Riots in London

[drwaffles]

Evicting people and taking away benefits are stupid ideas, as aurik said. It just leads to a whole host of new problems without doing anything to help fix the underlying issues.

The issue of people abusing the welfare system definitely needs to be addressed, but claiming that the way to fix it is by simply denying people welfare is ridiculous. There are much more complex issues within our society (and in the US) than simply "poor people are bone-idle sponges", but it takes something more than a typically limited conservative mind to ask questions like "why this is the case?".

[wop]

^ I don't care for poor trouble making people

Boot/evict/send them to bermuda triangle for all I care.

Take away their benefits, if they commit another crime, send them out of the country. Problem solved.

[thetruepandagod]

^ I don't care for poor trouble making people

Boot/evict/send them to bermuda triangle for all I care.

Take away their benefits, if they commit another crime, send them out of the country. Problem solved.

You already did it once i don't think your country can do it again.

[Correction]

You already did it once i don't think your country can do it again.

More than once, really. Never actually solved any problems. You'd think after so many failed tries the U.K. would recognize the pattern.

[Cesaria]

Evicting people and taking away benefits are stupid ideas, as aurik said. It just leads to a whole host of new problems without doing anything to help fix the underlying issues.

The issue of people abusing the welfare system definitely needs to be addressed, but claiming that the way to fix it is by simply denying people welfare is ridiculous. There are much more complex issues within our society (and in the US) than simply "poor people are bone-idle sponges", but it takes something more than a typically limited conservative mind to ask questions like "why this is the case?".

Evicting people for anti-social behaviour's already been done quite a lot round here - the city council's got a history of evicting people who've done shit like threaten their kids' school teachers and by and large it's actually had an effect on cleaning up the city, cos Nottingham was in a fucking hell of a state a few years back (when it was riding at the top of the guncrime tables and earnt the Shottingham nickname) and now it's not a bad place to live really - it's got its pockets of shithole, but generally I feel safer here than I do back up north where I'm from originally.

But yeah the zero tolerance lose your council house thing (privately renting sucks in comparison in terms of cost, security, actually getting repairs done) - I've known a couple of headteachers call it in for persistently threatening parents even before the riots started off.

[Jeryhn]

Hello rioters. Look at your friend, now back to me: now at your friend, now back to me! Sadly, he isn't me; but if he stopped using antisocial behaviour and started using a job centre he could be like me. Look down, back up. Where are we? You're at an interview, with the man your friend could work for! What's in his hand? It's an application form to that job he needs. Look again... the form is money! Anything is possible when you get a job and stop looting. I'm at a desk.

http://moviesblog.mtv.com/wp-content.../281x21150.jpg

You forgot the .jpg

[Cantih]

Here's something odd.

The voice of reason... Russell Brand?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/au...s-davidcameron

Text for the lazy

Spoiler: show

Big Brother isn't watching you

Dismissing rioters as mindless is futile rhetoric. However unacceptable the UK riots, we need to ask why they are happening



Russell Brand
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 11 August 2011 20.00 BST

I no longer live in London. I've been transplanted to Los Angeles by a combination of love and money; such good fortune and opportunity, in both cases, you might think disqualify me from commenting on matters in my homeland. Even the results of Britain's Got Ice-Factor may lay prettily glistening beyond my remit now that I am self-banished.
To be honest when I lived in England I didn't really care too much for the fabricated theatrics of reality TV. Except when I worked for Big Brother, then it was my job to slosh about in the amplified trivia of the housemates/inmates. Sometimes it was actually quite bloody interesting. Particularly the year that Nadia won. She was the Portuguese transsexual. Remember? No? Well, that's the nature of the medium; as it whizzes past the eyes it seems very relevant but the malady of reality TV stars is that their shelf life expires, like dog years, by the power of seven. To me it seems as if Nadia's triumph took place during the silver jubilee, we had a street party.
Early in that series there was an incident of excitement and high tension. The testosteronal, alpha figures of the house – a Scot called Jason and a Londoner called Victor – incited by the teasing conditions and a camp lad called Marco (wow, it's all coming back) kicked off in the house, smashed some crockery and a few doors. Police were called, tapes were edited and the carnival rolled on. When I was warned to be discreet on-air about the extent of the violence, I quoted a British first-world-war general who, reflecting on the inability of his returning troops to adapt to civilian life, said: "You cannot rouse the animal in man then expect it to be put aside at a moment's notice."
"Yeah, that's exactly the kind of thing we want you to say the opposite of," said the channel's representative.
This week's riots are sad and frightening and, if I have by virtue of my temporary displacement forgone the right to speak about the behaviour of my countrymen, then this is gonna be irksome. I mean even David Cameron came back from his holiday. Eventually. The Tuscan truffles lost their succulence when the breaking glass became too loud to ignore. Then dopey ol' Boris came cycling back into the London clutter with his spun gold hair and his spun shit logic as it became apparent that the holiday was over.
In fact, it isn't my absence from the territory of London that bothers me; it's my absence from the economic class that is being affected that itches in my gut because, as I looked at the online incident maps, the boroughs that were suffering all, for me, had some resonance. I've lived in Dalston, Hackney, Elephant, Camden and Bethnal Green. I grew up round Dagenham and Romford and, whilst I could never claim to be from the demographic most obviously affected, I feel guilty that I'm not there now.
I feel proud to be English, proud to be a Londoner (all right, an Essex boy), never more so than since being in exile, and I naturally began to wonder what would make young people destroy their communities.
I have spoken to mates in London and Manchester and they sound genuinely frightened and hopeless, and the details of their stories place this outbreak beyond the realms of any political idealism or rationalisation. But I can't, from my ivory tower in the Hollywood Hills, compete with the understandable yet futile rhetoric, describing the rioters as mindless. Nor do I want to dwell on the sadness of our beautiful cities being tarnished and people's shops and livelihoods, sometimes generations old, being immolated. The tragic and inevitable deaths ought to be left for eulogies and grieving. Tariq Jahan has spoken so eloquently from his position of painful proximity, with such compassion, that nearly all else is redundant.
The only question I can legitimately ask is: why is this happening? Mark Duggan's death has been badly handled but no one is contesting that is a reason for these conflagrations beyond the initial flash of activity in Tottenham. I've heard Theresa May and the Old Etonians whose hols have been curtailed (many would say they're the real victims) saying the behaviour is "unjustifiable" and "unacceptable". Wow! Thanks guys! What a wonderful use of the planet's fast-depleting oxygen resources. Now that's been dealt with can we move on to more taxing matters such as whether or not Jack The Ripper was a ladies' man. And what the hell do bears get up to in those woods?
However "unacceptable" and "unjustifiable" it might be, it has happened so we better accept it and, whilst we can't justify it, we should kick around a few neurons and work out why so many people feel utterly disconnected from the cities they live in.
Unless on the news tomorrow it's revealed that there's been a freaky "criminal creating" chemical leak in London and Manchester and Liverpool and Birmingham that's causing young people to spontaneously and simultaneously violate their environments – in which case we can park the ol' brainboxes, stop worrying and get on with the football season, but I suspect there hasn't – we have, as human beings, got a few things to consider together.
I should here admit that I have been arrested for criminal damage for my part in anti-capitalist protest earlier in this decade. I often attended protests and then, in my early 20s, and on drugs, I enjoyed it when the protests lost direction and became chaotic, hostile even. I was intrigued by the anarchist "Black bloc", hooded and masked, as, in retrospect, was their agenda, but was more viscerally affected by the football "casuals" who'd turn up because the veneer of the protest's idealistic objective gave them the perfect opportunity to wreck stuff and have a row with the Old Bill.
That was never my cup of tea though. For one thing, policemen are generally pretty good fighters and second, it registered that the accent they shouted at me with was closer to my own than that of some of those singing about the red flag making the wall of plastic shields between us seem thinner.
I found those protests exciting, yes, because I was young and a bit of a twerp but also, I suppose, because there was a void in me. A lack of direction, a sense that I was not invested in the dominant culture, that government existed not to look after the interests of the people it was elected to represent but the big businesses that they were in bed with.
I felt that, and I had a mum who loved me, a dad who told me that nothing was beyond my reach, an education, a grant from Essex council (to train as an actor of all things!!!) and several charities that gave me money for maintenance. I shudder to think how disenfranchised I would have felt if I had been deprived of that long list of privileges.
That state of deprivation though is, of course, the condition that many of those rioting endure as their unbending reality. No education, a weakened family unit, no money and no way of getting any. JD Sports is probably easier to desecrate if you can't afford what's in there and the few poorly paid jobs there are taken. Amidst the bleakness of this social landscape, squinting all the while in the glare of a culture that radiates ultraviolet consumerism and infrared celebrity. That daily, hourly, incessantly enforces the egregious, deceitful message that you are what you wear, what you drive, what you watch and what you watch it on, in livid, neon pixels. The only light in their lives comes from these luminous corporate messages. No wonder they have their fucking hoods up.
I remember Cameron saying "hug a hoodie" but I haven't seen him doing it. Why would he? Hoodies don't vote, they've realised it's pointless, that whoever gets elected will just be a different shade of the "we don't give a toss about you" party.
Politicians don't represent the interests of people who don't vote. They barely care about the people who do vote. They look after the corporations who get them elected. Cameron only spoke out against News International when it became evident to us, US, the people, not to him (like Rose West, "He must've known") that the newspapers Murdoch controlled were happy to desecrate the dead in the pursuit of another exploitative, distracting story.
Why am I surprised that these young people behave destructively, "mindlessly", motivated only by self-interest? How should we describe the actions of the city bankers who brought our economy to its knees in 2010? Altruistic? Mindful? Kind? But then again, they do wear suits, so they deserve to be bailed out, perhaps that's why not one of them has been imprisoned. And they got away with a lot more than a few fucking pairs of trainers.
These young people have no sense of community because they haven't been given one. They have no stake in society because Cameron's mentor Margaret Thatcher told us there's no such thing.
If we don't want our young people to tear apart our communities then don't let people in power tear apart the values that hold our communities together.
As you have by now surely noticed, I don't know enough about politics to ponder a solution and my hands are sticky with blood money from representing corporate interests through film, television and commercials, venerating, through my endorsements and celebrity, products and a lifestyle that contributes to the alienation of an increasingly dissatisfied underclass. But I know, as we all intuitively know, the solution is all around us and it isn't political, it is spiritual. Gandhi said: "Be the change you want to see in the world."
In this simple sentiment we can find hope, as we can in the efforts of those cleaning up the debris and ash in bonhomous, broom-wielding posses. If we want to live in a society where people feel included, we must include them, where they feel represented, we must represent them and where they feel love and compassion for their communities then we, the members of that community, must find love and compassion for them.
As we sweep away the mistakes made in the selfish, nocturnal darkness we must ensure that, amidst the broken glass and sadness, we don't sweep away the youth lost amongst the shards in the shadows cast by the new dawn.

[archibaldcrane]

Great column!

[Atreides]

so, question to british people... what is Cameron's popularity/polling like currently? I don't imagine he's doing too well after austerity and news of the world and now the riots but I'm not really up to date on British politics. Do people really like Conservative Party, or are they pretty much going to be out of office the next time elections roll around?

[Sta]

The Phone hacking scandal was brought to justice after a few of the editors (/hackers) where sentenced to time in prison, so I guess that wasn't a mark on his campaign. The politicians had no effect on the riots until they where over (Aka: The police called all the shots throughout the riots, and the reason they did not use brute force or rubber bullets or tear gas or other shit was because their numbers didn't support the "tactics" the main police office had devised). There was actually a lot of shit between the head of police and the politicians because Cameron made the public believe it was him that authorised the level of force the police could use, but really it was a numbers issue. When the police had the men, they where confident they could contain the situation.

(that was all reported from the BBC, but you know that any company with the word "Corporation" in, it will be influenced by politics )

Edit: To answer your question in a few words: He's not doing bad. He will be in office for a few years I'd imagine.

[Atreides]

I guess my point was more that like... I really can't imagine that David Cameron is all that well-liked and popular among the people.

I know the phone hacking scandal isn't over, it's pretty much just beginning, and I know that by all accounts Rupert Murdoch's British media played a large part in getting Conservatives into power in the last elections... so much so that Cameron initially hired Andy Coulson (who previously worked at News of the World) to be his communications director. Do regular British people see Cameron as someone who got in bed with the media to facilitate his party's rise to power, or do people view the whole system as corrupt because all politicians in Britain regardless of party try to woo the media, or do they not care?

This was all on the heels of implementing a somewhat painful austerity program, my question here was whether Cameron has taken a hit among working people who feel unfairly squeezed by government cutbacks, or do they view it as something necessary that would have been even more painful had they elected Labour or the Lib Dems?

And with the riots now, I know he's been criticized for responding too late, from what I've heard on the news he was out of the country when the riots started. I guess I was wondering how people thought of this (come to think of it, didn't he cut another trip abroad short because of a different crisis recently?)... I mean in the US, President Bush's late response to Katrina was a huge blow to his popularity. My question here is how regular people feel about Cameron/politician's response to the crisis in general.

It seems to me like the guy has had to deal with a bunch of particularly tough challenges during his time as PM but I don't really know if people still like him or not lol

[Galkaeater]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14513517
lol

[Correction]

''the whites have become black''

[richardd]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14513517
lol

all apart of the plan

Spoiler: show

http://img16.imageshack.us/img16/6708/elphiscute.jpg

[Rocl]

WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU DO THAT

[Leva]

I said it first!

[Elvis]

Hey look, douchebag is back to troll the thread!

[Leva]

David Starkey for president

[Elvis]

A diaper filled with burnt indian food for president.

[Qalbert]

Nothing to see here, move along.