The Metropolitan Police clearly should have been out in higher strength on Monday night – this is not straight from Captain Hindsight but the fact of the Tottenham riot the night before. One wonders what ‘Gold’ was up to, especially as they have to foot the bill under an ancient Riot Act.
The ‘lying’ over the shooting incident needs scrutiny now and sackings. I doubt the shooting was unlawful – our attitudes towards cops dealing with guns needs tuning up, perhaps by more ‘citizens’ representatives’ doing virtual courses and being reminded nothing shoots back on them! The IPCC should have had something considered to say within a couple of hours. My suspicious mind wonders where the non-police gun came from – but it is as irresponsible to put that in main media as the usual character assassination of the dead or brutalised that always seems to be put out. In these circumstances it should be possible to be as clear on the forensics of that gun as the ballistics on the police shooting.
What have we been told, under successive nopolitics govenrments, under the guise of ‘falling crime’? Across the comparable EU ‘highlight crime’ except drug dealing is down since 2002. These highlight figures are manipulated in all forces I’ve worked with in research in much the same way. There is little effort in real detection other than on serious crime and the figures rely on nodding and the other gaming techniques. Essentially, someone like me years ago spots a ‘likely lad’ or set of the bastards and nicks them with a pair of socks in their pocket or swag in someone else’s car – perhaps after a chase against pursuit rules – or someone’s munter dob’s him in to get rid of his violence – and the resulting body is sweated for further crimes. 98% even of recorded crime is undetected directly and is ‘coughed’. How many of the coughs are true is a matter of casting dice. This is part of the reason Bill the Burglar believes his chance of being caught is one in a hundred – though Bill is so thick he can’t work out his real odds.
The figures seem not to have told us about a welter of young men who will pop out and loot. In Manchester, it seems one family took their car out to do the ‘shopping’ at a Lydl as it was trashed. The truth here is that police do not have the responsibility to get in amongst these people in community liaison – this is what government should be doing through jobs and a form of National Service.
The call to sweep the scum off our streets seems hapless – one assumes cops have been keeping the lid on until now. One suspects this approach on its own will only fester more and deeper problems. We can come up with a scheme to create jobs and decent opportunities – the problem is always the clown economics that has diverted wealth abroad and to the rich in massive percentages. This is always the sticking point. The people involved are the most disgusting thieves of all and not only go unpunished but are lauded as “successful”. Life and business is actually simple. The rich and political class just make up schemes to divert work effort into their cash, even getting governments to fund their losses. The occupy the same moral ground as slave owners and feudal barons. The social contract and work ethic of old farts like me is broken. Even the fantasy of university and knowledge society work has evaporated.
Police are out in my City Centre, but if there is any sustainability amongst these looters they will soon be down the road instead. My guess is this is all the fault of my complacent generation – we are at the very least the parents of it. There has been a way out for 40 years but we refused to learn, preferring nopolitics and now to brand the perpetrators as hooligans – which they are – but also elides our responsibility for them. These riots have been familiar to many outside their homes over many years. Are these the kids ‘achieving’ ever better educational standards? Ever increasing ‘standards’ that leave them with no decent job?
Guff I found particularly ‘clown’ is that tonight’s police finally have the political backing they need – cops don’t need anything political to deal with crime. Numbers and equipment yes, but ‘political leadership’ is exactly what we don’t want in this area. They should be fixing the economy.
It will be interesting to see what happens in the appeal courts when sentencing comes along – is it possible to give these scumbags higher tariffs than they could expect for 100 burglaries on mine and yours? Would this survive appeal? Can the judicial cosh work? Who will be the first vigilante prosecuted> Are the racists ‘planning’ anything?
Above all, how is it we need ‘mindless looting’ to get us talking about sorting the country out? Newsnight has just produced she guy in a hoodie and mask with more sense than the politicians. This government, which looks incompetent and lazy, is puking the old fascist tale that it’s all “hooligans” smashing up their own. This appeals to us all, but is a con. This is a time to support police action, but if this is turned in such a way as to write off this lot as merely criminal behaviour and the reasons crushed as they would be in a police state – then we have another ball game – or rather ‘you’. I’m off.
They will try joint enterprise prosecutions – something we should see more of in other circumstances – and these may well backfire. As may the ‘full force of the law’ (which may be has hapless as Gadget predicts) in encouraging the spread of the feeling of unfairness . ‘Ring leaders’ will be targeted – all rather like political suppression. I’d be staying if we had democracy – but that would mean we discussed the real issues and could direct action rather than have to engage in ‘direct action’. Instead, we have remained so ‘tranced’ that most of us conflate household economics with the global picture.
The similarities between the riots and scene from Grand Theft Auto (SA) are remarkable. These lads come from this generation. Have we heard any sensible material on their plight or what it is to grow up poor with no prospects – let alone any action by us to fix the global economic idiocy that has led to massive increases in the wealth of the rich and the creation of a new kind of poor class – and no democratic means to contest this because the the rich and their banksters are ‘global’ – a term which translates into protection racket jargon of screwing any country that wants to provide public services and structured routes out of poverty.
The events were “unprecedented” (actually there is historic precedent) – and they were in a reasonable sense before Tottenham – but surely not the night afterwards!
The immediate ‘search’ for some rational reason under the riots flies in the face of what we know about human behaviour – that it is hardly ever rational. A better metaphor might be how this boil built up and how it burst. Our most politically uneducated have been out smashing things up, but they presumably know they are small mushrooms in the trickle-down fertilizer society we have created. We should not compare the greed of some hoodie with a T-shirt and cd-player with Madoff and his mates as yet not caught (or our greed in wanting Ponzi-level returns bound to be too good to be true).
I’ve just seen Horriet Harmoon and Gove the Gory whacking each other over the deficit and other bulldung. The actual issue is about not having people live in the kind of poverty amongst celebrity affluence we have developed (which has returned Britain to 1900) without either big government Sino-Soviet style (which we have now because we are governed by a bankster politburo) or a collapse in motivation to do anything. This means getting to grips with the fact that we are massively capable and productive – but also gullible in the extreme as witnessed in Nopolitics and ADMASS. There are reasons we can’t condone criminality – but just as terrorists become freedom-fighters when someone else gets to write history these lads may be written-up rather differently than in current knee-jerk. Trying to write them up as merely criminal seems as irresponsible as their own actions.
As for cops claiming they haven’t got enough confidence or powers to deal effectively with any of this – why didn’t they say so long before where it might matter? And all the others who have claimed crime was falling for some bonus or political purpose? It seems reasonable to suppose that the current boot boys are the same as those causing the anti-social crime police have been doing more or less nothing about (sometimes not for want of effort) outside our homes. That was crime and not ‘politically motivated behaviour’ too.
Manchester has had a bad night tonight. Looking at some of the clowns involved, I can see little difference between them and the ones dismissed as ‘just kids, no crime’ for so long until we got a new chief constable. This isn’t ‘la revolucion’ – but it could be if we could wake up. I’ll be stuck doing another year for pension catch-up as the stock market plunges (though most of mine is now elsewhere). I just take a ‘grubbing by’ position. My guess is the media will convince us robust policing has sorted the matter out by the time I make my escape. Water cannons will just be another symbol of the banana republic I leave. It’s 10 years know since an Iraqi colleague explained he had left London to work in Bahrain to get away from uncontrolled streets and this kind of juvenile thug. They keep a substantial body of their people poor and there is looting behind their actually political-religious riots. They fairly randomly lock up as much as 10% of their male Shia population. We have relied on a different model, but have equally left a substantial proportion of our people in hopelessness and a small number with nearly all the wealth.
In respect of this, I’m always told that the top people in our organisations only take a small part of the budget. This looks true – but the message in preparing a taken-over company was always ‘find the LOMBARDS’ (loads of money but are right dicks) and get rid of them – broadly so the company or part of it could be put up for sale without their wage and on costs. This had many names – delayering, right-sizing, business process re-engineering and kwality – and it continues everywhere in offering packages to get rid of your experienced people and replace them with cheaper ones. All sorts of people supposedly vital sparks turn out not to be needed at all and often turn out to have been utterly unproductive doing non-existent management functions and drawing double and triple the salary of someone doing the actual work. If our promotion systems are this bad, imagine what the truth behind bankers’ claims to be so much better and so much in need of mega-bonus motivation. Ask yourself too how the rich got so much richer as wages collapsed from around 1979 to now – one might have thought it would become more difficult to get rich if earnings were suppressed. They ran the world as a richman’s ckub is how, able to invest abroad to take advantage of serf-labour and in the gambling club running Ponzi schemes we have just paid for (only in part).
That we have a legal system out of date and out of order can be seen in the berating of the street-scum and their horrible behaviour and the lack of demand to do anything about the rich and their hoods. 500 riots like these over the last few nights does not make one Madoff.
Disciplined National Service (whatever the work done – it needn’t be military) is the answer – but we can’t afford it because the rich want their money (how was it ‘earned’) invested in China, Indonesia and so on – or some hedge fund betting on global collapse – the top 20% own about 70% (these are people with £350,000 or a lot more) and the bottom 10% don’t even register for any (HMIRC figures).
Our politicians should be implementing an emergency wealth tax across the developed world to be invested at home. But these politicians are all up to their necks in the existing fraud – countries even cheat on stuff like a gold standard against very clear rules. ACPOs who find their integrity challenged should know the main figures of integrity at the Bank of England (etc.) cheat. There is no other solution that will not destroy hard-earned freedoms – and I suspect this is what is at stake.
Just imagine teaching our ‘new revolutionaries’! And remember they have been produced as educational standards have risen year on year just as crime has fallen year on year. Like get real! From 1979 to 1999 personal wealth in Britain went from £500 billion to£2,752billion (figures that just happen to be at hand). I for one was more content then. Soon, I fear, they will be knocking on the door to render such memories seditious! This said, these crimes are crimes and I hope the knocks come where they are deserved.
It’s long been rumored that Manchester’s city centre was rebuilt with Russian Mafia money and this increased the drug trade (etc.), but I guess the thought the hoodies were trying to make a statement on this is as daft as imagining the IRA was ever really Marxist-Leninist! Might be worth remembering that the peaceful civil rights marches got not much of a response in NI. Thank goodness they’ve cancelled the soccer friendly and not thew Test!
The generation of “Grand Theft Auto Revolutionarses” is the spoiled generation of recent social-psychological speculation. I have no doubt they have been dumped on, but they have not known the poverty of my youth. They have ‘grown’ without corporal punishment and the kind of authority we had. The ones I speak to are generally clueless – you just hope they are toilet-trained. Even their brighter cousins I’ve been forced to teach at 18 are dire – we commonly say we are the first people they encounter who say ‘no’ to them. The idea they know anything is frankly unbelievable and these are the ones with GCSEs and some kind of A levels. Most of them demand spoon-feeding and then claim it’s boring. We now vie for the evening classes once avoided in order to miss these young, idle dorks – only to find them spoiling things for mature students once they realise (it takes time) they don’t have to get up in the morning if they crash the evening option. We should be failing them in droves – but guess what – it’s career suicide.
Now some gawp is saying parents should dob their own kids in to be ‘true Mancunians’. Those of us who might consider that before dismissing it already know where our kids were. If this lot are criminals their parents are already not surprised when new equipment comes into the house. These looters have just upped their thieving from my garden or front room to the high street. Who and what they are isn’t the issue (except in due process). What kind of home isn’t bothered when its pre-teens and teenagers aren’t in by 9 p.m. ? One that ain’t bothered when one of them lugs in a new hoover for Mum. And our cops are not cracking down on that kind of “home” and we have housing and social workers doing sod all about them too. If I have a theory it’s that the police and other agencies who should have done something for Fiona Pilkington (and I suspect any poor sod living near these scum and victim of them) have been sitting on an iceberg of this stuff pretending kit wasn’t there. More lying in performance management and even worse (I suspect a widespread character assassination of victims, even to the point of conspiracies to blame and prosecute them) – these scum are foisted on decent people in denial by authorities on what they do – imagine living next door. The riots are just the problems of police and related agency failures to tell the truth and get these scum out of other people’s lives. The reason is resourcing (the rich again) and a fatal nexus of senior bureaucrats and politicians. Anyone offering space next door for the scum youth you’ve seen? Not likely is it, but they live near someone and that’s all right as long as it’s someone else.
We’re all guilty – but there was no outcry about the bastards who nearly drove me and my partner insane, killed the Pilkingtons and another dozen cases I’ve uncovered (I know it’s thousands) involving murder, arson and drugs. What does anyone imagine these bastards do when they aren’t rioting — deliver meals on wheels? A family like this could be dumped near you tomorrow. I’d have them machine-gunned simply to save others from having them nearby. Yet the real problem is the rich.
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