Britain’s Riots: A Society In Denial Of The Burning Issues

[Trudy]

by Finian Cunningham

 

Global Research, August 9, 2011

 

Britain saw its third consecutive night of widespread burning of properties and looting as riot police failed to contain gangs of masked youths marauding several parts of the capital, London.   There were reports too of violence fanning out to other cities across Britain. And some commentators were even suggesting that the British Army might have to be redeployed from Northern Ireland to help restore order. Armoured police vehicles are now patrolling London streets amid calls in the media for the use of water cannons and plastic bullets.   Politicians, police chiefs and the media have reacted to the chaos by labelling it as the result of “mindless criminality” that has seemingly sprung from nowhere. ‘The Rule of the Mob’ declared the rightwing Daily Telegraph. ‘Mob Rule’ is how the more liberal Independent put it.   Home Secretary Theresa May stridently denounced “unacceptable thuggery”. London Metropolitan Police Commissioner Tim Godwin vowed that culprits would be tracked down and brought before the courts. He appealed to Londoners to identify individuals caught on CCTV and amateur video footage.   Nearly 500 arrests have been made so far and police numbers in the capital have been tripled overnight to 16,000, with officers being drawn in from other parts of the country.   Although the arson attacks on commercial and residential premises do have an element of criminal spontaneity by disparate groups of youths, it is simply delusional for Britain’s political leaders, police forces and the media to claim that it is all a matter of law and order.   The burning issues that need to be addressed to explain the outburst of arson, looting and rioting are endemic racism endured by Britain’s black community and, more generally, the deepening poverty that is increasingly racking British society.   Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron cut short his summer holiday in Italy by flying home to London to hold a special “emergency security” meeting with other Cabinet members.   Speaking outside Downing Street today and visibly vexed by the unfolding chaos, Cameron condemned “pure and simple criminality that must be defeated”. The government, he said, stands with “all law-abiding citizens”.   Opposition Labour party leader Ed Milliband and the Conservative Mayor of London Boris Johnson are also making hasty returns to the capital from abroad to deal with a crisis that seems to be spiralling out of control. The British Parliament is to be recalled from its summer recess later this week so that “all parliamentarians can stand to together” to face down the sudden disorder.   The disturbances – the worst in almost 30 years – began last Saturday in the rundown north London inner-city area of Tottenham. That followed the shooting dead two days earlier of a young black man by police officers.   Mark Duggan was fatally shot by an armed police unit as he sat in his car. Police claimed that the man was threatening to use a gun. However, family and friends of the 29-year-old victim strongly denied that he was armed or involved in any criminal activity. The death is the subject of a police inquiry, but it has emerged that only two shots were fired in the incident, both by police officers.   Sinisterly, BBC news reports on the killing have invariably showed what appeared to be a family photo of Duggan taken before his death in which he is seen holding up his hand up in mock gangster style.   Angered by what they saw as a gratuitous police shooting and lack of immediate answers from authorities, the mixed black and white community in Tottenham held a vigil for the victim on Saturday. With tensions running high in the area, the peaceful rally turned into a riot against police, and several properties, including police cars, were attacked and set alight.   Since then, similar disturbances have now spread to other parts of the capital, including Peckham, Brixton, Hackney, Lewisham and Clapham. A Sony factory was reduced to a charred shell in Enfield in north London. In the outer south London district of Croydon – several miles from Tottenham – there was a huge blaze last night after a large commercial property was torched. Even the affluent, leafy borough of Ealing in west London saw upmarket boutiques and residences attacked and destroyed by fire.   The distraught owner of the razed family business in Croydon struggled to comprehend why his 150-year-old furniture shop had been targeted. Nevertheless his few words of disbelief had a ring of truth that the politicians and media commentators seem oblivious to. “There must be something deeply wrong about the [political] system,” he said.   Police forces are seen to be struggling to contain the upsurge in street violence, with groups of youths appearing to go on the rampage at will, breaking into shop fronts and stealing goods. A real fear among the authorities is the spreading of disorder and violence to other cities, with reports emerging of similar disturbances in the centre of Birmingham in the British midlands, and further north in Nottingham, Liverpool and Manchester.   Inner-city deprived black communities in Britain complain of routine heavy-handed policing that is openly racist. Community leaders tell of aggressive stop-and-search methods by police that target black youths. The community leaders say that racist policing is as bad as it was during the 1980s when riots broke out in 1985 after a black woman, Cynthia Jarrett, died in a police raid on her home in Broadwater Farm, London.   In the latest spate of violence – on a much greater scale than in the 1980s – there is no suggestion that subsequent street disturbances to the initial Tottenham riots are racially motivated. The growing number of areas and youths involved in arson, rioting and looting do not appear to be driven merely out of solidarity for the young black victim of police violence last week, although that may be a factor for some. Many of the disturbances in London and elsewhere seem to be caused by white and black youths together and separately.   But there is one common factor in all of this that the politicians and media are studiously ignoring: the massive poverty, unemployment and social deprivation that are now the lot for so many of Britain’s communities.   Britain’s social decay has been seething over several decades, overseen by Conservative and Labour governments alike. As with other European countries and the United States, the social fabric of Britain has been torn asunder by economic policies that have deliberately widened the gap between rich and poor.   The collapse of manufacturing bases, the spawning of low-paid menial jobs, unemployment and cuts in public services and facilities have all been accompanied by systematic lowering of taxation on the rich elite. Britain’s national debt, as with that of the Europe and the US, can be attributed in large part to decades of pursuing neoliberal policies of prosperity for the rich and austerity for the poor – the burden of which is felt most keenly in inner-city neighbourhoods.   David Cameron’s Conservative-Liberal Coalition government has greatly magnified this debt burden on the poor with its swingeing austerity cuts since coming to office last year. Ironically, only days before the latest burnings and riots, British government spokesmen were congratulating themselves for “making the right decision” in driving through crippling economic austerity measures that have so far spared the United Kingdom from the overt fiscal woes seen elsewhere in Europe.   But as thousands of Britain’s youths now lash out at symbols of authority/austerity, breaking into shops to loot clothes and other consumer goods that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford, the social eruption may be just a sign of even greater woes to come for the Disunited Kingdom.   http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=25946

 

[Simmy]

Years of liberal dogma have spawned a generation of amoral, uneducated, welfare dependent, brutalised youngsters

by Max Hastings

 

A few weeks after the U.S. city of Detroit was ravaged by 1967 race riots in which 43 people died, I was shown around the wrecked areas by a black  reporter named Joe Strickland.

He said: ‘Don’t you believe all that stuff people here are giving media folk about how sorry they are about what happened. When they talk to each other, they say: “It was a great fire, man!” ’

I am sure that is what many of the young rioters, black and white, who have burned and looted in England through the past few shocking nights think today.

It was fun. It made life interesting. It got people to notice them. As a girl looter told a BBC reporter, it showed ‘the rich’ and the police that ‘we can do what we like’.

If you live a normal life of absolute futility, which we can assume most of this week’s rioters do, excitement of any kind is welcome. The people who wrecked swathes of property, burned vehicles and terrorised communities have no moral compass to make them susceptible to guilt or shame.

Most have no jobs to go to or exams they might pass. They know no family role models, for most live in homes in which the father is unemployed, or from which he has decamped.

They are illiterate and innumerate, beyond maybe some dexterity with computer games and BlackBerries.

They are essentially wild beasts. I use that phrase advisedly, because it seems appropriate to young people bereft of the discipline that might make them employable; of the conscience that distinguishes between right and wrong.

They respond only to instinctive animal impulses — to eat and drink, have sex, seize or destroy the accessible property of others.

Their behaviour on the streets resembled that of the polar bear which attacked a Norwegian tourist camp last week. They were doing what came naturally and, unlike the bear, no one even shot them for it.

A former London police chief spoke a few years ago about the ‘feral children’ on his patch — another way of describing the same reality.

The depressing truth is that at the bottom of our society is a layer of young people with no skills, education, values or aspirations. They do not have what most of us would call ‘lives’: they simply exist.

Nobody has ever dared suggest to them that they need feel any allegiance to anything, least of all Britain or their community. They do not watch royal weddings or notice Test matches or take pride in being Londoners or Scousers or Brummies.

Not only do they know nothing of Britain’s past, they care nothing for its present.

They have their being only in video games and street-fights, casual drug use and crime, sometimes petty, sometimes serious.

The notions of doing a nine-to-five job, marrying and sticking with a wife and kids, taking up DIY or learning to read properly, are beyond their imaginations.

Last week, I met a charity worker who is trying to help a teenage girl in East London to get a life for herself. There is a difficulty, however: ‘Her mother wants her to go on the game.’ My friend explained: ‘It’s the money, you know.’

An underclass has existed throughout history, which once endured appalling privation. Its spasmodic outbreaks of violence, especially in the early 19th century, frightened the ruling classes.

Its frustrations and passions were kept at bay by force and draconian legal sanctions, foremost among them capital punishment and transportation to the colonies.

Today, those at the bottom of society behave no better than their forebears, but the welfare state has relieved them from hunger and real want.

When social surveys speak of ‘deprivation’ and ‘poverty’, this is entirely relative. Meanwhile, sanctions for wrongdoing have largely vanished.

When Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith recently urged employers to take on more British workers and fewer migrants, he was greeted with a hoarse laugh.

Every firm in the land knows that an East European — for instance — will, first, bother to turn up; second, work harder; and third, be better-educated than his or her British counterpart.Who do we blame for this state of affairs?

Ken Livingstone, contemptible as ever, declares the riots to be a result of the Government’s spending cuts. This recalls the remarks of the then leader of Lambeth Council, ‘Red Ted’ Knight, who said after the 1981 Brixton riots that the police in his borough ‘amounted to an army of occupation’.

But it will not do for a moment to claim the rioters’ behaviour reflects deprived circumstances or police persecution.

Of course it is true that few have jobs, learn anything useful at school, live in decent homes, eat meals at regular hours or feel loyalty to anything beyond their local gang.

This is not, however, because they are victims of mistreatment or neglect.

It is because it is fantastically hard to help such people, young or old, without imposing a measure of compulsion  which modern society finds  unacceptable. These kids are what they are because nobody makes them be anything  different or better.

A key factor in delinquency is lack of effective sanctions to deter it. From an early stage, feral children discover that they can bully fellow pupils at school, shout abuse at people in the streets, urinate outside pubs, hurl litter from car windows, play car radios at deafening volumes, and, indeed, commit casual assaults with only a negligible prospect of facing rebuke, far less retribution.

John Stuart Mill wrote in his great 1859 essay On Liberty: ‘The liberty of the individual must be thus far limited; he must not make himself a nuisance to other people.’ 

Yet every day up and down the land, this vital principle of civilised societies is breached with impunity.

Anyone who reproaches a child, far less an adult, for discarding rubbish, making a racket, committing vandalism or driving unsociably will receive in return a torrent of obscenities, if not violence.

So who is to blame? The breakdown of families, the pernicious promotion of single motherhood as a desirable state, the decline of domestic life so that even shared meals are a rarity, have all contributed importantly to the condition of the young underclass.

The social engineering industry unites to claim that the conventional template of family life is no longer valid.

And what of the schools? I  do not think they can be blamed for the creation of a grotesquely self-indulgent, non-judgmental culture.

This has ultimately been sanctioned by Parliament, which refuses to accept, for instance, that children are more likely to prosper with two parents than with one, and that the dependency culture is a tragedy for those who receive something for nothing.

The judiciary colludes with social services and infinitely ingenious lawyers to assert the primacy of the rights of the criminal and aggressor over those of law-abiding citizens, especially if a young offender is involved.

The police, in recent years, have developed a reputation for ignoring yobbery and bullying, or even for taking the yobs’ side against complainants.

‘The problem,’ said Bill Pitt, the former head of Manchester’s Nuisance Strategy Unit, ‘is that the law appears to be there to protect the rights of the perpetrator, and does not support the victim.’

Police regularly arrest householders who are deemed to have taken ‘disproportionate’ action to protect themselves and their property from burglars or intruders. The message goes out that criminals have little to fear from ‘the feds’.

Figures published earlier this month show that a majority of ‘lesser’ crimes — which include burglary and car theft, and which cause acute distress to their victims — are never investigated, because forces think it so unlikely they will catch the perpetrators.

How do you inculcate values in a child whose only role model is footballer Wayne Rooney — a man who is bereft of the most meagre human graces?

How do you persuade children to renounce bad language when they hear little else from stars on the BBC?

A teacher, Francis Gilbert, wrote five years ago in his book Yob Nation: ‘The public feels it no longer has the right to interfere.’

Discussing the difficulties of imposing sanctions for misbehaviour or idleness at school, he described the case of a girl pupil he scolded for missing all her homework deadlines.

The youngster’s mother, a social worker, telephoned him and said: ‘Threatening to throw my daughter off the A-level course because she hasn’t done some work is tantamount to psychological abuse, and there is legislation which prevents these sorts of threats.

‘I believe you are trying to harm my child’s mental well-being, and may well take steps . . . if you are not careful.’

That story rings horribly true. It reflects a society in which teachers have been deprived of their traditional right to arbitrate pupils’ behaviour. Denied power, most find it hard to sustain respect, never mind control.

I never enjoyed school, but, like most children until very recent times, did the work because I knew I would be punished if I did not. It would never have occurred to my parents not to uphold my  teachers’ authority. This might have been unfair to some pupils, but it was the way schools functioned for centuries, until the advent of crazy ‘pupil rights’.

I recently received a letter from a teacher who worked in a county’s pupil referral unit, describing appalling difficulties in enforcing discipline. Her only weapon, she said, was the right to mark a disciplinary cross against a child’s name for misbehaviour.

Having repeatedly and vainly asked a 15-year-old to stop using obscene language, she said: ‘Fred, if you use language like that again, I’ll give you a cross.’

He replied: ‘Give me an effing cross, then!’ Eventually, she said: ‘Fred, you have three crosses now. You must miss your next break.’

He answered: ‘I’m not missing my break, I’m going for an effing fag!’ When she appealed to her manager, he said: ‘Well, the boy’s got a lot going on at home at  the moment. Don’t be too hard  on him.’

This is a story repeated daily in schools up and down the land.

A century ago, no child would have dared to use obscene language in class. Today, some use little else. It symbolises their contempt for manners and decency, and is often a foretaste of delinquency.

If a child lacks sufficient respect to address authority figures politely, and faces no penalty for failing to do so, then other forms of abuse — of property and person — come naturally.

So there we have it: a large, amoral, brutalised sub-culture of young British people who lack education because they have no will to learn, and skills which might make them employable. They are too idle to accept work waitressing or doing domestic labour, which is why almost all such jobs are filled by immigrants.

They have no code of values to dissuade them from behaving anti-socially or, indeed, criminally, and small chance of being punished if they do so.

They have no sense of responsibility for themselves, far less towards others, and look to no future beyond the next meal, sexual encounter or TV football game.

They are an absolute deadweight upon society, because they contribute nothing yet cost the taxpayer billions. Liberal opinion holds they are victims, because society has failed to provide them with opportunities to develop their potential.

Most of us would say this is nonsense. Rather, they are victims of a perverted social ethos, which elevates personal freedom to an absolute, and denies the underclass the discipline — tough love — which alone might enable some of its members to escape from the swamp of dependency in which they live.

Only education — together with politicians, judges, policemen and teachers with the courage to force feral humans to obey rules the rest of us have accepted all our lives — can provide a way forward and a way out for these people.

They are products of a culture which gives them so much unconditionally that they are let off learning how to become human beings. My dogs are better behaved and subscribe to a higher code of values than the young rioters of Tottenham, Hackney, Clapham and Birmingham.

Unless or until those who run Britain introduce incentives for decency and impose penalties for bestiality which are today entirely lacking, there will never be a shortage of young rioters and looters such as those of the past four nights, for whom their monstrous excesses were ‘a great fire, man’.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2024284/UK-riots-2011-Lib...

 

 

*p.s.: I don't agree 100% with his view, but this is to show non-brits how these kids are here. Sadly, it's true and only someone that lives here can attest to that.

[Trudy]

No Simmy don't blame it on the youth!! It is that people with your standards are thinking ohh it is all scum, it isn't. Maybe you don't have to live in poverty and need your food from the foodbank, well honey I have now for 2 years!!! And when I see a building from Sony on fire I shout HOORAY ...
It is all too blame on your goverm and the police ...
You don't shoot people in the head even if it is a drugsdealer, whom btw was sitting in his car when they shot him in the presence of his family :(
and let me tell you Simmy, it is here in Holland no other way, poor is poor ...

[Simmy]

Trudy, I live in a very tight budget.

I get no benefits from the government (and I wouldn't want them unless there was no other way) and I live in a tiny privately rented flat. At the end of the month, after rent, groceries and bills are paid there is very little left. Sometimes the bank account goes into negative. It is not poverty, but is very simple living. I have one vice: I love gadgets. I'd love to have an iphone or an ipad, but I can't afford them. Do I go out looting and burning things? No.

I have a teenage boy. He knows what he can have or not. Does he rebel when we tell them we can't afford something he asks? No, he understands. He is a very bright kid who goes to a school where 90% of his peers are from very well off families. He goes and visits them and comes back telling about the size of their houses, how nice, etc. He doesn't get bitter because he doesn't have the same. He says he will do his best in school and one day he might be able to afford those things, if that is what he wants.

I suppose you can only understand how certain teens are in the UK if you live here. I know these youths were neglected and deprived of love and care since before they were born. I feel sorry for them for this reason. But, I see other kids from the same kind of background that were able to turn their lives around somehow and don't act like that. Believe it or not there is support out there offered to them, unfortunately most don't want it! They want the 'easy' option. They don't want to finish school, they don't want to work, they want to sit at home the whole day, playing video games, smoking, drinking and that's it! They know the government is going to pay their rent, their bills and their food.

I am not pro-government and pro-police. I know they are all dirty and corrupted. The big guys, at least. but, in this case the evil came from the youths. the youths that destroyed small family business which took them a whole life to built; the youths that set flats on fire without caring if there was anyone inside; the youths that beat an old man unconscious and left him for dead because he was trying to stop a fire they've set on a building.

Regarding the shooting, I never thought shooting of the drug dealer was the right thing to do; I was just saying the guy wasn't a saint. I have no respect for drug dealers. I don't think they should be shot, but they should be put in prison for the rest of their evil life. I sincerely doubt the his family was with him Trudy. He was running from 'the feds' when he called (or texted) his fiance to say they were after him.

Trudy, I think we will never be on the same page on this particular subject...

[Gerd Ambranovic]

well, i can understand the "youth". Why should they go to work when there is "no Future". What for?? Look around and look at the world. I'd rather stay at home and get high, definetely when looking at the establishment that obviously does not give a sh** about the younger generation.

The so called kids have not the knowledge about the world/reality that we live in because no one told them and they have little to no education (that does not mean they are bad, they just don't know better). I am quite sure that they have been made so (bad education-system and the media telling them what to do and what not)

 

Just because some kids could make it out does not mean they all can. Or what would you say Simmy if I told you "it's your fault that you have not enought money for the stuff you'd like. You could have studied and worked harder. I know people who have gone from poor to rich on their own?". Surely this is not nice, but thats how you come across to me (please don't take it personally, I just wanna let you know how you sound to me).

 

Sometimes people just have no other choice and don't know a better way of going about a problem. Violence (from civilians) is always a cry for help!!

 

 

 

 

 

[Gerd Ambranovic]

just want to add that "we, the people" have to stand up and bring the establishment down. The French Revolution was a very bloody thing but very important for all of us. So "kids" go, show them fu*** authorities who the boss is  and who they are working for!!!!

[Trudy]

You've got that quite right!!! I look beyond what is given .... England has a devided population and there is more poor, and I mean really poor, then there is a middle class ... again it's a gap between rich and poor between being black and stand hold almost everyday by the police because of your skincolor... en being a white and be given the benefit of the doubt...

It's revolution time, and hey the muslims do it in a peacefull manner and we in the '' free '' west do it in a agressive manner, the veil of deception is fading away ... and we are taking back our constitutional civil right of Freedom !!!
And it happens all around the world :)))

[patrick]

Max Hastings is an English upper class twat, what the f''ck does he know about why the alienated working class and minority youth riot ?

[Trudy]

Yes Gerd all this what happens now is an eruption of the failing system of the so called  social live  for everyone ...

The index of  AEX or Nasdaq is more important to goverments then the well being of their population!!!

[Simmy]

"Or what would you say Simmy if I told you "it's your fault that you have not enought money for the stuff you'd like. You could have studied and worked harder. I know people who have gone from poor to rich on their own?". Surely this is not nice, but thats how you come across to me (please don't take it personally, I just wanna let you know how you sound to me)."

 

Gerd, If I didn't have enough money because I didn't study or worked harder, it would be my fault indeed!

In my case, I did study a lot and I did work all my adult life while I was living in my birth country. Unfortunately my life turned upside down when I decided to move to the UK (circumstances which I won't be discussing) and it makes things much more difficult for me, jobwise. As it was my choice to move I always assumed the responsibility and the consequences of this choice, so yes, it is my fault. Absolutely! Also, I'm not complaining I don't have enough money to buy everything I want. I don't really care because they are just things, they are not really important in my life. I just said that earlier to show that not having everything you want is no reason for rioting.

[Gerd Ambranovic]

Ok simmy, thanks for answering :)
But i think they don't do it just for iphones or new shoes....there is surely more behind it.

[Ullan]

I work sixteen hours each day.

I work weekends, week days and every day that my employer demands of me.

I get paid well for what I do, but in this city that amounts to nothing. Prices are determined by those who earn my annual wage monthly.

Everything I have, I had to work for, day and night, and I'm proud to call it mine. I've earned it, all of it, by the strength of my back and the sweat of my brow (to borrow an americanism).

 

Two doors away from me lives someone who has never worked in his entire life. 'Benefits' mean that he can live in a house the size of mine for free, and has all his bills paid for him. He even has enough left to buy a new car and all the high tech gadgetry he could possibly want. He earned none of it, it's been given to him.

 

For the past four days, he's been out looting, taking from small shop owners that can barely afford to stay open in these hard times, and who work day and night to stay afloat. Wherever he and his ilk pass, they leave nothing but destruction, damages which I will have to pay for, and shattered lives as shop owners fall into destitution. To rebuke him for this behavior is to invite a petrol bomb through the window.

 

I don't advocate the use of rubber bullets. I do, however, feel that the water cannon is a good non-damaging measure to cool off a crowd, with the added bonus that everything they've looted will be destroyed by water so they do not profit from their criminal trespass.

 

As for me... I will finally admit this much: I have spent my youth, my adolescence and my most active years in service to my country. I have always endeavoured to keep people safe, so that they'd never have to feel afraid in their own homes, or see their lives ruined by a lawless mob. I have equally dedicated my life to end oppression in the guise of government, policing and erosive legislation. When I see my own city burn, I feel like I've failed.

 

There's two opinions I hear, polar opposites, among the community here. One side says they'll keep on looting until they're caught, the other says they'll take back their streets with fire and steel. I sit and watch my own door, because that is all I can do anymore.

 

It's easy to have an opinion on these matters when you're far away. It's a whole different matter when your city burns around you.

[Trudy]

Nobody here has the feeling of given easy an opinion, and in heart we are not far away ... and indeed when your safe world is about to crumbling down because of inferior behavior, you must not only watch your front door but you better watch your back when you are outside in that jungle!!

But again it is what I was saying...  

all this what happens now is an eruption of the failing system of the so called  social live  for everyone ... and yes even your scum neighboor is a victim of the society where you work so hard for!!!