks, the city, Harrods etc. and not the nearest car, Malaysian students or family owned furniture shops. Romanticising the events is stupid, inaccurate and damaging.

[LeazesMag 0]

And you prove that Leazes .

 

The rioters were bored chavs and nobheads wanting a new TV and some Basmati rice. If there was a 'class war' element, they'd have attacked banks, the city, Harrods etc. and not the nearest car, Malaysian students or family owned furniture shops. Romanticising the events is stupid, inaccurate and damaging.

 

you've just actually "proven it" [ie the sarcasm] too in your own ironic and blind way.

 

I posted earlier about the roots of the riots, in respect of social standards and behaviours. I stand by that. It is correct, it goes back way before Thatcher to the namby pamby lefties and softies etc with their idealistic view of the world to the 60's and 70's in particular.

[Billy Castell 0]

I was actually having a joke there, you know, playing along.

 

And if you were not so in love with your own opinion, and have such a monochrome view of the world, you'd realise that I am not some 'ultra left, PC do-gooder' or whichever label you choose for those who don't agree with you 100%. We have on occaision even agreed on some things, like the extreme devotion to multi-culturalism being damaging to society, and that these rioters are badly behaved kids who have not been taught rtight from wrong. But I am wasting my time here, pointing out this to Toontastic's interpretation of FOX News, a man who is compelled to make imaginary enemies and ideological bogeymen out of every event, post and issue.

Edited August 21, 2011 by Billy Castell

[LeazesMag 0]

I was actually having a joke there, you know, playing along.

 

And if you were not so in love with your own opinion, and have such a monochrome view of the world, you'd realise that I am not some 'ultra left, PC do-gooder' or whichever label you choose for those who don't agree with you 100%. We have on occaision even agreed on some things, like the extreme devotion to multi-culturalism being damaging to society, and that these rioters are badly behaved kids who have not been taught rtight from wrong. But I am wasting my time here, pointing out this to Toontastic's interpretation of FOX News, a man who is compelled to make imaginary enemies and ideological bogeymen out of every event, post and issue.

 

I'm not labelling YOU at all man.

 

I don't watch FOX news, I don't have sky anymore, and when I had it I still didn't watch it.

 

Who's making up labels here ?

 

I'm making a true comment about leftie namby pambies too by the way, albeit admittedly based in deserved sarcasm.

[Kevin S. Assilleekunt 1]

NAMBYYY PAMBY

 

CAN THEY FIX IT?

 

NAMMBY PAMBY

 

NO THEY CAN'T

[Park Life 71]

On a warm spring day, strolling in south London, I heard demanding voices behind me. A police van disgorged a posse of six or more who waved me aside. They surrounded a young black man who, like me, was ambling along. They rifled through his pockets, looked in his shoes, inspected his teeth. Their thuggery affirmed, they let him go with the barked warning there would be a next time.

 

For the young at the bottom of the pyramid of wealth and patronage and poverty that is modern Britain - mostly the black, the marginalised and resentful, the envious and hopeless - there is never surprise. Their relationship with authority is integral to their obsolescence as young adults. Half of all black British youth between the ages of 18 and 24 are unemployed, the result of deliberate policies since Margaret Thatcher oversaw the greatest transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top in British history. Forget plasma TVs; this was panoramic looting.

 

Such is the truth of David Cameron's "sick society", notably its sickest, most criminal, most feral "pocket": the square mile of the City of London where, with political approval, the banks and the super-rich have trashed the British economy and the lives of millions. This is fast becoming unmentionable as we succumb to propaganda once described by the American black leader Malcolm X thus: "If you're not careful the newspapers will have you hating the oppressed and loving the people doing the oppressing."

 

Money-moving parasites As MPs lined up to bay their class bigotry and hypocrisy in parliament, barely a handful spoke this truth. Not one of the heirs to Edmund Burke's 18th-century rants against "mob rule" by a "swinish multitude" referred to previous rebellions in Brixton, Tottenham and Toxteth in the 1980s, when Lord Scarman reported that "complex political, social and economic factors" had caused a "disposition towards violent protest" and recommended urgent remedial action. Instead, Labour and Liberal bravehearts called for water cannon and everything draconian. Among them was the Labour MP Hazel Blears. Remember her notorious expenses? None made the obvious connection between the greatest inequality since records began, a police force that routinely abuses a section of the population and kills with impunity, and a permanent state of colonial warfare with an arms trade to match: the apogee of violence.

 

It seemed hardly coincidental that on the day before Cameron raged against "phoney human rights", Nato aircraft - including British bombers sent by him - killed a reported 85 civilians in a peaceful Libyan town. These were people in their homes, children in their schools. Watch the BBC's man on the spot trying his best to dispute the evidence in front of his eyes, just as the political and media class sought to discredit the evidence of a civilian slaughter in Iraq as bloody as the Rwandan genocide. Who are the criminals?

 

This is not in any way to excuse the violence of the rioters, many of whom were opportunistic, mean, cruel, nihilistic and often vicious in their glee: an authentic reflection of a system of greed and self-interest to which scores of parasitic money-movers, "entrepreneurs", Murdochites, corrupt MPs and bent coppers have devoted themselves.

 

On 9 August, the BBC's Fiona Armstrong - aka Lady MacGregor of MacGregor -interviewed the writer Darcus Howe, who dared use the forbidden word "insurrection".

 

Armstrong Mr Howe, you say you are not shocked [by the riots]? Does this mean you condone what happened last night? Howe Of course not . . . What I am concerned about is a young man called Mark Duggan . . . the police officer blew his head off. Armstrong Mr Howe, we have to wait for the official inquiry before we can say things like that. We don't know what happened . . . We're going to wait for the police report on it.

 

On 8 August, the Independent Police Complaints Commission acknowledged there was "no evidence" that Duggan had fired a shot at police. He was shot in the face on 4 August by a police officer with a Heckler & Koch MP5 sub-machine gun - the same weapon supplied by British governments, Tory and Labour, to dictatorships that use them against their own people. I saw the result in East Timor, where Indonesian troops also blew the heads off people.

 

The big sweep An eyewitness to Duggan's killing told reporters: "About three or four police officers had [him] pinned on the ground at gunpoint. They were really big guns and then I heard four loud shots. The police shot him on the floor." This is how the police shot dead Jean Charles de Menezes on the floor of a London Underground train in 2005. And there was Ian Tomlinson, and many more. The police lied about Duggan's killing as they lied about the others. Since 1998, more than 330 people have died in police custody yet not one officer has been convicted.

 

“Funny, too," noted the journalist Melanie McFadyean, "that the police did nothing while some serious looting went on - surely not because they wanted everyone to see that cutting the police force meant more crime?"

 

Still, the brooms have arrived. In an age of public relations as news, the clean-up campaign, however well-meant by many people, can also serve the media goal of sweeping inequality and hopelessness under gentrified carpets, with cheery volunteers armed with brand new brooms and described as "Londoners" as if the rest were aliens. The otherwise absent Boris Johnson waved his new broom. Another Old Etonian, the PR to an asset stripper and currently the Prime Minister up to his neck in Hackgate, would surely approve.

 

http://www.newstatesman.com/uk-politics/20...e-british-young

 

Couple of Africans in the betting shop yesterday were misty eyed about their time living in Manchester and how much they miss the UK compared to Germany.

 

One used to work on BR was going on about what good crack the locals were and there was never a hint of racism and so on...

 

He's a street cleaner here and said that whites come in he trains them and they get promoted above him.

 

Would be very rare if ever in the UK.

[ChezGiven 0]

I'm delighted to see the backlash against the initial fury has now started to happen. Some of the early harsh sentencing has been overturned and rightly so. Also, Blair was spot on today, I personally see the riots as evidence of our society working not it being broken. If society is getting more unequal (fact) and our institutions are corrupt (fact) then pur youth should be angry or at least make a statement. Whether any of them intended it or not is irrelevant, the immediate impact has been to elevate equality, fairness and wealth distribution into the political debate and that's a good thing.

[DEADMAN 0]

i think its a good idea that if crimminals smash something up they should be forced to fix it

[ChezGiven 0]

You mean like the banking sector and self-regulation? I hear you Deaders.

[DEADMAN 0]

no i mean the public sector or private sector which is ever its refered to lol

[Happy Face 29]

I posted earlier about the roots of the riots, in respect of social standards and behaviours. I stand by that. It is correct, it goes back way before Thatcher to the namby pamby lefties and softies etc with their idealistic view of the world to the 60's and 70's in particular.

 

I've looked through all your posts in this thread and can't find that. Could you quote it please...or explain which actions the "lefties and softies" took that caused the riots?

[LeazesMag 0]

I posted earlier about the roots of the riots, in respect of social standards and behaviours. I stand by that. It is correct, it goes back way before Thatcher to the namby pamby lefties and softies etc with their idealistic view of the world to the 60's and 70's in particular.

 

I've looked through all your posts in this thread and can't find that. Could you quote it please...or explain which actions the "lefties and softies" took that caused the riots?

 

was within the last 2 weeks or so, maybe another thread. Billy Castell replied to it.