Real ‘Reason’ For the Riots and Police Cuts?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/aug/25/uk-net-migration-rises-21

Part of the routine lying done before our last election ritual was that the Tories would sort out immigration.  One is used to our lying politicians.  I thought Blair was a Labour one until it became obvious he was some kind of CIA stooge planted to get us into war in Iraq.  I wonder what hold they had on him?  Well it turns out, as per Grauniad, that immigration is rising.  This is because enough of us are not now leaving for a bunker in Spain or Bulgaria.  Speculating on why our half-wit poor and those swept along with the crowd rioted is more or less hot air, but could the underlying reason for the riots lie deeper in a Home Office run by Gadget’s presumably former paramour, Ms. May?  With the usual blundering and waiting for some shiny statistic to emerge not working, perhaps she is manipulating police numbers and riot opportunities to make the country even less worth living in to encourage more to follow my lead and get out?  I merely use the kind of reverse non-logic involved in cutting police numbers (sorry – waste – must feel especially good to be made redundant as ‘waste’) just as a section of the public turns to ‘Argentinian shopping’.

Anyone else noticed the ‘eugenics’ going on through immigration?  Our employers seem to be claiming they are importing highly skilled and intelligent foreigners as our lot aren’t up to speed.  I’m not working with any and just notice my taxi drivers seem to have moved from pleasant-chatty to more or less incapable.  What’s the plan?  I had suspected a cull, 1930’s eugenics style – but our own disadvantaged seem to be breeding exponentially.

The ‘logic’ appears to be that even if our economy goes tiger (NO CHANCE) we’d still have to import labour as our own is incompetent  Bernanke – the guy who runs our economy – makes a speech in a couple of hours.  He will blather a bit and then give a lot more money from our pockets (via reactivating the dummy running the BoE to go copycat) to insolvent banks.  Warren Buffet put several billion into the broke Bank Of America yesterday, so he’s confident his preference shares will either receive 6% or he’ll get his money back in a bail out – he’s probably acted on inside information.  So we’re in for another QE launch that Europe will follow – it’s all about printing more Monopoly Money to keep the game going.

The policing issues in this economic twaddle look dire.  In Britain, most cops, like most people, have been able to view politics with disdain and not give a damn about it – at least since WW2.  We are at a point now, perhaps a tipping point, where policing may turn away from dealing with low-level crime (we have almost no sophisticated policing of white-collar crime in the UK) to public order.  Just hear the OT cash register ringing lads!  We may be about to see the job market collapse – governments are pouring money into banks, not job creation (at least not in the West).  The banks are covering their own arses – some of the complex accounting beggars belief – and the public is going to be very short of cash and potentially even food and housing.  A situation not unlike the Scottish Enclosures is with us in some parts of the world (Killing squads in Africa already turfing people off land) as our money (that we never see) seeks assets we are trying to buy (like homes).  In ancient Athens, Solon decided, once his mates had bought land with loans, to cancel debts – and one can see QE like this – massive loans given to cronies based on our collateral that can never be paid back, but could be cancelled in similar fashion – a bit like the last man not standing getting to own all the chairs in musical chairs.  Sky are doing a piece on Greece tonight (7.30 p.m.) which will give the gist of what may be coming here, though they’ll probably make Greece a special case – which it won’t been if bank contagion is a bad as many of us think.

Police may find themselves in almost the same position as the Army in the French Revolution – with that nasty choice of whether to fire on their own.  This may over-egg the pudding, but I’m seriously scared (mostly, admittedly about that bit of my pension linked to stock markets – I’m mostly in gold and commodities).  Nothing at all is being done to sort out what most of us consider the economy – secure jobs.  The riots this month may just be a blip compared with what’s coming.  We all hope it will go away, but this is what we have been doing since the Thatcher days and what’s happened has been class war that has indebted nearly all of us and transferred merely all wealth and liquid assets (cash) to the rich.  We have been too dumb to notice and public argument has been steered away from political consideration of it and still is.

Many of us who work or thought we had earned our retirements through work resent benefit payments, especially to cheating scrote.  Yet the amounts involved in this are trivial in comparison to what the rich have leached out.  This is all utterly clear in GDP and debt figures, but we are generally much to thick to cope with counting, preferring ideology and homily.  Work is beginning to approximate to Premier League soccer and even my beloved Rugby League.  Our own can’t get into the teams because of one-way international competition.  This despite all kinds of academies of sport.  Milk output is only about 30% ‘genetic’ and the rest environmental, but you ain’t gonna start ‘training’ the worst genetically endowed cows.

I’ve done too much teaching to believe in widespread intelligence of the sort our school qualifications indicate.  But the chickens of what’s been going on are coming home to roost and our politics offer no answers – thus we may expect some kind of attempt to change politics through street protests.  This should be a re-taking of the streets and politics by decent people – but we have seen the opposite so far and it seems no attention is drawn until buildings burn and shops are smashed.

I see  a bad time ahead and a big overtime bill.  I hope to be on a beach somewhere, or close-by writing my novel, reading about it three days late.  If there was a glimmer of sorting any of this out by some more work from me I’d stay.  There isn’t.  I can now work anywhere with electricity and broadband.  I may know some Marx (I preferred Veblen), but I’ve always been conservative in my view of national democracy.  I hope I wouldn’t have been as stupid as P.G. Wodehouse with the Nazis, but I did work for the World Bank and this may have been as bad.  I was one of 3,000 cops wondering why we were protecting a ‘fucking Nazi’ to allow him to march through Stockport in the 1970’s.  Now I might wonder that Marx surely didn’t mean for workers of the world to unite in my bloody country whilst keeping the EDL and Muslim fantacists apart!  What has come is madness. and political statements on immigration, jobs and public services as bad as ‘let them eat cake’.  The sad thing is that there are sensible answers.

I hope it’s obvious I don’t thin the Home Secretary engineered riots and police cuts just to get me and others to leave so she could claim a net reduction in immigration.  Yet tell me who is advocating any sensible reversal of wealth accumulation in few hands, decent jobs for all, full employment and a return to national values that you fit in with if you want to live here?  We are turning Japanese – but to understand this you need to understand some economics – and that’s not much of a British national trait.  For coppers, a fine traditional British breed, it’s going to mean bricks flying work, because our politicians are too crooked to tell the truth.

There is a point in policing when the cop has to think about whose side he is on.    We have rather assumed democracy as a given in this and some police feeling of current confusion about ‘what the public expects’.  Blair stated police must expect 100% support from politicians, but clearly all of us have scant regard for politics and politicians – in ‘true democracy’ police are answerable to the people and of the people.

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The Country Needs New Management

We have repeatedly been told that educational standards have been rising in this country.  Anyone daring to contradict this has been accused of deriding the hard work of pupils “achieving”  5 GCSEs and the ever increasing number of A levels. The usual array of statistics was in place to “prove” the “improvement” in standards. Those familiar with police recorded statistics and the odd BCS material that show consistent lowering of certain aspects of crime, year on year, will note the similarities.

Management has been held to be one of the UK’s failings ever since I can remember.  Various reports came up with the obvious and stupid conclusion that we needed business schools.  We have over 50 now, teaching utter crap in the main.  These were boot polishing schools for piss poor bureaucrats long before we copied the Americans.

The Mail publishes some tired crap from employers that I’ve seen all my career too.  Schools and universities don’t produce the candidates they need.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2026858/Bosses-condemn-useless-degrees-leave-graduates-lacking-basic-skills.html

This is usually not put down to thew young people themselves, but the educators.  I don’t agree.  The fault lies in the kids in part, in the governments that have all lied to us and the collapse of standards amongst educators and the creeps who manage in education.

The problem starts in thinking we can teach anything complicated to most people.  Most people can’t even learn basic science, and maths at GCSE is trivial.  School leavers are usually utterly unsuited to university education and unable to learn independently – they have been schooled into this incompetence.

We need to change our attitudes towards education.  It isn’t good for everyone and is a lot to do with child minding at Primary levels – so much so some kids cannot make the transfer even to Secondary and yet remain in ‘school’ until 18 in FE colleges and do a further three useless years at university before becoming secretaries who can’t spell.

The essential problem is management getting into everything and pretending a good job is being done as standards drop to the floor.  I can’t think of a single industry we have ‘saved’, ‘created’ and all the rest through management.  There’s more evidence we “managed” the conditions that created the riots than that we are properly managing the country, education or crime.

We might define management as something that is ‘against democracy’ – OK in the individual firm but bad when we reach the point where we can’t democratically direct policy because the rich will run away with ‘their’ money.

Blame the evil poor – but what creates them?

Squirrel Nutkin is on TV claiming to know only a minority of Salford citizens were involved in the riots ‘because she lives there’.  No you don’t Squirrel and weren’t there £13K’s worth of doubts once about where you lived?  Squirrel wants to stamp down hard on the riots – and so we should, but already aren’t doing – but no you don’t Squirrel, you just want to be seen saying the right thing we all feel anyway.  Toss off …

I’ve finally found someone saying something I agree with that isn’t what boils down to ‘crime is wrong’.

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/camila-batmanghelidjh-caring-costs-ndash-but-so-do-riots-2333991.html

“My own view is that the police in this country do an impressive job and unjustly carry the consequences of a much wider social dysfunction …   Working at street level in London, over a number of years, many of us have been concerned about large groups of young adults creating their own parallel antisocial communities with different rules. The individual is responsible for their own survival because the established community is perceived to provide nothing. Acquisition of goods through violence is justified in neighbourhoods where the notion of dog eat dog pervades and the top dog survives the best. The drug economy facilitates a parallel subculture with the drug dealer producing more fiscally efficient solutions than the social care agencies who are too under-resourced to compete.

The insidious flourishing of anti-establishment attitudes is paradoxically helped by the establishment. It grows when a child is dragged by their mother to social services screaming for help and security guards remove both; or in the shiny academies which, quietly, rid themselves of the most disturbed kids. Walk into the mental hospitals and there is nothing for the patients to do except peel the wallpaper. Go to the youth centre and you will find the staff have locked themselves up in the office because disturbed young men are dominating the space with their violent dogs. Walk on the estate stairwells with your baby in a buggy manoeuvring past the condoms, the needles, into the lift where the best outcome is that you will survive the urine stench and the worst is that you will be raped. The border police arrive at the neighbour’s door to grab an “over-stayer” and his kids are screaming. British children with no legal papers have mothers surviving through prostitution and still there’s not enough food on the table.

It’s not one occasional attack on dignity, it’s a repeated humiliation, being continuously dispossessed in a society rich with possession. Young, intelligent citizens of the ghetto seek an explanation for why they are at the receiving end of bleak Britain, condemned to a darkness where their humanity is not even valued enough to be helped. Savagery is a possibility within us all. Some of us have been lucky enough not to have to call upon it for survival; others, exhausted from failure, can justify resorting to it. Our leaders still speak about how protecting the community is vital. The trouble is, the deal has gone sour. The community has selected who is worthy of help and who is not.”

Camila Batmanghelidjh is usually good value.  She finishes with an example of a rescued kid who did not ‘do the riots’ – who was like a mad, barking dog when her charity got him some help.  This isn’t Zoe Williams poncing with Baudrillard, a French dork she doesn’t understand who might have driven his Ferrari somewhere near distant farting distance of the riots and pronounced them as to do with consumerism.

I’ve seen these kids close up.  They get so little they grasp at anything on offer when they are young.  Food from our kitchen, sweets on bonfire night, whatever taken in a manner our own kids just couldn’t do – almost savage with a hunger for something.  Piss poor housing workers, social workers unable to see abuse and frankly never there when it matters to witness.  I later found their bosses encouraged them to lie and that much of their alleged ‘professional’ discussion was vile gossip.  One such kid, left in his druggie parents’ hands with no supervision is now described as ‘brain dead’ by other kids.  ‘What a happy child’ I remember one of the less wuckfit housing workers say of a kid exposed to drugs regularly and who was regularly up at one in the morning before suddenly going quiet as his parents passed out after a heroin smoke.  Others bring their children up remarkably well – the issue is not simple poverty – indeed the druggies who destroyed their children’s lives had an income of £20K plus with their due benefits, benefit cheating, dealing and thieving (that’s more than the average in the grim North and came with free housing).  I could walk round the estate near where I live and point to the houses our rioters will come from if my parochial town is hit.

What I’ve seen in research for my book is that very little good work is done by the non-police agencies, often despite decent street-level staff.  The collective noun for social workers remains what itr was when I was a Plod – an absence.  Housing workers, paid less, try harder.  A few cops are very good, again in the lower ranks doing the toughest jobs.  They are ‘led’ by jerks who bend the performance targets.  I could almost kill now on hearing about 3-star ratings!  The system is rotten and systemically so.  We need the resources out of its hands and to find some honest people like Camilla or the brilliant cop on the beat next to the one I live on.

These ‘rioters’ could not exist if the performance management figures were real.  Banksidebabble finished a recent post with ‘Screwtape’ – http://bankbabble.wordpress.com/

We once had an admiral shot because sailors mutinied and I would rather see across the board sackings of ACPOs, Directors of Housing, Social Services and various QUANGOs then have 10,000 of the looters locked away.  They have stolen more from us and helped create the mutiny.  Banksie is upbeat on a cure.  Listening to Melvin King I am not.  We need a new way out of the fiscal-financial econodung.  Most of us are used to it not mattering much and thinking politics doesn’t matter because the bastards are all the same.  The problem is that their corruption has spread into everything and we can’t think or act without its constraint.  It’s more than the petty crap Gadget ‘reveals’ on form filling, HR, H & S and supposed ‘leftie’ influences like political correctness, human rights and ‘koro’ (roughly, ‘ball shrinking’).  This is all the result of micro-management attitudes and probably persistent in-breeding in selection – we might call it ‘recruitment narcissism’ and it has been studied as such.  We are certainly gullible to psychopaths and narcissists – they are useful in crisis sometimes but destructive at all other times.  These are our leaders and we’ve got that all wrong.

What sort of country is it in which Squirrel Nutkin pops on TV slagging the evil poor?  They were around before the riots doing untold damage.  Call Me Dave is on now trying to take credit for something.  We won’t put up with it, apparently.  He’s discovered we have a problem with gangs.  We have pockets of sick people.  Really, Dave?  In every town, in every estate, in every street (some bullshit) – resource it all Dave?  The police have been asked if they have the resources they need and ‘they’ said they did!  Now he’s saying a dose of parenting,upbringing, morals, discipline in schools, no welfare for idleness – but not anything that costs anything is the cure.  Lying tosser worse than the vandals.  Hasn’t he got form for trashing a restaurant with Boris?  Things have sunk so low Ken Livingstone sounds like the voice of reason!

My thoughts and condolences to Tariq Jahan.

 

Johnny Marbles – Waste of Oxygen Or Valid Protest

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jul/20/why-i-foam-pied-rupert-murdoch

Marbles tells his own story at the Groan above.  He’s served some purpose in bringing security at Parliament into some relief bit otherwise served little purpose other than to highlight problems with eye-witness observation.  Unlike all the others involved in the hacking nonsense, Marbles has at least told the truth without massive and costly processes needed to drag it out.  Wendi Deng, on the evidence of the eye, did not leap in to protect her husband, yet this quickly became the media account.  What is scandalous about this is that she did not get the same treatment someone in a similar ‘street incident’ might well get – an assault charge.  I wouldn’t wish this, but it seems to sharpen my feeling that the ‘new toffs’ are not living under the same law as the rest of us.

It’s hard to judge Marbles.  We need a strong protest movement because politics is dead and it’s clear we aren’t forming one.  The underlying problems concern the difficulty with getting a modern form of public dialogue and even a public interested in such.  This has been a problem since the Greeks issued slaves with whips covered in purple dye to shame citizens into democracy events.  In the absence of sensible public dialogue I find it hard to condemn Marbles and ‘direct action’.  I’m afraid I now think our society isn’t worth being bothered about.  The problems will unfold into war and to a considerable extent already have.

The people in the hacking scandal telling us they didn’t know what was going on are all clearly lying.  We knew, even as serfs, that the media, law and politics were bent long before any of this, and yet people at the heart of it all are laying claim to no knowledge.  Marbles at least spares us this.  In the end, I would rather share the planet with him than these other gassers.  Maybe the only language worth a spit these days is the custard pie and Wendi Deng’s right hand?

Anything new in politics?

Nothing turns out to be simple (even nothing itself in physics).  People still lust after simplicity because they can’t cope with the ambiguity of what goes on around them.  Our public debates play on this , whether in courtrooms or what pass as current affairs programmes.  Whodunits are usually very simple matters, aimed at what we might categorise as the unbright 12 year old mind set.

It is more or less impossible to find intelligent dialogue.  For me, even science programmes are usually annoying re-hashes of O level – and it’s 45 years since I did mine.

What I’ve been looking fir recently is sign that we are governed at this semi-literate-hardly-numerate level and my guess is we are.  I’d just ask this question – ‘when did you last catch even a glimmer of anything new in politics’?  My answer is I can’t spot anything other than the emphasis on television politics.  This is strange, set against all the change I can otherwise see around me, or in the labs I used to work in against those around now.

Anyone else bemused by this?

I’m listening to the clown Robert Peston (who should be a villain in Wallace and Grommet) and his voice reeks patronisation.  He’s using glib phrases one after the other with a very strange intonation.  He’s even suggesting it would be a good idea to borrow a few bob from the Chinese.

What we need to do has nothing to do with any of our current politics.  It is now part of some dire bureaucracy we don’t know how to control.  I now believe the answer lies in ridding ourselves of this bureaucracy and the people in it.  We have to do this by ignoring it.  In the same way that I would like to finish my time in a small village by the sea in ex-patriot style, I believe we should be making this form of shunning ADMASS a reality for all.

The shunning is only stage one, but we need to find ways to do this first.  I see this as a replacement for voting and space in which we might develop viable business models that are very different from today’s.

There has to be something better than dumping war criminal Bliar on the Middle East Crisis.  Something Blair says is relevant – that we can’t just go on imbued with pessimism – but the key pessimism has long been about our inability to form a decent society.  I’m just wondering if there are enough of us to create some enjoyable space that could lead to something new as politics and pay its way without the usual planet-burning or condescension to those who would even fail today’s GCSEs (really – take a look – they keep kids in school 12 years for these hapless certificates) and who are growing by modelling themselves on soap opera.  The answer isn’t high culture but a new one that might let us collapse the separation of work and entertainment, whilst making school obsolete.

Ryan Giggs

Who cares?  The only issue here involves the use of our legal system for matters irrelevant.  18 months ago, 6 witnesses against very violent druggies (explosives and a very violent murder involved) were guaranteed anonymity in court.  They had taken a lot of encouragement.  The first gave her evidence from behind a screen and then the clerk to the court read out her name and address.  The murder involved a brush stale being rammed up where the sun don’t shine into a lung.  Ryan Giggs!

Surely there are more important issues for our votaries to get themselves involved with!  Anonymous complaints about local scum published in social media might very well be a good thing if we designed it properly.  It may be that all the fuss we can make on privacy is outdated and only arises out of vested interests.  As usual, the situation is really regulated by fears of what scum might do – false allegations, blackmail and so on.

One possibility is to allow anything on the Internet to be published by an ‘institution of record’ that chooses to and let any legal action be decided on the truth of that.  We might then assume all as gossip until such publication.

When the MP named Giggsy under Parliamentary privilege, he mentioned it was impractical to jail over one hundred thousand people who had done so on twitter.  Did he understand potential power to the people this would involve?  Or remember that one amorous lad has been dragged before the courts for a comment many of us might have made delayed by snow at Robin Hood Airport (also more important to our freedom than Giggsygate).

Giggs is presumably now just a pawn in the hands of his lawyers.  The arrogance of suing Twitter beggars belief, involving the threat to jail.

Of course, the real establishment fear is that we might find some genuine way to express and govern ourselves and stop the leeching of wealth to a few.  Giggs must know what a level playing field is.  Pity we have none in our legal system.