London's Burning
 

Also Birmingham. Also Liverpool. Also Manchester.

HEY! UK Dwellars, check in *please*!!!


http://globalvoicesonline.org/2011/0...urning-videos/

http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2011/...t_8609072.html

what the fucking fuck?

V... I'm not in England ( altho Mrs. G is from London way ) .. but we were both up late last night watching the news....

Don't know if you've read the background on this but the "tinder spark" was the Police shooting of a black man Thursday night, under what is being termed suspicious circumstance.

What was designed as a peaceful protest / vigil outside of the police HQ in the town where that happened turned into full scale rioting and looting... in the victims name.

since then what has been termed as recreational rioting has broken out in scattered parts of the city, and now last night in many different cities.

I personally doubt that any of these kids rioting and looting could name the man that was killed by police or even know he existed.... they are out only for a, pardon the expresssion, good time.

my opinion : break out the tear gas and the water canons.

It's pretty horrible.

Watching the news it was just surreal.

It's like an orgy of violence and looting. What's disturbing is that so many of them are young, like really young.

Some of it seems to be due to the major disconnect between the police and the youngsters in these communities. This is the 'lost generation'. Interestingly, what appears to have sparked off at least one of the riots was apparently the police stop and searching a young lad (whom they then let go having found nothing). This seems to be a real grievance of young people now is that they are the ones being subjected to excessive stop and search these days.

Not that that's an excuse for rioting through the streets and setting fire to people's cars and property. But there are some serious questions that need asking about the relationship between police and the communities involved, particularly the youth.

I don't think it's a coincidence that this is happening when confidence in the Met is at an all time low. I'm not wholly sure what is at the root of this, but the police have one hell of a job on their hands in regaining confidence. I think the shooting just sat as an unfortunate symbol of a much deeper malaise.

Can't add anything to what Grynch and Dana said. Checking in as asked, so far it is all quite a long way from where I am.

now THIS is my kinda place ....
http://gawker.com/5829018/michelin+s...rs-share-booze

Michelin-Starred Restaurant Staff Scare Looters, Share Booze

The kitchen staff at the Ledbury went beyond their call of duty by rushing up from the kitchen with rolling pins, fry baskets, and other dangerous kitchen tools and scared off the looters




also.. tonnes of stories on Facebook about groups organizing clean up of the streets and setting up food pantries for people that lost all due to fires.... the spirit of the Blitz lives on.

My father (now deceased) was British but became a US citizen in the 50's once told me that the British used to not have too many issues with public unrest because there was always a war every few years and then and the lower classes were always sent off to the front lines of battle and their ranks were thinned out enough that you didn't hear much from them until the next war.... and then they were gone again.

"Hey Mum, I'm just going to step out and do some looting. Cheers."

Where are these kids' parents?

We live up to the expectations people have of us.

thank you for checking in... one still absent... grrrr...


I listen pretty regularly to the BBC World Service, last night it was wall to wall coverage with one short exception which I can't remember just now. Anyhow, there was a statement by Cameron, ending with "Now, if you'll excuse me, there's work to be done." He characterized it as simple unacceptable criminality. I also heard one theory, swiftly rebutted, that there was an undercurrent of dissatisfaction over deep cuts to social programs, especially for youth. The (police officer?) local observer scoffed saying these kids would be pushed back by the police, and then jump in their souped up GTIs and scooting away a few blocks where the drivers would talk on their mobiles to reorganize their mates.

Astonishingly, there was an interview with a couple of girls, one was seventeen, who had participated, not just spectators, in the rioting and looting. These are kids, just kids really. They were typically difficult to comprehend, plus they were still a little drunk on rose wine, but they (thought they) were sticking it to the man (my phrase, their sentiment). "It's the government, innit?" They thought they were showing those who had money that they could do what they wanted. The reporter pointed out to the girls that shop keepers in the area are not really likely to be "rich". Seriously, why loot a nail shop? The booze, the clothes and electronics I can understand, though not condone.

The best program was World Have Your Say (I think) and the reporter was sitting with a handful of folks around a kitchen table in a house in Hackney. It was quite a free for all. Many thoughts were expressed, and the responsibilities of the parents to take charge of their kids was prominent. Teachers were also mentioned as influencers of these youth.

I see that an individual can feel taken advantage of, that they're not getting what they deserve. This is an uncomfortable feeling, and in their resentment and their desire for retribution, recompense they look to blame "the other". I believe that this blaming the other works for the rioters, the shop owners, the cops, the politicians, everybody. It's so much easier to see the motes in their eyes (myself included). But the only way out of any of this is to see through the others' eyes. Each side's story contains some truth. Work with that, listen to and validate that. At a minimum, you can't riot and empathize at the same time.

footfootfoot, that's true. it's also true that we live down to others' expectations of us.

Have high expectations.

Some snips from here: http://old.news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110...u_britain_riot

Power to the people! Chocolate and ice cream for everyone! :rolleyes:

ohh.. frig......
just saw a facebook message from a friend

"omg, it's started down here now" ( eastbourne )

gonna be another long night

Viciousness in the kitchen!

Seriously, never f*ck with the cooks. They're all coked-up and have cleavers.

as always, the fight for the narrative will be dirtier than the fight in the streets

Take away News of the World and the kids have nothing left to read. What did they expect?

Take away the full frontal nude on page 3 and the really nasty ones will get angry.

I'm thinking this might be a bad idea to burn down your neighborhood stores and loot and rob from the very business owners that serve your community. Those business people should do what they did in Watts in the riots in LA in the 1960's, close up shop and let the place turn into a slum.

That's so true, Toad.

just heard the phrase "social media rioting"

also discussion about twitter and blackberry messenger as chief tools for the hooligans' reconnoitering. Up til now, the cops always had better communication. No more. There was some talk about the cops being able to go to the providers and ask for access to the messages but that was described as unrealistic to intercept or sever the communication of every user that transmitted the word "riot" or whatever. Good thing, that shit scares me even more.

Remember when a flash mob was just a bunch of geeks doing something cute and interesting?

I was at a local really huge mall when police got a tip that it was due to be hit by one of the bad kinds of flash mobs. There were police from three or four local jurisdictions providing a visible presence ... and the flash mob was either never a real threat, or they chickened out.

This is Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrats and Deputy Prime Minister:

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/...ife-ch-006.jpg

His party is one of the two parties currently governing as a coalition. The other party of course being the Conservative, or 'Tory' party.

In 2010, when Nick Clegg was campaiging against the Conservatives he gave this interview:

Has anyone heard from Sundae since this mess started? I'm not sure how close she actually is to it, but I'm getting worried.

She's a fair old way away, Clod. Though it is likely to be upsetting to her because of her connection to and affection for the city.

Horrible seeing Manchester and Salford erupting as well.

I was living in Salford in the 90's during a period of rioting, and the big carpet store up the road went up in flames. Seeing it again on the screen but on such a larger scale is not pleasant.

No known dwellars (that I can recall) live within the borders of London or in any of the affected cities.

Turns out by the way, that the initial reports that came out suggesting that Duggan had fired at the police and a bullet from his gun lodged in a police officer's radio have proved false. There was a gun at the scene, which police say belonged to Duggan, and that's what he fired. But that gun it appears is a replica of some sort and not able to fire the kinds of bullets that were at the scene, and the bullet in the radio is from a Police issue gun.

There's also been some trouble in Leeds apparently.

Whats happening is pretty incomprehensible to me. When I was a teenager, or even now, I would never think of random violence as a way to respond to an act of violence by the police, or as a way to respond to government action I don't approve of. I honestly don't see how this is going to help anything at all.
I feel bad for all of the innocent victims of this who are losing their business and sometimes their homes. I can understand it happening once and a mob just losing its ability to think rationally and go berserk, but the fact that its spreading and continuing to happen, shows to me that those involved have no rationality or empathy for those that they are hurting the most....their own peers, regular people just trying to get by.

Regardless of whether he fired at police, if he displayed a gun, or what appeared to be a gun, the police response of deadly force was justified.

On this side of the pond, anyway.

The police said he had a gun and fired at them first. Now it would seem he never fired a gun at all. And some witnesses have suggested that the gun which was found at the scene was actually found inside a sock. If that's the case then he may not have had it in his hand at all.

First of all, since when did beat cops in the UK start carrying guns.

Second, police issue bullet in the radio? Where these guys part of some sort of exchange program with the Chicago PD?:right:

Follow the axiom of Military Intel reports.... the first report is always suspect.

has anyone noticed the racial aspects of this? seems the victim was black and supposedly the majority of rioters are too. seems similar to the riots after the rodney king incident.

btw if somebody points a gun at me, don't expect me to wait to see if it is real or not!!

of course it's a bad idea, but I've got another (bad) idea... why don't you go out into the street and tell the rioters what they are doing is wrong.

report back to me in the morning please.

Sarge, that was true for the intial riot(s) but now there is a very mixed race crowd.. mostly kids from what I see on TV, many simply out for a bit of... what was kid on TV called......fun.

:mad:

How can this be happening in England? At some point that's a question that requires some attention.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england...ngham-14471405

Three men killed in Birmingham.

Pictures from around the country. These are tiny pockets but they are happening in several major cities. The picture of Salford makes me want to cry.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14471098

I saw a couple on tv being interviewed. They'd come here from Sri Lanka in the early 90s and built up a grocery store. Thye had building's insurance, but not contents insurance (maybe they were only just keeping in profit and couldn't afford it, i dunno.) and their store has been looted of everything. Including the tills. They've lost in excess of £50k and are now ruined.

They showed on the news yesterday people being helped out of burning buildings, one person seemed to be leaping from the flames.

Some of the rioters are as young as 10 and 11.

I can kind of understand what they mean by that. I think we dismiss this as simple criminality at our peril. And just because they can't necesarily articulate their grievance doesn't mean there isn't one. Whatever they think it is that they are doing, they are definately expressing something that runs very deep and has been boiling under the surface for a while now.

About three or four months ago, my ward colleagues and I were discussing a local housing estate in our ward. We were considering ways in which the various partner organisations in the area could try and off-set the growing sense of alienation and helplessness that was starting to set in. It feels like a powder keg, and one of the things that makes it feel that way is how the young people of the estate are starting to behave. There's just an intangible sense of escalation in tension. An electricity in the air, part hopelessness, part excitable destruction.

Obviously we were discussing some more concrete issues, and expected issues as the cuts start to bite and people start losing their homes and as unemployment starts to rise alongside shrinking assistance programmes. But we'd all noticed that frisson.

I was 18 when the country went into recession and the housing boom bust. I'd spent the previous few years being educated in a system that was underfunded to the point that pupils had to share text books, 3 to a book. With the flow of classes intermittently disturbed by teacher strikes. I watched tv as a kid and there were always strikes. And people shouting at each other across picket lines. Police attacking miners, miners shouting at scabs. The army on fire-fighting duty in the Green Goddess, because the Firemen were on strike. Far-right parties marching in town centres and their bootboys spraying swastikas on walls.

Major miscarriages of justice and the police implicated in racist, or homophobic killings. Trust in the police was not high. You trusted the guy who walked about your neighbourhood, but the organisation was not trusted and the racism of the institution was pretty widely accepted.

There were no jobs to go to. What jobs were on offer were awful, low-paid, insecure and hard fought for. And politicians on the telly were all sternly telling us off for not having one.

Meanwhile, the consumer culture was in full swing. The gap between the haves and have nots was at an all time high (now massively expanded). Tv and movies, adverts and schoolfriends, all high-lighted that gap constantly. Shiny, shiny, success and happiness cheek by jowl with hard-edged poverty. Somewhere in the middle where most of us lived things just felt really insecure.

At 18 was a bit of a nihilist. I wanted to tear it all down. Fuck the whole thing up so it has to be built anew. I'd have been watching these reports with a kind of horrified satisfaction back then. It would have felt right. Like, the world really is fucked up, and now we're just seeing what that really looks like. Because this is what it actually feels like.



And I remember the sense of escalation and *thinks* energy and invincibility and rightness that enveloped me when the poll tax demo turned into a riot. Scary at first but then, completely right.

This may not look political. And to many of the individuals involved it may not feel 'political'. But it is. It isn't the articulate political expression of a demonstration against political policies, it's more of a primal yell.

Excellent analysis Dana.

Thank you, Dana, for helping those of us across the pond to better understand what's happening.

Dana, from the little I can gather about life in England it seems that there is a huge gulf between the haves and the have nots, there also seems to be a fairly strong degree of learned helplessness among the lower class. I can imagine that after a point if one feels there is no hope or point or chance of improving one's lot, then it's every man for himself and god against all.

again, I base this on nothing but inference.

Interesting photo I came across....

Beat cops are not armed in the UK. The police who shot and killed Duggan, were members of the elite CO19 unit of the Met Police. There are special units who are armed and able to respond to situations where an armed response may be needed. This is actually probably one reason why the country gets very upset when the police kill someone by mistake. It happens very rarely, but every time it does it is a massive issue. Unfortately the police press machine does itself no favours in such instances. Their first strategy is pretty muich always both to heap laurels on the bravery of the police concerned and effect a character assasination of the deceased in order to place the blame for the death onto the victim. Those close to the case know instantly that this is not the truth and the anger starts at that level. Then the details start to come out and the gulf between the intial reports and the reality sparks national anger and concern.

The Menenez killing was a classic example.
Initial reports said that they'd been watching him for some time, that they knew he was likely to be carrying a bomb, that he had been wearing a hoodie and a backpack, that the police went into the subway station after him and shouted at him to stop, and that on hearing that warning he ran and vaulted the ticket barrier, rushing onto the platform and boarding the train that was there.

The police followed him onto the train dragged him from his seat and put several bullets into him before he had a chance to set off any device.

The only part of that story that turned out to be true was the bit about him being dragged from his seat and shot several times. No hoodie, no backpack, no shouyed warning, no running, no vaulting ticket barrier, no suspicious behaviour on the part of Menenez whatsoever. The house they'd been watching as part of an anti-terror surveillance operation was subdivided into flats, and they followed the wrong resident.

Interestingly, the photo that featured on the front pages of most of the newspapers and which had been provided, I think, by the police, darkened his skin tone.

Anyway, back OT:

Here. I found a really interesting article about the situation on the New York Times website. I found it interesting because I like to see how events here are viewed over the Pond. But it also discusses the whole riot response and armed/unarmed policing issue.

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/201...ront-lines/?hp


It's not entirely fair to say they are 'unarmed', as they do have batons, but most of them have no firearms.

All this trouble, just because the Brits refuse to wear tin foil hats while solar flares generate interference affecting the minds of susceptible citizens. I watched the videos of the riots and noted that not one rioter was wearing a tin foil hat. The facts of the matter are evident.

As you can see in my profile pic, I'm always prepared for solar flares!!!

Here is a comment from my trade union site which makes some valid points,

PCS statement on the UK riots
9 August 2011

Thousands of our members live and work in the communities that have been hit by the vandalism and looting of recent days. Tragically many people have lost their homes, and many more their workplace, potentially their job and income too.

We echo the words of the Fire Brigades Union, “these events illustrate the bravery and commitment of London’s firefighters, and the entire capital will be grateful to them”. Our emergency services in London and other cities have once again shown that they play a vital role in protecting the public.

Public sector workers, from police community support officers to welfare advisers and from teachers to youth workers, will have a huge role to play in rebuilding and in maintaining a sense of community. The government has spent recent months disrespecting these workers and attacking their jobs, pensions and pay; it is time for that to stop and for them to recognise their valuable contribution to society.

As communities clear up, we have to step back and recognise these disturbances did not happen in a vacuum. It is not condoning violence to say that simply dismissing this as 'mindless criminality' is to give up on our responsibility to look for causes and solutions.

Youth unemployment is at its highest level on record, and further and higher education costs are set to soar. Public services are being slashed in many communities with councils cutting youth services and eligibility to housing. Welfare cuts and privatisation mean jobcentres are being closed and benefit cuts are causing anguish and hardship to many.

Our society is more unequal than at any point since the 1930s. There will be those who will call for tougher sentencing and more police powers, but these will not solve the very deep problems facing our country. As PCS has argued, we need investment to create the jobs and build the infrastructure that our communities need.

We should also resist attempts to demonise young people in general. They have been the biggest victims of this recession. The lawlessness of the financial and political elites is a much larger problem that our society must address.

In the coming days and weeks, we must address the complex issues that have led to the recent days' incidents across London and elsewhere, and caused so many to be rightly shocked and appalled.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Now i have no idea if the riots were in anyway political or just something that got way out of hand but similar riots happened in Greece after some other kid got shot recently and i remember the70's and early 80's and the riots in Brixton, Toxteth and the poll tax riots, seems there was another Tory Govt then also making huge welfare cuts, history repeating itself again, who knows?

Thanks for that be-bop. Last time I saw burning cars in Salford was in the early 90s.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england...ester-14478498

Oh, well that'll help the situation no end, making a bunch of families homeless. Can't see how that could possibly backfire and cause greater social unrest and public expense.

This sort of thing really pisses me off. Because, see, here's the deal: local councils have legal obligations when it comes to little things like ensuring children are not homeless or in other dangerous situations. All the councils are doing by following this line is to shunt these families out of the stable (however deprived) setting of a council house and into the unstable setting of hostels, guest houses and other comparatively expensive forms of temporary accomodation.

If these kids are already disconnected from society, then throwing them and their families out to try and survive on family's floors, and shared lodgings, disrupting whatever structures do exist within their homelife and probably interrupting their education, possibly necessitating a change of school due to moving to a new area, is not going to help anybody. It's just Look Tough nonsense. 'Common sense responses' that are anything but.

Saw a Manchester woman vox-popped on the news, and one of the things she said was: well, they've been labelled scum, so now they're acting like scum.

There's been a near constant narrative in the last 5-10 years in the tabloid media and within political discourse, of 'feral youth' and 'broken Britain'. I've seen some interesting statistics about youth crime and youths as victims of crime, and some interesting survey results on perceptions of crime. Basically, the fear of youth crime far outweighs its incidence rate in people's perceptions. And by far the most common victims of youth crime, are other young people.

Despite the regular caveats thrown in about this not being 'all' young people. but a minority, the tone of the media and political analysis has actually served to suggest the opposite. And the responses to problems have at times been ridiculously heavy handed. I have to say my own party was responsible for some of that when they were in government. The anti-social behaviour order, known as an 'asbo' are an incredibly blunt instrument in judicial terms, and whilst many are fairly harmless, some have done real social harm.

Changes in policing, and in how children are treated if they end up coming to the attention of the authorities have both helped and hindered. We're more likely to identify those young people in vulnerable situations, but we're also more likely to criminalise them at a much earlier, and in some cases inappropriate stage. Petty nonsense that 20 years ago would have had you being taken back to home and handed to your parents by a policeman, but not actually booked as an incident, now ends up with an official caution, and the tentative beginnings of involvement with the criminal justice system.

We incarcerate more young people than anywhere else in Europe. We place them under constant surveillance. If they gather in groups larger than 3 or 4 the police can and will intervene to disperse them. The police might be doing all sorts of outreach work, and running all manner of football and boxing clubs, but they're also the ones stopping young people and searching them whnen all they're doing is hanging about the street.

Hanging about is something young people like to do. I used to like to do it too. Hanging about in a group and larking around. Now, there's always been a battle of wills at the edges of that activity, with raucous behaviour bringing calls to be quiet, go home, stop being a nuisance, and maybe a cop coming over to tell you off and warn you to behave yourelves. But there used to be a general acceptance that whilst it wasn't desirable as a full time occupation, hanging about was something most kids were going to do and we were pretty much left alone to do it if we didn't get in anyone's way.

Now, the very sight of a group of youngsters raises tension, and even if they aren't actually doing anything wrong there's a good chance they'll be interrupted and possibly dispersed by police. Not the case everywhere, but definately the case in a lot of places.

The idea of hanging about on the street is a bit odd to me. I know teenagers like to congregate, but - at least in my experience myself and with my kids - they'll usually do it at someone's house, or at a sporting event. Occasionally they'll take themselves down to the shops to feed their faces, but other than that, you don't generally see groups of kids just hanging around 'making a nuisance of themselves'.

I think the fact that this is seen as the norm in the UK points to a bigger social issue really if the kids don't feel happy and better off to be hanging about at their own homes or the homes of friends.

I'm not saying we don't have social issues here, just that the idea of just hanging about aimlessly is a problem I think. Boredom leading to trouble is the most likely outcome from what I can see.

Much of it is most likely to do with the fact that we have much smaller houses in the UK than in most other countries, and that is doubly so in the innercity areas. The middle-class paradigm, which tends to involve bigger houses and kids all having their own space, is one of kids not being out on their own much, and mainly playing with their friends in bedrooms, on playstations. This has been a source of much concern as we ponder the less active generation and the less independant kids whose parents remember hanging about the streets entertaining themselves outside :p

The working-class paradigm, which tends to involve smaller houses, often with kids sharing bedrooms, and much less social space for the kids to hang out in, is one of kids hanging around outside congregating at bus shelters, or street corners with handy seat level walls etc.; then possibly having a kickabout of a football in a carpark.

Well maybe there needs to be more sporting and cultural programs in place for these kids. Youth centres or what you might call them where there are a variety of activities available.

I understand what you're saying about space being a factor, and I guess we're lucky here in that most people do have a yard to play in or hang about in even if the house is small.

Still though, it's a shame that kids can't just plop down in front of the telly or at the kitchen table or whatever.

I hope the situation there is not so bad that it's beyond the point of no return. Aside from the current riots which will hopefully peter out when they get bored of it.

Unfortunately youth programmes and facilities have been shrinking for some time. And I don;t see local councils being able to initiate much more for them, given they're attempting to effect massive budget cuts across the board.

I think it's so sad that the kids feel they have nothing better to do than destroy other people's lives. I'm sure they disassociate themselves from that actual thought when they're in the process.

Honestly, I just want to give them all a big hug and tell them there's a better way to live, but I'm realistic enough to realize they'd probably punch me in the face for my trouble.

Youngsters have always hung around on street corners an bus shelters, and kicked footballs around carparks, and drunk cider in secret, down by the kiddy play park (this is amost a unversal :p) in Britain. But they haven't always rioted.

And this is more than just social deprivation, or boredom. Amongst the rioters arrested last night, were a grammar school girl (so either wealthy enough to pay for private education, or clever enough to pass the 11+ and gain a scholarship) and a teaching assistant.

Yeah, but just because they've always done it doesn't mean it's the best thing for them to be doing.

I know I come from a very different culture, but if I knew my kids were hanging around aimlessly, I'd be finding them something to do. I know this because when we first moved here, Aden got hooked up with a group of kids that do just hang around the streets. He got himself into a bad situation, but was lucky enough to have us to help him find a better way. He's never looked back, and he's so much happier now. I can go into details if you like.

Tonight a group of the rioters blamed it on the "rich", and these were their neighbors. The business people who served their communities, again, pull out and let them rot. See how that works out for them.

I remember the first time I clapped eyes on British punkers -- would have been down Bath way, around 1984. The whole ensemble and the worldview it symbolized was strikingly off-kilter -- an excrescence of Euro-socialism and of the welfare state, even then.

It was not merely distasteful philosophically, it was ugly-looking too. ("They ductaped me into a chair to give me this hairstyle. Then they boxed my ears a few times to impart a properly scroungy air.") And the scrounginess was widespread. Had to get up into Scotland and a year and more later to see any of it done with style -- scrounginess now being refreshingly absent, at least up there.

The sort of thing we're hearing now seems of a piece with that. The root cause of this is the existence of the welfare state. Absent that and things will freshen right up.

Marx outlined and theorized what caused this -- and it's a purely European idea, this classist thinking, this rigidity. Marx could not have come up with the error he did had he lived in America. But he didn't make it that far west.

Now it comes home to roost. England may have the best chance at turning from welfarism to a libertarian paradigm, as much of the libertarian philosophical literature is in English.

How does a country that tries to give it's people everything, free healthcare, generous retirement benefits, strong union representation, all those utopian ideals of the American Left end up in such disarray? Anyone? What? they didn't give enough? Maybe they need to raise more taxes and redistribute more of the wealth, that should fix it. Obviously taxes are not high enough.

I think part of the problem is that there are too many people taking handouts and not enough putting back into the system. The state can't afford decent education because of all the money spent on housing and healthcare etc, and many people never learn enough to get themselves out of the cycle.

This issue is going to take a long time to resolve and I think the people of the UK are going to have change the way they think for that to happen.

I don't necessarily agree with the way healthcare etc is run in the US or even Aus, but there's got to be a way to help those in need but exclude those who want to leech off the system.