There should have been a curfew in London and across England last night. There is no excuse for the kind of violence we have seen.
I would like to believe the violence is a political reaction to quite hapless, greedy-rich “government” – but it isn’t in any direct manner. This is nopolitics Britain.
The facts are pretty clear – most of the trouble is being done by those labeled ‘mindless, criminal and violent’. It’s doubtful this is all these people are, though the behaviour is that of scum. Cops clearly could not cope with the outbreak of this mindless, criminal, violent group – which rather suggests they are not normally this, leaving open the question of what the tilting point was. Many of us have suffered because the police don’t take the goings on of these bastards seriously enough and write matters down as antisocial behavior.
Police clearly failed to control anything much and Gadget is claiming officers were talking about the Tomlinson case as an excuse, fearing they would ‘become Harwood’ if they got stuck in. If this is true our officers have sunk to a new low. Mr. Tomlinson was subject to an unnecessary attack by a clod (Harwood) in front of other officers who should have stopped him. If police really see the Tomlinson incident in this light (most police blogs don’t) they need disabusing and re-training or replacement. I don’t believe it, though just as the scum out on our streets are a minority, there is no doubt a scum minority in the police who have the fascist mentality on brutality.
We don’t yet know who Mr. Duggan was, but it is now emerging he was shot twice and not involved in any exchange of fire with police. There is lots about in the press about Mr. Duggan – my reading left me with the impression he was a hood. This kind of information always seems to get out well ahead of facts, and often turns out to be wrong. This has been subject of considerable academic scrutiny, and it’s accepted that police get the ‘misinformation in first’ – the Rodney King beating is the classic example.
I know how difficult armed duty is (and even worse what unarmed duty feels like when you expect the opposition to be armed – the trauma lingers) and I also know the public has little clue. Instead of the cosy dinners with media bosses and misinformation tactics there should be better education of what being armed means and what police have to deal with – combined with honesty about incidents (this latter point requires change in the legal system). There is no reason interim statements could not be made quickly and not just of the form ‘we can’t say anything because there may be a court case – no reason, but there is law which is out of date.
There is no ideology behind the riots (unless a sect has found ways to influence and/or take advantage the ‘mindlessness’ – some of the fires are suspicious in this respect). But this doesn’t mean some tragedy in our society is not responsible. Most of the lackwits I’ve seen couldn’t get out of bed without being led by the nose.
If I get a message that a few mates are meeting for a few pints I’ll probably go. I am not going to be moved by ‘let’s go looting’. So why are any of these kids? Mind is at work, even some kind of collective mind and we need to know its content.
My guess is that there is no longer moral authority in this country. Most of the people who have expressed this to me have been living or working abroad. The basic revulsion of the ex-pat is often yobbery and nothing being done about it. The collapse of proper legal action – most of this being said to me in countries with dictatorship!
I despise what the culture of my own country has become – yet in Germany I hear the same thing. There the comment is often ‘the country is flooded with foreigners’. Germany treats its own non-academic youth much better than we do, as do other northern European countries. The blight of non-onomics is there too, but better controlled.
Other countries around the world control the kind of ‘mentality’ that may be behind our riots through dictatorship and arrest and imprisonment more or less at will – with more or less unaccountable police. Go go go the Gadget battalions? I don’t think so.
We are not hearing a beep in our media about the economic conditions other than ‘youth clubs being closed’. Factors from hardly any white taxi drivers through to the thieving rich probably play a part. Police have been shown to be outnumbered, outclassed tactically and other jumble by these ‘mindless criminals’. Even the cops in Miss Marple were smarter than that! Of course, none of this rot is true – it’s argument from my dog can drive to the moon is blue cheese.
Now Channel 4 has a completely different story on Mark Duggan than first issued. Only two shots were fired and both hit Duggan. The Incompetent Poodles of Constabulary Corruption (IPCC) are just getting round to interviewing the taxi driver involved! FFS!
No one was able to anticipate the scale of criminality last night – why not? Last night followed a previous night of large scale rioting. A no brainer!
Channel 4 finally ask a black lad in Grand Theft Auto garb and he says the problem is with police not liking black people, Asian people and they don’t even like their own people. Why are we not hearing more from such sources – he may well be wrong, but didn’t sound ‘mindless’. He had a rather clear view. As did the guy ‘harassing’ Boris telling the reporter he didn’t need to comment because we all know about wages taxed to death and mortgage payments hard to make (think of Gadget refusing to tell the truth openly because she’d lose her mortgage-paying abilities).
Cops should be out with the Army tonight and there should be a tough crack down. But not on sick old guys Gadget, while other cops look on. That view is clown fascism and the start of the slippery slope to exactly the kind of ‘law and order’ of the police state. Our cops are fortunately better than this, despite your agitation. Frankly, it’s a mind-state as stupid as that of the rioters. This stupidity is a result of “ejukation” so dim most of our population can’t ‘read’ GDP figures and balance sheets that show untold wealth in so few hands but probably sense the chronic unfairness and the fact we have no democracy to cope with putting it right. We only have the fascist propaganda that it’s about meritocracy (debunked 40 years ago) and scumbags who won’t work and immigrants stealing our jobs (which is a problem for poor people and known to be).
We have lost compassion and our economists, politicians and vile rich are doing nothing to make markets honest and work to provide reasonably shares in wealth. I have no problem with tougher policing to give us breathing space to do something effective about this. At the moment, the only people who seem prepared to take action are ‘mindless, teen criminals’ – which says something about the rest of us. I’m leaving – and it’s not the teen-thugs behind my reasoning – it’s the rest of us – spineless and mean, prepared to cling to clown propaganda when the evidence is clear.
There is no moral authority in this country. It’s ripe to the point of something rotten in the State of Denmark. The thieving going on in financial services, the suppression of jobs and wages (plus immigration to poor sectors) and funding of a special economy for the rich and a legal system accessible only to rich interests are the reasons for the riots – even if the daft sods doing it think they are playing Grand Theft Auto.
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