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Interestingly, none of the insurance companies are paying up, as they class the damage and destruction as caused by rioting, which has to be covered by the government.
However, the government are strongly maintaning that this is not a riot. There’s a surprise!No idea what an angry mob of hundreds tearing through the towns, setting cars, busses and shops on fire is called, but it’s not a riot, ok.
:roll:
Had that conversation with my son, who arrived here yesterday, only to spend the first couple of hours on the phone, getting the manager of his studios, who had no idea what was going on outside, to tell the clients to leave so he could get it all locked up tight, and then make his own way home – which he did safely, thankfully, with some diversions through back streets. He’d have been bankrupted if anyone had got in and cleaned out all the equipment – his insurance wouldn’t have paid a penny.
The poor sod with the furniture shop in Croydon, a 5-generation family business burnt to the ground.
@Lee wrote:
However, the government are strongly maintaning that this is not a riot. There’s a surprise!
Is that just to avoid paying up? Or is there some other political consideration there?
Very dangerous situation in Brum tonight, after the 3 Asian men were run over and killed yesterday by, apparently, a black man. Strong rumours that a lot of people are planning to come in from nearby cities to exact revenge. Always the edgiest element of race relations there, black vs Asian. So much good work that’s been done in the last few years down the drain in an instant of vicious idiocy.
Drove out to Wembley this evening for a spot of shopping, and found it eerily quiet. Saw three police riot vans, lights flashing, hurtling along the A40 on their way somewhere.
Back in Staines, there’s 20 coppers standing around at the top of the high street, waiting for something to happen.
Very strange atmosphere out there at the moment. This week is British history in the making, I think.
Whereas the truth is we’re not such a tiny island that it is actually possible to move from place to place without seeing any signs of the current unrest. :wink:
In any case, what now seems to be happening is there has been such a huge backlash against the chavs that are looting, that few of them appear to have the bollocks to carry on now, because of the huge gangs of vigilantes that are on the streets waiting for them.
I doubt the news will report it too much, but I fully expect as the perpetrators get named and their faces splashed across the media, some of them will be tragetted by vigilantes and have the everloving shit kicked out of them.The burning questions are what was the underlying cause of all this, and will anything change?
It’s an immensely complex topic, with all manner of facets to the various causes, but a very popular theory is that the whole human rights issue and the subsequent inability for teachers, police and other people in positions of authority to be able to reprimand unruly kids in any meaningful way, has created a generation of youth that are fearless of all authority, and believe (and most often proven right) that they can act in a lawless manner with impunity.
When you couple that with glamourous culture of believing you can achieve material wealth without having to work hard for it or exercise any moral restraint (as promoted by some premiership football players and certain actors) along with the fast-track-to-succcess TV programs, such as X Factor, then you arrive at place where many kids are too lazy to work at being valuable community members, and who think they have a right to material wealth simply because others have it. And they believe that if a crowd of people are smashing up a shopping precinct and stealing high end goods, then there’s little to lose in joining in.
The tide appears to have turned in the last day or two, and the country as a whole has united to form a monumetal groundswell of outrage, which may take root and form a long term moral turning point across our entire society. But we’ll soon learn if that was a momentary blip on an otherwise irrepressible journey to the bottom.
I agree with most of that, except it’s by no means a whole generation. And you left out lack of parenting. That will get even worse as the cuts bite, with Sure Start centres closing down all over the place and the council and other cuts to all the different organisations that help dysfunctional families, etc.
I really think the other main problem is the lack of hope in some of these terrible estates and inner-city districts. Most young people there see no way forward, no way to get up and out, all avenues (such as EMAs) closing down one after another. And there aren’t the jobs for young people without qualifications now, with all the factories gone, even dustmen’s jobs, say, being jealously guarded for friends and family of those who’ve already got them. (Similar to the iniquity of unpaid internships as the way in to more middle-class jobs, so those who can afford to support their offspring for 6 months or whatever in London making sure the best jobs go to those who already have all the advantages.) And as it has become such a materialistic society, of course all those kids want the goodies that they’ll never be able to pay for by getting a well-enough paid (or any) job.
Predictable that all the usual suspects are blaming the looting on black kids, even if they don’t actually come out baldly to say so, but by contrasting with white British men and their patrols. Though the looters were from all races and ethnicities – you can see clearly enough from the footage. In Manchester they were apparently mostly white. Hard to tell the difference between them and some of the super-aggressive vigilante types. And naturally the BNP and EDL are trying to use that willingness to see only black looters to stir things up further.
I’ll reciprocate with – “I agree with most of that” – insofar as the parenting is actually responsible for the lack of hope…
Good parenting means good education (in a non academinc sense) and if parents can install in their children a sense of worth and the ideal that they can be anything they want to be, then the children will choose a path that leads them to success and a better way of life. And they’ll work hard at that aspiration and meet a level of the success they’re aiming for. We see and hear about it repeatedly, so we know it happens. Unfortunately, the majority of the low-class “deprived” families consist of low intelligence parents that are themselves embittered, and whom impart their resentment of society on their unwitting offspring, leading to a population, bordering on a generation, that has nothing but a learned resentment for their society and an inherent lack of incentive to seek an alternative view, nor compulsion to apply the normal rules of application to fit in and comply.
It appears that human nature determines that those that have worked hard at compliance, along with the success that that may bring them, become very judgemental on those left behind and whom become the subject of such events we have seen in the last few days. We all look down with disdain on these miscreants, because they failed where we succeeded, and in looking down on them it accentuates our prowess. It’s an unsavioury view, but one that I believe is prevalent.
The point about the vigilantes is well made and it seemed to me from the footage I watched that they were a group that were positioned somewhere between the looters and the moderate public. They came across as excessivly combatant and hard-core violent, in a scenario that would have placed them firmly against the police in any other circumstances, rather than somewhere kind of on the same side, if slightly in the way.
Personally, I’d say you’d find much more applicable theories of the behaviour in the realm of psychology rather than generalising about entire generations or their upbringing.
The theory of “collective behaviour” would explain the vigilantes trying to stop the looters almost perfectly. Basically groups form in the absense of order to create their own order (while still not being part of the mainstream).
The reason the articles are popping up regarding government policy failures is because theories on urban riots have predominantly names urban decay, discrimination, brutality, unemployment etc as causative factors in these types of riots. Remember, these riots were sparked by “police brutality” in the shooting of Mark Duggan, so to many people, this is text book.
I’d also shy away from blaming some generational factor on this for the simple reason that there has been a major riot somewhere in the west every 3 or 4 years going back well over half a century. The UK has a proud and distinguished tradition among that (including an almost monopoly in the 80s). ;)
@ROB wrote:
Personally, I’d say you’d find much more applicable theories of the behaviour in the realm of psychology rather than generalising about entire generations or their upbringing.
This may be the case, but the abundant theories that point at family backgrounds is based in the fact these kinds of riots only ever seem to occur in less than affluent areas. We do not see these riots hitting the streets of Chelsea, Knightsbridge, Hampstead, Richmond etc. And the common denominator in the worst hit areas is the kind of people that live there.
@Lee wrote:
@ROB wrote:
Personally, I’d say you’d find much more applicable theories of the behaviour in the realm of psychology rather than generalising about entire generations or their upbringing.
This may be the case, but the abundant theories that point at family backgrounds is based in the fact these kinds of riots only ever seem to occur in less than affluent areas. We do not see these riots hitting the streets of Chelsea, Knightsbridge, Hampstead, Richmond etc. And the common denominator in the worst hit areas is the kind of people that live there.
I’d say there’s two main things at work.
What you’re talking about, I would suggest, serves to spark the riots with a small group of leaders (I just wouldn’t apply to the entire generation).
Group psychology gets the wider group to join in (including the children of millionaires).
Either way, I think there need to be strong repercussions for such anti-social behaviour.
Quickly cos v busy. Course it doesn’t happen in Chelsea etc. Kids and young people there may be just as materialistic, just as lacking in good parenting, families as dysfunctional too, tho prolly in diff ways, but they get all the goodies anyway. Can be bought off. Given therapy if necessary. No reason for gang membership to get a bit of what they can’t earn or daddy can’t provide. Not same absence of hope or prospects to have decent future.
Group psychology kicking in, absolutely. Exciting, innit, after all, on either side – looter or vigilante.
Just seen Peter Oborne in Torygraph. Agree almost every word. I’d add more too.
Did you see Starkey, Lee?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14513517
The man’s a maniac. And to fall for that BNP/EDL line that it’s not race it’s culture they’re opposed to. Hard to credit, even from him. No wonder that:
Nick Griffin, MEP for the British National Party, said on Twitter that he was “wondering whether to make David Starkey an honorary Gold Member for his Newsnight appearance”.
Owen Jones, one of the other participants, who Starkey, as usual, kept interrupting and shouting down, is the author of that book about chavs that Flipflop’s so keen on. (There was an excellent and v well informed discussion about the Starkey thing on my brother-in-law’s FB page, but I can’t link that, unfortunately.)
Meanwhile, there’ve been plenty of signs that some communities are pulling together in a positive way. The Winson Green area in Birmingham, following the heroic restraint of Tariq Jahan, and more broadly there, is the most salient, but I love the Peace Wall in Peckham too:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14495327Peckham
The masonry thrown through the window at Poundland last Monday during seven hours of rioting in Peckham, south London, left a hole directly over a poster of a giant red £1. The shattered window summed up the senselessness of much of the rioting: the shop is not worth looting. There are no expensive trainers or mobile phones. Everything is £1. Some things are even cheaper: you can buy two packs of Post-It notes for £1.
On Tuesday morning, as shop-owners picked through broken glass strewn across Rye Lane, four members of the Peckham Shed Youth Theatre Company joined in pavement discussions of what the community could do to defy the violence. One noticed the newly boarded-up windows of Poundland, and suggested it could be used as a focus for their defiance. Armed with Post-It notes bought from Poundland and marker pens, they asked passers-by to write messages explaining why they loved Peckham.
By Thursday morning, the entire 10ft-square board looks like a pastel-coloured kaleidoscope, with messages such as “Peace Will Rule”, “There’s more to life than trainers”, “Less God, more education” and “I live here, we live here, now love here, all cultures, all colours, all peaceful”. Someone had taped sprigs of lavender to the board.
A tattooed man and a woman and their fierce-looking dog walk by, pausing to look at the Peace Wall, as it had become known, and continue up the high street. “Peckham is a shithole,” the man says as they walk off. His friend replies: “No, it’s not. Well, it is now, but it wasn’t.”
This is, perhaps, an image of Peckham widely held across the country: it is where Damilola Taylor was left bleeding to death and where gangs and drugs rule. But this is not the complete picture. Few were surprised that Peckham, with some of the highest crime rates in the country, was one of the places to be hit by riots. Yet the response of the local community has been startling. The contributions to the Peace Wall have been from the sort of diverse community that Nick Griffin described on Twitter this week as a “multicultural mess”: white, black, Asian, middle class, working class, and even the “underclass” that is held responsible for the violence.
Peckham residents speak enthusiastically of the openness and friendliness of strangers they encounter. Since Monday, that openness has blossomed, they say. Chikara Stewart, 19, who has just finished college, says: “It is nice to walk around here and feel quite carefree. When people ask me where I live and I say Peckham, they say, oh, gangs. But it’s not all like that. The wall is beautiful and is so nice to see there is some good in Peckham, and that not all of London has gone to the dogs.”
Peter Hill, 69, an actor who has lived in the area since 1986, says: “Maybe this is actually a positive moment in the history of the world that we live in. Maybe this is going to bring people together so that we all feel we belong, and the love that comes from that.”
One of the instigators of the Peace Wall was Jo Tyabji, an actor and director from the Peckham Shed Theatre Company. She says: “There is a sense that, for all the area’s problems, the people of Peckham have fortitude, and hope. Hope is part of the fabric of everyday life.”
On nearby Bellenden Road, a bohemian haven of delis, restaurants and independent art galleries, Isabelle Alaya, who came to the UK from France seven years ago, is working in her Melange chocolate shop and café. Her new apprentice, Mamadu Tyson, 17, says: “I understand why they are doing it, because they want the anarchy, something to do in the summer holidays, and some want free phones and clothes. I don’t see the appeal, but I do see the reason.”
Lindsay Johns, a writer and broadcaster who volunteers as a youth mentor, says: “It is tempting to be depressed but I am an optimist and I think we can overcome this. People are fed up with all the negative things they hear about Peckham. Things do happen here. There are a lot of stabbings, gang shootings. Maybe the Peace Wall, the positive messages of community spirit, is in response to that.”
The late afternoon sun is shining on CodFellas on Bellenden Road, and three riot officers from North Wales Police, among 10,000 brought from outside the capital, are waiting outside for fish and chips before their break ends. A man crosses the street to ask: “Are you Welsh police?” North Wales, confirms one of the officers. The man laughs. “We’re used to seeing you on Traffic Cops,” he says. “But, cheers, mate. Good to see you around.”
One of the officers says later: “For the past 20 years I’ve been in the police, no one has ever said thank you. In the past week, down here, everyone has said it. People in cars have been beeping their horns, thumbs up, at us.”
Peckham may not be transformed overnight, but, ironically, its image may have been improved in the aftermath of the rioting. The Peace Wall – which will be put on permanent display at the local library – suggests that not only will Peckham bounce back from the riots, it will be reborn – not just in bright yellow and pink Post-It messages but with a community thrown closer together.
Jane Merrick
I think Starkey was wrong. He certainly chose his words wrongly, at least. In my opinion the accurate state of affairs was seemingly, inadvertantly, reached right near the end of that interview and swiftly left behind as they continued to debate and argue.
In my opinion that accurate state of affairs (that I think Starkey was trying but failing to suggest) is that “gang culture” is the real problem, not “black culture”. Clearly “black culture” is quite a derisive term; there is no such thing. There are probably as many different and disparate cultures across the black world, as there are across the western white and eastern asian worlds. To use the term “black culture” in such an ecompassing manner for society’s ill is inflammatory and ill-judged.
But it may be fair to conclude that gang culture arose from black communities in the inner cities and that is why people, wrongly, call it “black culture”. And it’s probably the point that Starkey was trying to make when he said that “the whites have become black”, when he should have in fact said “the whites have become gangsters”.
I think he was hoping for a sound bite with powerful rhetoric. He failed dismally.
I find these kinds of debates incredibly frustrating, because if you read back a transcript, you’d probably see that less than 10% of sentences are ever completed without being loudly interupted. Even questions and counter-questions are rarely ever permitted to be asked before someone is shouting at the implication of the question that has yet to be finished. Young Voters’ Question Time the other evening was the worst case of this. Everybody is united in saying that one of the main problems is that no-one listens to the youth, and yet there they are not listening to each other when given a stage on national TV.
Gangs in our inner cities are of all races and ethnicities, but it’s a convenient code people use to vent their prejudice against blacks (mostly people who never go anywhere near inner cities and don’t know what they’re talking about – like Starkey). Secondly, plenty of those taking part may well have been gang members or linked to gangs, but to say that gang bosses organised it, as people do, doesn’t make sense: the last thing they want is for a huge police backlash (Cameron’s “all-out war on gangs”), which will damage business and make their money-making activities much more difficult.
We were lucky to have my son and his girlfriend staying here during and after the riots. They work in the thick of it in Birmingham. In fact his studios are a sort of neutral ground for some gang members, who go there to get away from it all into music, plus during the day they’re used by organisations with groups of young offenders or kids on referral orders, so he spends a lot of time dealing with them. She has her own take on it all, having grown up with, and still frequently having to deal with all that negative racial stereotyping. So a lot of fascinating discussion, and much ribaldry and scorn at public pronouncements from the great and the good on telly.
On the live television debates with real people: I agree they’re usually just annoying. It must be a fantastically difficult format to host or moderate or whatever the word is. I was impressed with one Krishnan Guru-Murthy led on a channel 4 programme the other day: unusually, quite a lot of illuminating and useful points were made.
Meanwhile, a fine example of the importance to national security of intercepting BlackBerry messages, which Cameron’s making such a thing about after the riots:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/aug/15/essex-water-fight-blackberry-messenger
Charged under the Serious Crime Act, no less, for planning a water fight.
Quite. They’re behaving like tinpot dictators do when they face any sort of challenge – clamp down, lock ’em up and the problem will go away. Insanity.
Someone’s been sent to prison for 4 years for sending out an invitation to riot the next day on his FB page. Drunk, and no one turned up – I guess they knew it was a joke. As well as the guy sentenced to 6 months for nicking a bottle of water, and someone else told they’ll be going to prison for helping himself to an ice-cream cone. Magistrates seem to be going batshit crazy. It’s fair enough to give serious sentences to people who actually were inciting to riot and mayhem, and meaning it and carrying it out – setting fire to buildings and so on – but people who are just caught up on the fringes of that sort of collective craziness?
Plus they’re talking about evicting from council housing whole families because their teenage son or daughter was out rioting and thieving (or nicking an ice cream on their way home). How the hell do they think any of this nonsense will help?
Meanwhile AFAIK not a single banker who ripped off millions (people and quid) has been sent to prison for any time at all, let alone 4 years.
What’s happening with the courts’ sentencing is very interesting. There’s now a lot of debate over whether they’ve been too harsh, as per the 4-year sentence for posting on Facebook (and then removing the post the following morning).
However, for many years the public has been decrying sentences for being too lenient, and so with the severity of the recent riots and the nationwide condemnation of the “chav scum” that were at the heart of it, it certainly looks like the courts are responsible for a knee-jerk reaction to the sentencing.But a valid point just made on LBC radio by a legal “expert” was that rarely do the general public know all of the details of a court case, but on the occasions where the details are later known, the opinion usually sways in favour of the sentencing being appropriate.
The truth is that there is a decay running right through Britain, and its remedy must be multifaceted. Political governance, social policies and public spending are a few of hot topics that are implicated in the rot that has set in, but another one of those facets must surely be very harsh sentencing to reflect a zero tolerance approach.
Cheers.
As usual I both agree and disagree with you, Lee.
I agree that we shouldn’t rely on partial news reports of trials, having not seen all the evidence as a jury does. (I’m guilty of that myself sometimes.) It doesn’t apply so much with summary decisions of magistrates in this context, since I don’t think they could have received background or psychiatric or social services reports in that time (knowing how slowly such wheels turn), so they were handing down these sentences on the bald facts of the cases, which would have been what the press is reporting. So it’s reasonable to conclude that a 6-month sentence for nipping into an already looted supermarket for some water because you’re thirsty on your way home from work and there’s no normally open shop nearby where you could pay for it is ridiculous in the extreme – if he’d been caught shoplifting something of much greater value, as a first offence, in normal circumstances, he probably would have been cautioned and nothing else. So why ruin the guy’s life for something so absurd? Same with the other cases we hear about: referral order to a kid for a packet of chewing gum, some sort of custodial sentence for the one with the ice-cream. So clearly knee-jerk nonsense and worse than useless.
The trouble with zero tolerance is that it allows no leeway for mitigating – or, for that matter, exacerbating – circumstances, so it may well be legal but it can never be just. And injustice, or perceived injustice, is one of the main factors that fuels such explosions of rage and despair. How can we pretend to be or aspire to be a tolerant society with self-evidently authoritarian and intolerant policies? It would inevitably be used to come down most harshly on the most deprived areas and people and give further excuses for abuses of stop and search practices, which cause so much distrust and hatred of the police, so it wouldn’t help at all in that respect either. It’s like the eternal campaigns against ‘welfare scroungers’ for cheating an extra fiver a week off the state. Can you see them imposing zero tolerance on tax evaders and big city fraudsters who cheat the state (collectively) out of billions every year?
Either we make a serious effort to return to the concept of policing by consent, which is how our system is supposed to work, or we let the hangers and floggers have their way and carry on further down the road to becoming a police state of cameras and snitches and curfews of whole areas and all our private communications being intercepted. This is where we have to be grateful to the civil libertarians on the Tory right and hope they’ll rein in the worst of the control-freak instincts of the rest of the party!
Here’s something to warm ROB’s heart: a quick summary of earlier moral panics (thanks, Johnny FF):
http://www.economist.com/blogs/bagehot/2011/08/civil-disorder-and-looting-hits-britain-0
I think you’re both failing to account for the reality of history.
“Decay” implies that things were once better. When?
“Return to the concept of policing by consent” – When did that ever happen?
That article from the Economist is spot-fucking-on.
These are bold claims, amounting to a thesis that Britain has been wrecked and transformed from a familiar, law-abiding spot to an alien hell hole in just three or four decades. But here is an odd thing, surely: go back precisely three decades and you get to the summer of 1981, scene of some of the nastiest riots in modern British history, when racially charged violence saw tracts of Brixton in south London and Toxteth in Liverpool burn for days.
It’s true, so many of us little Englanders harp back to the halcyon days when children had respect for their elders and the world was a rosy place where everybody rubbed along nicely and the rules were to be abided by.
We attribute this sentimental recollection to the long lost ability to give our kids a clip round the ear when they went astray. Kids were afraid of the police back then, as they were of school teachers. My own father took his belt to me on more than one occasion for my transgressions, and I was once “slippered” by a teacher for laughing at another teacher. I was 9 years old at the time, and yet, you’re probably right – elsewhere in the country, crimes were being committed just as they always had been.These days, kids can do almost anything they please without fear of punishment. In fact only a little while ago the police were instructed to not arrest anybody for merely swearing at them. Up and down the land, horrible little thugs were wringing their hands with glee, knowing they could go and score some major kudos points in fornt of their peers, simply for walking up to a local bobby and calling him a thick C***. What great sport!
The reality of history is that there has always been trouble. That goes back to the earliest civilisations. But what’s changed is the backdrop, and what powers exist (or not) to have anything done about it.
Because kids have been swaggering around for the last decade knowing that they can largely behave as they wish with impunity, at home, school or on the streets, the regular people in our scociety are now overjoyed to see the little bastards getting dealt some heavy retribution. Most of us are experiencing feelings borne out of not much more than vindictiveness, it’s true.
I was a delinquent when I was 13/14, and I was rounded up, placed in front of the juvenile courts and only very narrowly avoided a spell in borstal. It put the fear of God into me, and I corrected my ways, knuckled down at school and made a success of myself.
I should feel empathy for our current crop of delinquents, but I don’t because there’s a undercurrent of hostility in their crimes, which wasn’t the case when I was a kid. My crimes and the crimes of my peers were led by mischief, lack of direction, and respect not yet learned of others; whereas the kids in our cities now seem to be commiting crimes out of hatred and resentment of people they don’t even know. Old men trying to put out fires started by these people have been attacked and in some cases hospitalised or worse. A Malaysian student with a broken jaw and heavily bleeding was helped to his feet by one little bastard who then proceeded to ransack his belongings with his mates and calmy swaggered away with his new plunder. And a fella on a scooter was unceremoniously knocked to the ground and dragged away from his scooter so that another little wanker could jump on it and ride away on it, no doubt to just crash and destroy it a hundred yards down the road.These riots have been such enormous news in the UK mostly because of the nature of the perpetrators. It wasn’t blacks against the police, and it wasn’t the great unwashed against the system… It was marauding masses of youth enjoying anarchy for the sake of it, in the belief that there would be no repercussions. They had every reason to believe that, but they were wrong and the rest of us normal folk are enjoying that.
Oh I think we both accept there’ve always been riots, periodically, usually for much the same reasons, and nearly always followed by draconian sentences, which don’t address the underlying problems, whether they are direct causes or not, but merely push it all under again for a few years, until the pressure builds up too much again and there’s another explosion.
It would be nice if, for once, they could be a bit more sensible about it. And this time it’s particularly galling to watch politicians who’ve been caught out as thieving bastards themselves baying for blood. Which brings us to the other great English disease: rank hypocrisy.
John Harris has a good piece on that today (and the eternal cycle of riots):
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/18/looters-rioters-mpsNo disrespect to my cousins but its a point.
Try something like that in my neck of the woods and the little ingrate immigrants would be riddled with bullet holes about 10 seconds after they started trying to destroy peoples property.
Remember, in my hometown local bar they had an archery competition INSIDE the bar on deer heads.
Something like that could almost put deer season out of business!
@Jefe wrote:
the little ingrate immigrants
?? What are you talking about? It wasn’t an immigrant vs locals thing.
It looks as if the judges who put so many minors on remand after the riots may have put Britain in breach of the UK convention on the rights of children:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/oct/09/unicef-britain-riots-children-jailed
London could have always tried the Vancouver method, of not charging anyone:
The wheels of justice move so slowly that most of the rioters have likely left the country by now. How’s that for making sure the police are revered and respected?
Yes, make sure to protect the rights of the children as they burn your country.
Refer back to my post about the only country with a 2nd Amendment like ours and see what happens.
While you’re at it, look up the Castle Doctrine and Threshold Defense. I guarantee you won’t find it next to the Commission on Children who burn and destroy property laws.
Who is the troll, Jefe? ROB, Lee and I (and latterly SRR) were having a civilised discussion. You intervened to salivate, irrelevantly, about riddling “little ingrate Immigrants” with bullet holes.
And FYI your Castle Doctrine is based on English common law. The difference is that in the UK the householder is allowed to use “proportionate force” in defence of his/her life and property rather than “riddle anyone with bullet holes” for so much as crossing the threshold. It may be a strange concept to you, but we think that human life is more valuable than property.
And while we’re on legal matters, I’d be grateful if you ceased your repeated theft of my image in the other place. Anyway, it’s pretty damn stupid now as I don’t post there any longer.
Here’s a long piece about some of the costs to some young people who got only peripherally involved yet were severely punished as part of the blanket policy of high “deterrent” sentences:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/nov/25/england-riots-personal-cost-youngsters-sentenced?INTCMP=SRCHStupid, counterproductive, populist appeasement of the public demand for revenge, it seems to me.
I fully back the harsh sentencing, as it will send out a very clear message to the minldess idiots that think rioting is good fun that they’ll get royally fucked by the courts if they indulge; even for such a minor transgression as stealing a rizla paper.
Fuck ’em. They won’t be so stupid next time. I bet the people whose properties were attacked, or those that had loved ones killed, aren’t feeling pity for them, and it’s their opinions that matter above anyone else’s.And if you must pity people for lacking the basic intelligence to not be sheep, then blame the ones that started the riots and not the courts for dealing with it exceptionally swiftly and efficiently.
I love it on this soap box!
:mrgreen:
@Lee wrote:
I love it on this soap box!
Fun, isn’t it? You should do it more often.
How about punishing the parents (and siblings) by evicting them from their council housing? Approve of that too?
In London, Maria Ramirez (not her real name) is also unhappy about the treatment her 18-year-old son received at the hands of the police, but in her case the consequences of his involvement in the riots are complicating life for the whole family. Five days after he was arrested (empty-handed) inside the already-looted Currys in Clapham, she finally managed to see her son in Feltham prison and young offender institution. This was her first experience of being inside a prison, as it was for him, and she was so dismayed to see him there that she collapsed outside the visiting room as she left the building.
“I love my son so much and seeing your child in those circumstances… I was trying to be strong; I didn’t want anyone to see me being weak, and then I fainted,” she says.
When she arrived back at her flat in Wandsworth that afternoon, she found an eviction notice from the council. In the days following the riots, a number of councils said they would be seeking to evict council tenants from their property if anyone living there was found guilty of participating in the riots. It was at the height of popular outrage, and government ministers were also floating the idea of cutting rioters’ benefits.
Maria was the first person to be served with an eviction notice in connection with the riots, and her case triggered an explosion of outrage, from human rights campaigners and politicians, who pointed out that this went against a basic tenet of justice; instead of the individual taking responsibility, the whole family was being given a collective punishment.
The tenancy conditions that have been breached are extremely broad, and the letter, which explained the grounds on which the housing authority was seeking to evict her, highlighted, among other things, a clause stating: “You, your lodgers, friends, relatives, visitors and any other person living in the property must not… do anything which interferes with the peace, comfort or convenience of other people living in the borough of Wandsworth and/or the local area.”
“What about the people who fire fireworks out of the windows?” Maria says when I meet her at her flat on a rainy evening a few days after bonfire night. “If it was like that, all the flats here would be empty.”
If Wandsworth hoped to make an example of Maria’s family, they seem to have chosen an unfortunate target. Maria is recognised by her neighbours and local charities as an excellent member of the community. She works as a clerical officer in a central London hospital, and in her spare time she has helped create a support group for vulnerable single mothers in the area, works to help women who have been the victims of domestic violence and is an active member of the local church. She is tremendously articulate and enraged, and did not shrink, in a court-steps television interview, from describing the council as “fascists” who were resorting to “dictatorship-like” behaviour.
Should the council decide to go ahead with the eviction, Maria and her eight-year-old daughter will become homeless, and it’s not clear where or how they would be rehoused, or precisely who thinks this would be a constructive development.
It sounds as if her son, Samuel (not his real name), was also a bit stupid during the London riots, but it also sounds as if he has had rough treatment from the authorities (although, due to an ongoing court case, it’s not possible to outline why). Maria says she had expressly forbidden him to go out that night but, apparently, he got a call from a friend at around 10pm, asking him to come and escort her back from Clapham because she was scared by the erupting violence. Maria didn’t know he’d slipped out. “He always has to be the superhero,” she says.
She knew there was trouble nearby because from a window upstairs she could see people driving their cars back from the shopping area and unloading the things they’d looted. At 3am, she was telephoned by a police officer who told her that her son was in hospital, somehow hurt during the arrest. She wasn’t given the name of the hospital and was told she couldn’t visit him.
“My son has never been arrested, never been in a fight, never been in trouble at school, never been in any trouble whatsoever. My son is well educated, but he was stupid and naive that night.” He told her later that he went into Currys to look around, but didn’t take anything. He pleaded guilty this month to burglary, on the grounds that he was in the building, even though he stole nothing. He pleaded not guilty to a violent disorder charge, which will be heard in December. He was due to start a fine arts course in Bournemouth in September, but the ongoing legal proceedings mean he has given up the place.
Maria describes feeling as if she’s “in a bubble”, watching terrible things happen to herself from a distance. She tries to be philosophical about the prospect of losing her home. “I think of people who have lived through tsunamis and have an utterly hard time. I think, this is only things. It is only a home. I haven’t lost my marbles.” She stops because she is beginning to cry and is finding it hard to speak.
Her cat joins us in the kitchen, sits down on my notepad and purrs. Next door in the warm sitting room, her daughter is lying on the floor, surrounded by school books, happily getting on with her homework. Over the four years they’ve been here, they’ve made this flat into a secure and comfortable family home, and it’s obvious it would be painful to leave. Maria has not told her daughter about the eviction proceedings.
“I’m very angry, disgusted by the government,” she says when she recovers herself. “I don’t want to lose my home,” “They don’t evict the rapists’ families, do they? It should be logical. They did it without checking anything about whether my son had previous convictions or if there had been any complaints against the family. They should have checked about my involvement in the estate, and my charity work.”
“They can’t evict someone who owns their own home. As if my suffering for what my son is doing is not enough, they have to rub it in, punishing us for being poor.”
Emma Norton, legal officer with the human rights organisation Liberty, which will act for Maria against the eviction order, says, “No one is trying to excuse the terrible lawlessness that took place, but that’s a matter for the criminal justice system, not the housing authorities. If Maria was living in a privately rented flat or had managed to scrape together enough money for a deposit on a flat, she wouldn’t be facing this morally reprehensible bullying behaviour from the council.”
But Charlie Masson-Smith, a spokesman for Wandsworth council, said the council would base its decision on the outcome of her son’s case next month. He said the fact that Maria and her young daughter had done nothing wrong themselves was irrelevant. “We need parents to show some parental responsibility,” he said. “There is no suggestion that she would be homeless if she were to be evicted. She can go along and rent in the private sector. The council’s responsibilities to sort out her housing would cease.”
I used to live in Wandsworth. Shocking council. Note that last sentence. Typical: bastards. Did she fail to show parental responsibility when she had “expressly forbidden him to go out that night”? I know one of my sons used to sneak out late at night when I had “expressly forbidden” him, at much younger than 18, and not often to rescue damsels in distress either. ;) Not always possible to stop them; you can’t stay awake all night. Only last night he (now in his 30s) was regaling us with some of the things that he got up to and we’d never known about. There but for the grace of …
Quite right, too. I don’t agree with council houses. You want a house; get a job and earn enough money to buy or rent your own.
If you want to get a better house, pay attention at school and keep striving to better yourself once you’ve left school.I don’t enjoy the fact that I’m required by law to pay taxes that are partly used to house people that are unwilling to better themselves.
I feel very controversial today.
Ha! Single mother, 2 children, working as a clerical officer: you think she can afford to buy, or even rent, a decent flat in Wandsworth? Where else are clerical officers and the like supposed to live if not council housing? Giving back to the community too – how’s Dave’s big society supposed to work without people like her, so generous with her time. She wouldn’t have that time if she was slaving away at evening classes to get a slightly better (and probably non-existent) job.
Enough for you to get your controversialist teeth into there?
@Lee wrote:
Quite right, too. I don’t agree with council houses. You want a house; get a job and earn enough money to buy or rent your own.
If you want to get a better house, pay attention at school and keep striving to better yourself once you’ve left school.I don’t enjoy the fact that I’m required by law to pay taxes that are partly used to house people that are unwilling to better themselves.
Then I guess it’s lucky for the UK that you’ll never be asked by any side of politics to form policy. ;)
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