Riots

[eighthobstruction]

This Nation needs to be taught, needs to learn....sustainability....on a material level and at a spiritual level....THIS is the result of GROWTH....

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

just watched Cameron, i hope 'robust' policing and justice is enough but it can not be sustained and if cat and mouse develops over time, as well as over the cities, it could run ...

the stories of the people who were individually attacked or threatened and offered no protection or help are the ones i find most chilling .... if the authority of the police continues to fail we may see some tough vigilante action .... and maybe we should all develop a stronger intolerance of youngster's misbehaviour in public ... the response last night was insufficient in both numbers and tactics, it was free for all with no sanction or control .... the slower process of subsequent arrest on which the Met seem to be relying is a long lagged feedback loop and a tad hit and miss to be of any use tonight or tomorrow ... much as one appreciates their apparent softly softly approach ... this is probably more to do with their resource levels than their mind set ..when they have the numbers they shoot people and push them to the ground without regard, or kettle them ...still the same old plod ... just outnumbered and outwitted by smaller numbers of fleet footed 'irregulars' [what price privacy now as Blackberry joins the fray ...the Met will be desperate for the comms intelligence]


the contagion is the most disturbing part ... we could see yet more cities affected, the coming weekend will be a critical time as well .... this is not something to condemn or condone right now ... it is not the immigrants, nor the blacks or whatever ... it is the kids in our cities who live on the street in gangs and their buddies .... they are our kids .... they are having a festival of gang culture .... their potency is being reinforced by the coverage and the wooden and inadequate efforts thus far to stop it ... and the contagion will be driven by a competitive rivalry transmitted via twitter and blackberry ...

historically this kind of gang activity is not new as the references to Dickens [and we could go earlier eh] show, what is new is the speed of contagion


the context of economic crisis and the recent exposure of elite larceny and felonious disregard for the law [as noted severally above, a serious permission for the kids] ... are dangerously combined in the present circumstances ... we have not seen such a potent threat to the authority of the system in many decades, no government can survive both losing the economy and losing the streets ... Cameron is very slow to spot this

me too aeolium

[Serial_Apologist]

Selfishness bred of disconnection is the only rational explanation for those who have no regard for the livelihoods/possessions of others. Our consumer society has bred a sense of entitlement - advertisers say our lives are incomplete, our status diminished, without the latest phone, TV or trainers - so if they can't be had by legal means why not steal them?

UNSUSTAINABLE things - things with inbuilt obsolescence - inbuilt because goodness me we have to keep feeding this constant need to comply with peer pressure, otherwise people'd have no meaning by which to live their lives. (Oh and btw we'd stop living off their backs... but don't tell them that).

For all its faults, and they are legion, Cuba has somehow just about managed to keep going by patching up & making do.

Thanks all of you for filling in the detail of the principles I was stating clumsily above. Time for The News now!

[amateur51]

Please don't read any accusation of racism into what I write when I say it is no accident - they do not "happen" to be black - the fact is that it was "useful" (euphemism) to bring their parents' and grandparents' generations here to reconstruct the country post WW2; just as it was "useful" not to recognise their underclass status when the postwar indigenous working class brought up on Britain's civilizing mission through colonialism started being shipped out to the 'burbs and new towns while Rachmanism took over the inner-cities. Sure, the liberal BBC in its well-meaning way presented Edmundo Ros as a model of welcoming gentle insistence, but when the slide to decline accelerated it was not difficult for Thatcher to speak of immigrants "swamping" the country.

And who did the initial invitations come from, to leave the Caribbean to work in Britain's NHS? Step forward John Enoch Powell MBE, Minister for Health

[Stillhomewardbound]

And yeah verily ... feast your eyes on the face of the great dispossessed and weep bitter tears for the cruel way we have neglected these children.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/uknews/8690951/London-riots-CCTV-pictures-of-suspects-are-released-by-the-Metropolitan-Police.html

Feral tea leaves more like.

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

Feral tea leaves, each and everyone.

...they are our kids, until you see that there is no solution

[Anna]

Unfortunately it seems to be kicking off again. Surrey Quays shopping centre in Bermondsey has just been evacuated and closed its doors with warnings of more riots on their way, Looting is reportedly already underway on Lower Road. Camberwell shops have been told to close as there's trouble.

You know, one of the overwhelming feelings I have is sadness that these young men are so detached from real-life (that's probably the wrong word), so uncaring, so desparate, so having nothing to lose.

[Stillhomewardbound]

This Twitter thing is causing considerable problems. It's like an amplifieed rumour mill and it would be no bad thing if its servers crashed for a few hours.

[Chris Newman]

At the moment everything seems to mirror the French troubles of 2005: the underlying social tensions of poverty, racial paranoia, greed and "having a good time". The first of these is at the root of the others and needs positive action. The French under Chirac never really tackled the problems. It will be foolish if we brush things under the carpet.

[amateur51]

Years ago, after I'd been a youth worker and a youth work trainer, I was involved in funding youth work. At that time there was a lot of evaluation of different approaches, a lot was 'known'. But you had to read it, and Government wasn't up for that and youth work was not exactly 'flavour of the month' because you couldn't see 'how' it worked. Youth work's a bit like electricity - electricity 'is' what electricity 'does'.

A group of brave souls including The Prince's Trust and Nat West Bank I think & National Youth Bureau got together some time in the 1990s, when Michael Howrd was Home Secretary, to address the question of whether youth work was worth funding. In other words, does it work? Is the financial investment worthwhile?

They employed that well-known youth work organisation Price Waterhouse Coopers (only it wasn't called that then) to do some research, reading the reports, meeting different interest groups, etc and they produced a report that showed conclusively that youth work DID work and they even managed to put a input:outcome cost to it all which was very favourable.

The report was launched with a panel comprising Sir Paul Condon representing policing, Sir Tim Clement-Jones then of Kingfisher representing commerce and sundry other worthies and in speech after speech they all signed up to the report and suppported the need to invest in youth work. We broke up for lunch feeling pretty upbeat that we finally had some evidence with which to address Government's questions about 'what does youthwork do for society?' and 'how does it work? and 'is it money well spent?'.

In the afternoon the sole speaker was Michael 'Prison Works' Howard. He blew in, and to everyone's amazerment and total silence he trashed the report, its methods, its findings, even its basic premises ... and then left. Youth work slid ever further down the Government's agenda and all the gains that had been made over decades of investment were lost.

When Blair & Co arrived, youth work was forced into a marriage of convenience with the Careers Service, presented to the world as Connexions (yes they even spelled it that way!). They couldn't see how this marriage distorted the very essence, the value base, of good youth work and huge amounts of target-setting took over instead. The voluntary (ie non-statuory) youth service carried on, bearing an increasing work-load with an increasingly disaffected group of young people.

I give all this pre-amble because I'd like you to watch this video - it's quite short - which fortells quite chillingly the initiation of recent events. It doesn't explain the range & extent of the rioters' activities but it does go some way towards explaining why young people kicked off at the start.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/video/2011/jul/31/haringey-youth-club-closures-video

We ignored this message.

We need to start listening and acting on what we hear

[Dave2002]

I would remind BetweenThe Staves that the holding of a sincere belief in equality and human rights is not the perogative of people with rose-tinted pinko-liberal sensitivities. One of the most famous and important sentences written in history runs:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

I believe in and support the principles advanced in the second sentence of the American Declaration of Independence.

Was it not the case that the formulation of the American Declaration of Independence did not, in today's terms, support equal rights?

The wording "that all men ... " was, I thought, suppose only to apply to white men, with others not actually being included. Thus the words which seem fair nowadays were not actually advocating fairness to all at the time. It was only in the 1960s that serious attempts to change such a notion of equality were implemented, and it has taken at least 40 years since then for something approaching that fairness to be achieved.

Please correct me if I'm wrong.

[Mahlerei]

Switching off Twitter or hoping it crashes is no solution. ironically, we all applauded social networking's role in the Arab Spring but we're less happy with the way it's being used in these riots. It's here to stay, I'm afraid, so we'll just have to get used to it.

[Osborn]

Once a disturbance has momentum you have to join in to keep your street cred. . And you need to get a trophy (e.g. steal a mobile phone) or get involved in an incident with or witnessed by your peers (e.g. set fire to something). If you don’t get involved, expect to be short of friends and maybe get beaten up.

Are people really protesting or are many quite enjoying doing something different and helping themselves to some free toys without fear of arrest. It’ll soon blow over.

[Chris Newman]

Was it not the case that the formulation of the American Declaration of Independence did not, in today's terms, support equal rights?

The wording "that all men ... " was, I thought, suppose only to apply to white men, with others not actually being included. Thus the words which seem fair nowadays were not actually advocating fairness to all at the time. It was only in the 1960s that serious attempts to change such a notion of equality were implemented, and it has taken at least 40 years since then for something approaching that fairness to be achieved.

Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Of course I mean the modern universal interpretation of that sentence where "men" is understood as "mankind". That is what I believe.

[eighthobstruction]

I don't know about recalling parliament....How about recalling SCHOOL....