Riots

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Comments

  • edited 9:32AM
    Ali: the police don't want anyone charged for riot, as it would make them liable for the damages suffered.
  • edited 9:32AM
    Way back on page one of this thread I recommended The Spirit Level as a tool for understanding this ever more complicated, ever more depressing scenario. On page 5 of today's Islington Tribune one of the co-authors, Richard Wilkinson, is interviewed, and the article gives you some idea of the central argument of the book. He excuses the rioters almost totally, which will stick in most throats, including mine, but I still think his analysis comes closest, and would be the right basis for planning a way forward. Fat chance, at present, of course.
  • edited August 2011
    This is spot on: Peter Oborne, yesterday's Telegraph. "The culture of greed and impunity we are witnessing on our TV screens stretches right up into corporate boardrooms and the Cabinet. It embraces the police and large parts of our media. It is not just its damaged youth, but Britain itself that needs a moral reformation." What I've been saying.

    <a href="http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/peteroborne/100100708/the-moral-decay-of-our-society-is-as-bad-at-the-top-as-the-bottom/">The moral decay of our society is as bad at the top as the bottom </a>

    This is currently one of the most shared links on my Facebook, and interesting that every person sharing it is on the left. Why aren't the wonks from the Guardian and the Labour Party talking more about this? Afraid of taking a moral stand? Interesting that it takes a commentator from a Conservative newspaper to solidly challenge the morality of venal politicians, big business, corporations etc who actually run the show.......
  • edited 9:32AM
    Will: hasn't Cameron already said that Riot Act compensation will apply, and even tripled the usual deadline for applications? Which is great for little shops and people whose homes have burned down, obviously, but I imagine the bulk of the funds released will be bloody Vodafone et al ripping off the UK taxpayer, again.
  • edited 9:32AM
    but isn't that the point - that they can only claim riot compensation if there have been rioters, and absent convictions for rioting...?
  • edited 9:32AM
    That certainly isn't my reading of eg <a href="http://www.politics.co.uk/opinion-formers/association-of-british-insurers-abi/article/abi-uk-insurance-industry-welcomes-prime-minister-s-compensa">this</a> and I think if he makes a statement like that, then weasels out on the exact charges being applied, he'll get crucified.
  • edited 9:32AM
    The [Riot (Damages) Act](http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Vict/49-50/38) compensation will apply regardless of whether people have been arrested or convicted of rioting or any other offence. Police probably haven't been arresting people for rioting as its more likely to require a snatch squad which takes people off the front line. Its generally easier to convict someone for theft/robbery if you catch them red-handed. The maximum sentence for these is fairly stiff (7 yrs/life) and, unlike for the rioting offence, you don't need to prove that there were 12+ rioters present.
  • edited 9:32AM
    ah, fair enough.

    i've since heard adgs that rioting is very hard to prove, as you need to show a common purpose between 12 or more different people, and that is why it hasn't been charged.
  • edited 9:32AM
    Missed the whole thing as just back from Tunisia where a fair ammount of time was spent in the hotel room watching with horror at the scenes unfolding on bbc world.

    I have spent the last 20 years working with deprived and often difficult families, and teenagers in particular, the kinds of families repeatedly mentioned in Cameron's speech today. In the past year service after service has been cut to the point that since April we have not been able to offer much more than tea and sympathy, for example to a sixteen year old who had been thrown out of her home by her mother who had severe mental health problems and who had eaten one meal a day for the past 3 days because she still managed to get herself to school where she got lunch. There seems to be an impression that youth services just provide a few pool tables for a couple of hours in the evening. Youth services did far more than this, but the work they did was not seen by much of the community because why would you? You weren't using the services. It is also true to say these services were always a sticking plaster. They made lives most of us would find unbearable bearable for periods of time and they also acted as a valve to release some of the pressures on families with complex problems.

    I have also read The Spirit Level and found the empirical evidence offered on the relationship between inequality and societal problems compelling. The comparison between the immorality of bankers, MPs etc isn't lost on these kids either many of whom have expressed feelings that they are paying for a situation that they in no way created. There is huge anxiety about cuts in EMA and the increase in fees for kids who have been repeatedly told that education is their way out. TIme and again I have heard kids express feelings of despair that doors are closing on them. The combination of unavailable / unaffordable housing, low pay and unemployment makes their future seem insurmountable. This is the one major change I have noticed over the 20 years of doing this work, whereas young people, even those in dire condidtions, used to be generally optimistic that their lives would get better in the future (even if they had no idea how that was going to happen) that optimism is no longer the norm.
  • edited 9:32AM
    Siolae- Careful, you seem to be on the point of turning into a dirty pinko. It is not lost on me that Cameron gave his last speech in North Oxfordshire where not having 500 acres is considered poor. He cannot admit that budgetary cuts will have adverse effects as that would leave him with no options. I work in eduction where the previous government's spending has given both impetus and hope to inner city schools. I dread to think what the next few years will bring. Capitalism has a constant tendency towards crisis and the Tories only hope would be a growth in GDP. Think this will happen soon? Me neither, get a job with a hedge fund and speculate on doom!
  • edited August 2011
    *applauds both taff bach and Siolae*
  • AliAli
    edited 9:32AM
    interesting comment <http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/16/evict-rioters-families>; Does make you wonder if you want to live in this country
  • edited 9:32AM
    Wow. Powerful stuff. The article is a brief account of what a horrible place Britain has become. But where shall we move to, Ali? To some extent I agree with my good friend The Commissar: wherever there is capitalism, there is cruelty, violence, greed, injustice, poverty, etc,etc. I'm depressed.
  • edited 9:32AM
    "wherever there is capitalism, there is cruelty, violence, greed, injustice, poverty, etc,etc"

    And wherever there is communism, there's all of the above in even greater quantities.
  • edited 9:32AM
    As far as I am concerned there isn't and never has been any communism. Anywhere. I'm not a communist, by the way. A decent welfare state, such as we once had here, would do me fine, warts and all. What do you think of the article?
  • edited 9:32AM
    Interesting piece and life in Britain is nicely turned on its head there. However, like much of the Guardian now it is fatally undermined by seeming set up to score a political point against the Tories while ignoring any part the previous Government has played.

    Which is one of the reasons why after years of enjoying the Guardian, I really struggle to read it now, as its relentless bias makes it infuriating.

    The first paragraph is fundamentally deceptive.

    'Ponder, for a moment, the second-most unequal country in Europe. Its prime minister, who failed to win an outright majority, heads a government whose cabinet contains several millionaires, and embarks upon an ideologically driven economic policy against almost all international and professional advice.'

    It deliberately sets the first sentence about inequality and almost everything that follows against the wealth of the current cabinet. Highly disengenous. ONS figures show that while wealth rose overall for everyone, the gap between the rich and the middle and the poorest got noticeably bigger under the last Government.

    Secondly, 'an ideologically driven economic policy against almost all international and professional advice' - well that depends on your point of view doesn't it. It might be against 'all international and professional advice' of those who are anti-cuts or subscribe to Keynesian economics. But to paint it as a maverick move that no one in their right mind would ever approve of, is simply untrue. There are plenty who back the economic action being taken.

    One opinion example, the IMF has given its support to the economic policy. One markets example, UK ten-year gilt yields are at 2.54% (0.28% above German bunds). That's down towards the level of countries considered to have sound finances and no debt problems (and below France) not up there with the debt-ridden economies.

    That first sentence - the most important in any article - turns this into propaganda.

    Other minor issues are that:

    The previous Government was knee deep in not properly investigating phone hacking and fiddling expenses.

    The riots weren't political protests against an oppressive regime - they were mass looting and theft.

    Beyond that, on the point of the article I agree. Kicking families out of their council homes is wrong.
  • edited 9:32AM
    I am struggling to accept the justifications for the prison sentences for the men who incited a riot which never took place through facebook. Particularly given that the drug addicted driver in an uninsured car who killed a close friend of mine 10 years ago by mowing him down, in broad daylight on a straight road, got 2 years.
  • edited August 2011
    I’m broadly in favour of the Spirit Level evidence-led argument that increased material equality equals greater social solidarity and less crime, and that focussing on personal responsibility and zero-tolerance is insufficient (though not necessarily expendable). Free will isn’t what it’s cracked up to be after all.* for a moment allow me to put aside the (at least partly legitimate) ‘bankers are as bad as looters’ argument and focus on the ‘underclass’ who were on the front line that weekend. There is one factor that has been neglected in the post-riot debate, though it has been touched on in this group before – drug prohibition. If we accept the thesis that much of the looting was conducted by gangs who took the night off from their usual rivalries, and that the ultra-materialist, community-rejecting values promoted by these gangs and their fellow-travellers is an underlying factor, then we cannot ignore the black market economy that funds these gangs and finances the alternative lifestyle of the gang leaders/dealers who appear to have become alternative role models. Working on the assumption that we will never eradicate recreational drug use, this is yet another reason for reconsidering decriminalisation and regulation. Now, there are those who will say that the illegality of drugs is a just end in itself, and damn the enormous negative consequences of prohibition. But it strikes me that this argument is the same as that made by the dufus in the crowd on Question Time last week, who – when repeatedly told that cancelling looter’s benefits would demonstrably cause more harm than good by damaging families and forcing them into a life of crime without likelihood of rehabilitation – simply kept repeating “well they should have thought of that before”. To my mind, this issue falls under the purview of good-ol’ utilitarian liberalism and the handy harm principle. Arky *See philosopher-neurobiologist Sam Harris (who everyone should be reading right now) on free will: <http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/morality-without-free-will/>; <http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/free-will-why-you-still-dont-have-it/)> And on drugs: <http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/drugs-and-the-meaning-of-life/>;
  • AliAli
    edited 9:32AM
    Papa, I guess it might have been better to describe the Millionaires as mainly ones who have inherited or married into it. I am not sure of how many of them have earned it. Because if they did in a legit way then no problem. Ed Milliband has put his hands up to the fact that the last government made quite a few mistakes. It is getting bit rich to blame all this on the last lot. A lot what happened then was global and we should be gratefully that Gord didn’t let the banks fail ( which I think was the Tory view at the time) as I guess nobody would have been very pleased to find no money in the cash point the following Monday morning. On phone hacking this will be the downfall of Cameron (probably death through a thousand cuts as this proceeds) along with the 3 u turns that have taken place so far etc We have had this lot for nearly 18mths so surely they must be coming responsible for something? I would think any Tory who is contact with the real life must be starting to have doubt’s and certainly will be early next year when people on housing benefit who have it reduced have to leave their homes. There is plenty of evidence on here that flats are in demand and no landlord is going to reduce rents because the government thinks it should
  • edited 9:32AM
    @Ali Tony Benn is a millionaire through inheritance. I wonder if you think that made him an illegitimate minister, or did you concentrate on his ideology alone? Gordon Brown may very well have done a good job of saving the banks, but they needed to be saved because the UK (under Brown) and the US allowed their banks to go nuts. Brown may have felt compelled to give The City a free reign in order to maintain its primacy, but in retrospect this is looking like a Big Fail, isn’t it? Labour were still blaming everything on the Tories well into their second term… did you complain about that at the time, I wonder. The died-in-the-wool Tories are as narrowly ideological and partisan as you are Ali, and are unlikely to have doubts of the kind that you suggest, any more than they did in the 1980s when unemployment went through the roof and social solidarity unravelled before their eyes. If anything they think that Cameron isn’t cutting enough or sufficiently brutalising the underclass. Note his recent speech where he managed to blame the riots on health and safety legislation and the human rights culture. And look at the Tory bank-benchers, many of whom are focussed on freaking out about the EU becoming a superstate in response to the Euro crisis. Reality is not something these people process well.
  • edited 9:32AM
    Ali, We didn't have to go to the party. Not everyone did.

    A global credit boom, yes. But much of it was engineered and encouraged in London* by a laissez faire supposedly leftist Government that spent 15 years sucking up to the City and media barons and failed to put anything aside in all those consecutive quarters of growth - which were often driven by people remortgaging their homes for increasingly high amounts and spending the money on consumer crap - for when things went bad.

    I don't think a Cabinet's wealth, earned or inherited, matters and Brown's legacy on banks is cloudy: his personally engineered tie-up of the country's one decent bank Lloyds with its basket case HBOS has been a disaster.

    If as is suggested by the comment piece above the riots were about inequality, you cannot simply decide to ignore the fact that someone else was in government while that inequality was being increased.

    <a href="http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/1847.htm">*Excerpt Gordon Brown, Mansion House speech 2005</a>

    'Take financial services and capital markets: today Britain exports twice as much in business services as we import and four times as much in financial services.

    'And I want to congratulate businesses here on their drive, global competitiveness and innovation which have made the City of London alongside New York the leading financial centres of the world - London, the world’s largest foreign exchange market, the largest foreign equity market, the largest bond market - London's success born not out of serving a large domestic economy, but on winning the lion’s share of international business.

    ...And now the determination of the financial services authority to extend their risk-based approach of financial regulation that is both a light touch and a limited touch. '
  • edited 9:32AM
    @Papa L: Quite so. As I’ve said here before, a Labour Party that allows inequality to increase is without point or purpose. Until Milliband declares that his aim is to decrease inequality – and why – I’m deaf to his caterwauling. Even better, he should be talking about supporting global economic reform in order to create space for national governments to have more redistributive policies. As things stand we are a slave to The City, which can always threaten to move elsewhere as the global regime is so lax. At the moment we have three economically liberal parties with barely a tattered fig-leaf between them on national economic policy, which is why there is little or no point voting on economic grounds as things stand (nor has there been since the mid-90s).
  • AliAli
    edited 9:32AM
    Well I guess Tony Benn did get his call on System X wrong
  • edited 9:32AM
    I think that light/limited touch regulation is what got us where we are. It's the green light to the financiers. It's the Mandelson-inspired doctrine of the noughties ("we are intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich"). But the doctrine only applies to those who can take advantage of the system, e.g. those in the square mile. Financial markets plumb the depths when oversight is at its weakest. The lack of good regulation and a good regulator creates the stretch in society between those who are 'in' and those who are 'out'. Yes, wealth is created, but only by the few and at the expense of the many. This has been exacerbated cruelly by the financial crisis. You see expensive 4x4s with blacked out windows cruising down London's increasingly pot-holed streets. The riots are a natural extension of this. The culture has been devised as "buy, buy, buy", but falls down when there's nothing left in the pot, quickly becoming "take, take, take". Our brand of capitalism needs to be re-invented, because it is not democratic. To quote Thomas Friedman (unfortunately, subsequently paraphrased by Mandelson): "we need to get back to making stuff, based on real engineering not just financial engineering". Not perfect, but the German model anyone...
  • edited 9:32AM
    "Yes, wealth is created, but only by the few and at the expense of the many. This has been exacerbated cruelly by the financial crisis. You see expensive 4x4s with blacked out windows cruising down London's increasingly pot-holed streets."

    Sounds more like the gangster types I see going up and down Birnam Road.
  • AliAli
    edited 9:32AM
    I wonder where we would be now if we hadn’t had all that North Sea oil and gas since the late 1960s not sure how long that will last?
  • edited 9:32AM
    Every UK government has squandered our oil money. The Norwegians created a sovereign wealth fund that will top-up their welfare state in perpetuity.
  • edited 9:32AM
    'Every UK government has squandered our oil money. The Norwegians created a sovereign wealth fund that will top-up their welfare state in perpetuity.'

    Which pretty much sums up about 40 years of a complete lack of foresight that has plagued this country, despite many of the solutions appearing to be bleeding obvious. (Including the ones to the cursed potholes)
  • edited 9:32AM
    Fill the potholes with crushed bankers?
  • edited 9:32AM
    I think the bankers are filled with the same emptiness as the potholes
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