This is extraordinary stuff, and I would love to see tossers like Ken Livingstone or Darcus Howe (blaming this on the cuts, calling it an "insurrection" respectively) challenged to listen to these little shits and then stick by their views.
BBC correspondent Nick Ravenscroft spent the night in Manchester as police battled to keep control of the streets.
Looter: 'I'll keep going till I get caught'
Today Program
10/08/2011
The Manc scally stuff starts 1'00" in. Some choice parts are:
"Why are you gonna refuse the opportunity to get free stuff?"
"This is my first offence... I'll take a caution... the prison's are overcrowded. What are they gonna do, give me an ASBO? I can live with that".
Ravenscroft is virtually the only reporter who doesn't let these thugs' pathetic non-logic get off unchallenged. They blame the government - when Ravenscroft challenges, it turns out the only thing they can coherently blame the government for is... not being able to stop them looting.
Finally they answer the question of "if you know it's wrong, why are you doing it?" with the chilling "because everyone else is doing it".
Croydon riot girls boast that looting was 'good fun'
Metro
10/08/2011
Two teenage girls who took part in looting in Croydon boasted about grabbing ‘free things’ and said they hoped the riots would spread further.
The 17-year-olds were drinking stolen rosé wine at 9.30am yesterday as they laughed about the previous night’s disturbances in south London and made vague complaints about ‘rich people’.
One told the BBC: ‘Everyone was just on a riot, going mad, chucking things, chucking bottles – it was good, though.’
Her friend added: ‘Breaking into shops – it was madness, it was good fun.’
One of the girls bragged about ‘getting a couple of free things’, before insisting: ‘It’s the government’s fault. I don’t know. Conservatives, whoever it is. It’s the rich people who’ve got businesses and that’s why all this happened.’
They said further crimes would ‘hopefully’ follow.
4 comments:
I heard Livingstone on 5Live. He was excellent. A combination of righteous indignation at what was being done to the city he has spent his life serving (whatever you think of how effectively), and at the same time seeking to comprehend the circumstances which led to this current state of affairs.
He was, at no point, an apologist for or defender of the dickheads on the street (despite the attempts of the presenter to steer him in that direction). The exchange went along the lines of,
'You've said we should try to understand what's happened, that sounds like you are trying to defend the rioters'
KL - 'Well if you say that you're an idiot. I've condemmend them out of hand. But don't you think if we understand why it's happening we might be able to stop it happening in the future?'
And look at the circumstances: how can you not blame it on the cuts, and specifically on the management style of the Tories in power? We had a succession of riots under Thantcher and Major. We had 13 years of Labour in power, and despite mass public protest (Iraq, petrol prices, Cuntry[sic]side Alliance), no real streeet violence. Tories are back in, social welfare and support budgets are slashed, the police budgets are slashed, and hey presto, street riots. The riots are not political, but the circumstances promting the timing of them most certainly are.
If you ask my missus, she'll tell you I predicted this a few months ago (if we had a warm summer).
I think my friend Rick's done an excellent rabble-rousing piece on this (link below).
And is it not a dubious tactic for any card-carrying Labourite to make this discussion so party political, given that we are quite clearly dealing with "Blair's children" here...?
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liberate-me-ex-inferis
Rick Joshua Blog
August 15, 2011
It has taken a mass mobilisation of the police, a sudden move towards what looks like instant justice and the usual soundbites and mealy-mouthed proclamations, but it finally appears that the spate of urban unrest and looting – or this phase of it at least – is over. As the dust is beginning to settle on the broken streets of England’s cities, who or what to focus our attention on is beginning to dominate the political agenda. As usual, nobody can seem to agree on anything – which is somewhat dangerous in that if no agreement cannot be found at this stage, there is little hope for any satisfactory solution. While Prime Minister David Cameron has followed popular wisdom in focussing on the looters and rioters themselves, leader of the opposition Ed Miliband has decided to widen the scope by blaming last week’s madness on money-grabbing bankers and dishonest MPs.
more...
I'm reading this outstanding study right now:
Wasted - The betrayal of white working class and black Caribbean boys
Harriet Sergeant
Centre for Policy Studies
27 November 2009
I found it following up on the superb lead article by the same author in the Sunday Times News Review yesterday. Unfortunately the bloody ST is now subscription only, which for me is a reason not to buy the rag (when I do buy a paper I pretty much always wanna post something from the online edition).
A brief summary of "Wasted" so far (I'm not that far in) is that there are three chief inputs to the delinquency of the black & white underclass - lack of male role models, poor schools, no jobs. And so far the key of those seems to be poor schools, in particular the failure to teach so many 7-year old boys how to read. This is especially grievous in view of the existence of phonics, a proven system of teaching reading, that is deliberately rejected in the face of evidence by a dogmatic teaching profession.
This appalling failure is both the responsibility of all UK govts in the last few decades, and above all of the left/liberal teaching establishment.
That opportunity exists in this country is clear from the experience of many recent Eastern European immigrants. One young Pole I interviewed for a previous report was then sharing a room in Ealing, barely able to speak English and working for the minimum wage. Four years later, he has opened a beauty salon in St John’s Wood. But then, as [gang member] Dave pointed out bitterly, ‘The Poles have not been through our education system.’ No doubt when their children do, they will have the same problems as our black Caribbean and white working class boys.
Am reading about benefits traps now. All ImpDecers should give it a butcher's.
P Hitchens on the london riots:
Bitter laughter is my main response to the events of the past week. You are surprised by what has happened? Why? I have been saying for years that it was coming, and why it was coming, and what could be done to stop it.
I have said it in books, in articles, over lunch and dinner tables with politicians whose lips curled with lofty contempt.
So yes, I am deeply sorry for the innocent and gentle people who have lost lives, homes, businesses and security. Heaven knows I have argued for years for the measures that might have saved them.
But I am not really very sorry for the elite liberal Londoners who have suddenly discovered what millions of others have lived with for decades. The mass criminality in the big cities is merely a speeded-up and concentrated version of life on most large estates – fear, intimidation, cruelty, injustice, savagery towards the vulnerable and the different, a cold sneer turned towards any plea for pity, the awful realisation that when you call for help from the authorities, none will come.
Just look and see how many shops are protected with steel shutters, how many homes have bars on their windows. This is not new.
As the polluted flood (it is not a tide; it will not go back down again) of spite, greed and violence washes on to their very doorsteps, well-off and influential Left-wingers at last meet the filthy thing they have created, and which they ignored when it did not affect them personally.
No doubt they will find ways to save themselves. But they will not save the country. Because even now they will not admit that all their ideas are wrong, and that the policies of the past 50 years – the policies they love – have been a terrible mistake. I have heard them in the past few days clinging to their old excuses of non-existent ‘poverty’ and ‘exclusion’." full article here
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