Hot weather, injustices in each direction, and it’s kicking off. Politicians trying to sound like a stern headmaster never convince me, any more than the headmaster did. From months of apathy and boring keyboard belligerence, to numbskulls using a significant mass killing by a mentally disordered offender to shift the concern from poorly managed mental disorder in the community, to the beefs stirred-up and aggravated by bad actors on social media. When people are angry and upset, telling them “you’re wrong, now go home” is generally an excellent way to REALLY piss them off. Are the folk kicking off correct to object to the two-tier system they claim means immigrants get away with offending in a way the dispossessed white working class are not? Is this one of those situations where there is a conflict between fair and equal?
More trouble every day
by 101 Comments
Similar unrest targeting a minority group and their businesses happened years ago in Germany. Thankfully the Nazis came into power and sorted it out, as my friend Nigel mentioned to me the other day. He said they are dismissing these people as racist thugs but we’ve got to listen to them and their ill informed excuses for violence and stealing electronic goods for they can help us billionaires and our need for power.
The master race never look much cop, it must be said. It’s the apathy that enables them. No evidence of apathy today, so after a few burned dustbins and broken windows, i expect them to slink away, and their children won’t have a problem, the situation always having been like this for them. Do hope no more bloodshed, though.
“Description of the assailant, officer?”
“White, male, slap-head.”
Good luck with that, Miss Marple.
The way these disturbances have been reported is concerning. They report it like the attempted burning down of mosques was always going to be the reaction “in the wake of” or “triggered by”.
This gives a more rounded, almost reasonable-sounding perspective. Far more than the situation deserves.
People didn’t rise up en masse to do this. It was organised by right-wing groups and the people they need to cause the trouble travelled in from miles around to do it. Now they are arrested, do you think the EDL will be helping them? Of course not – they are dispensable. Plenty more where they came from.
Yes, the BBC did this. If thugs are attacking mosques the ‘excuse’ that it was triggered by the horrific events in Southport wear very thin.
Anyway, here’s the video of that (quite possibly) coked up dickhead giving it Charlie big potatoes to the police and taking bricks to the head from both sides before the coup de grâce. I’d post the more inspirational Southport locals rebuilding the wall of the mosque, but this is funnier.
Your first para is a great observation that I’m going to be using/stealing.
Violence is never the right answer. But I guess appeals for calm sometimes have as much effect as appeals not to post videos in OPs.
Rioting is a summer sport.
People are more likely to come out in the required numbers in warm and dry weather. If it’s hot, tempers flare more easily and hot weather makes some people irritable anyway.
People who have thuggish tendencies don’t need much justification to exercise those tendencies. Especially in hot sticky weather.
Aside from that..
There is a danger, if TV and Radio news reports aren’t scripted carefully enough, that a certain amount of justification for incidents of violent disorder can be implied by the way links between stories are described.
There has already been a complaint upheld over the different way IS terrorists are routinely described and how a right-wing terrorist (Christchurch NZ bomber) was described. Not sure that lesson has been fully learned yet.
Twitter is awash with confused, respectable-looking middle-aged men and women claiming to be far-right thugs. Apparently they all pay their taxes and are ordinary UK citizens…eg:
Down here, it is being reported obliquely. “Rioting due to misreporting” “rioting after southport deaths”etc.
I assume the rioters believe the perpetrator is an immigrant and Muslim?
That was the story being spread by the likes of the odious Tommy Robinson.
The equally despicable Farage was a bit more circumspect, hinting that the authorities were “withholding the truth”
Hearteningly, not everyone is a closet racist.
As was proved by the many, many people who went out to rebuild the wall around the Islamic Studies Centre which had been ripped up by thugs needing bricks to throw when the rioting kicked off.
Like a lot of people of my generation, I was beginning to feel it was a rerun of the events of 1968.
Worryingly, some even older people seem to feel it’s more like the 1930s.
Glad I won’t be here in twenty years when the full effects of climate change really start to make themselves felt.
With rising sea levels flooding people in coastal areas out of their homes, we’re likely to see an exodus of refugees the like of which the world has never seen before.
There does seem to be an increasing amount of anger or tension in society – or maybe a small amount of anger is simply inflamed by the chaotic, seemingly uncontrolled cesspit of social media. Either way, it does appear that a small section of society can be immediately provoked into violence by something they read online, even if that “news” is later shown to be wrong.
Whatever the cause, I’m very glad I’m not responsible for calming things down.
I wonder if Kier Starmer is wishing he had stayed in opposition. How his government handles this awful period might define its early years.
The Daily Mail has, of course, done its fair share to stir up that anger and tension.
It’s easy to comment from the side, compared to the compromises of reality, and the limits on what can be done. Political big talk rarely marries with the possible actions. This is why so many political types are, when in real life, ineffectual. Owen Jones, Simon Heffer, etc – I see you.
From the New European.
Need a night of pishing rain. That’ll send the buggers running home.
Remind me, didn’t Boris buy those water cannons he was keen on getting from Germany? Feels like we could do with a few of those right now. Oh yes, Theresa May banned their use and no-one wanted to buy them, so they got scrapped. Hey-ho.
I don’t think it was Theresa May specifically who banned them. Legal opinion at the time was that their deployment would be completely illegal, so Boris was told that they couldn’t be used.
I fear this spate of unrest can only get worse, until someone is killed. And even that might not stop it.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/nov/19/boris-johnson-unused-water-cannon-sold-for-scrap-at-300000-loss#:~:text=Three%20unusable%20water%20cannon%20bought,be%20used%20on%20London's%20streets
Sadly lacking both balls and brains; although their ball and chain deficiencies
will hopefully soon be rectified.
Wouldn’t it be funny if they ended up sharing cells with the Just Stop Oil zealots
and had to spend the next four years listening to Cressida Gethin whingeing
how she had to miss her brother’s wedding
This may be a simplistic and fundamentally wrong view but it was held by my Irish friends and I when we lived in London through the 90s. It was that there is a minority of British citizens every generation, mostly male who express their ingrained sense of patriotism and superiority to other nations through violence towards others different from them. Our views were that this section of the population was essential to empire building and war and, in the absence of either was channeled into violence, sometimes on tribal or territorial grounds – gangs and football hooliganism. The crowds I see in these recent riots, while not exactly the cream of British fighting men, seems equally directed by armchair generals who fire them up and aim them, using them as unquestioning cannon fodder for their own evil purposes. A complicit media full of false equivalence and excuses and, at times, encouragement is letting much of this go unchallenged.
Watching the growing problem in Ireland where organised hate mobs are gaining traction is very concerning – wrapping their hate and racism in the tricolour. In both cases the response of our government and yours will be fundamental to whether this is a phase or here to stay. Scary times.
“Are the folk kicking off correct to object to the two-tier system they claim means immigrants get away with offending in a way the dispossessed white working class are not? ”
Do go on. I would be interested in your evidence to back up this assertion, which bears no relation to my own experience of objective reality.
It’s fiction.
The two tiers that I’ve seen are A) smartly-dressed, employed, articulate and lawyered-up, and B) scruffy, unemployed, inarticulate, legal-aided.
It often seems to me that accusations and insults, rather than constructive reasoning, dominate all online political discussions, even among the smartly-dressed, employed, articulate and lawyered-up. Terms like islamophobe/anti-semite; crank/thug; tankie/fascist are thrown around by group A with the same lack of restraint that group B shows regarding the use of more basic Anglo-Saxon terms. All part of the same playground, all fanning the flames.
Deplorable(s).
In this case racist thug is an accurate description of what these rioters are. They have to be called out for what they are.
Too true and one of the very reasons why the over-use of such terms when not indisputable needs to be avoided, or at least more curtailed.
I’m not saying, above, that their are two tiers of people involved in violent disorder. I’m saying that when they come to court their are two tiers, as defined above. But that’s for football hooliganism and pub fights etc.
When it comes to rioting, mob violence and looting, like what’s occurred in Southport, the authorities tend to come down very hard indeed on absolutely everyone. As they did after that countrywide spate of rioting some years back.
I am not sure that the people who kicked off when the children were being taken into care in Leeds a few weeks back fit category A. Nor have all the participants in a variety of other protests, from BLM through to Anti-Israeli marches.
In terms of B) I suspect that we will find that, unlike the riots post Mark Duggans’s death in 2011, many of those subsequently charged in the riots of the last few days might well be scruffy and inarticulate, but will be employed. That’s certainly the case with the bulk of the pub fight merchants and football hooligan types my wife has dealt with over the years. For sure, it tends to follow a common pattern – construction, saffolders and so on – but they are working,
Yep, seems to me there are thugs and racists on both sides in this current situation. Anti-Israel and anti-Palestine ones as well as anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish ones. Both in Britain and elsewhere. Of course that should never mean all pro-Israel or all pro-Palestine supporters can be defined by the words, actions or beliefs of such thugs.
Though that hasn’t helped the Just Stop Oil variant of A) avoid getting 5 years….
If anyone knows of any ecologically sound alternatives to petroleum jelly, Roger Hallam would very much like to hear from you
“They”. The rhetoric of the boneheads is that this is the case. I never said they are right. I don’t think they are.
Been in the same boat, V.
Best advice is to literally slather contentious statements that might get misinterpreted with caveats and inverted commas (“perceived two tier system”) and then, just to be on the safe side, sprinkle a generous quantity of qualifiers (‘seemingly’, ‘apparently’, ‘could be taken as’. “feel/perceive themselves to be”).
Apologies Vincent – I misinterpreted your meaning, in that case.
Now you understand what he tried to say to you…
This deserves more 🙌👏👏
Ear, ear as Vincent himself might have said
I’ll just leave this here
One of the many things I don’t understand about the rioting, especially given that nowadays practically everybody is carrying a camera, is what do the unmasked rioters do or say when they go back to work the next day?
I saw a few different images of one particular “patriot” apparently/allegedly carrying things from a smashed-up shoe shop, an electronics shop, etc. He is clearly recognisable and the pix have been all over the place, and some people who know him must have seen them.
Does he rock up to the office as if he’d had a quiet weekend pottering in the garden? What does he say when his colleagues ask “Have a nice riot, mate?”
Yes, I know a certain number of those causing mayhem will not be in work, but surely many of them have jobs. I may be old/naive, but how do you show your face after you’ve been filmed smashing up a hotel or throwing stones at the police?
The looter, for that is what he is has been recognised and named.*
It has been pointed out that some of the ones wearing masks have very distinctive tattoos so they should be easy to identify too.
There was supposed to be a ‘riot’ taking place in Huddersfield this afternoon which turned out to be untrue, but shops shut to be on the safe side.
* this could of course be false information.
The BBC have verified the name of the looter in the St George top.
Many will work in environments where their workmates, whsilt not necessarily approving of riots and looting, won’t be unsympathetic to some of the other noise.
The bigger grief is likely to come from their families
Two examples of Hull’s finest were filmed – one shirtless, nicking a tray of Greggs sausage rolls, one resplendent in a St. George flag-styled shirt, proudly walking away with his prized bounty of… gingerbread people. Makes you feel patriotic, dunnit?
The St George one also visited Lush and also helped himself several mobile phones elsewhere.
I forgot to post this. This is a corker.
As people begin to appear in court, it is heartening to see the ancient principle of FAFO in operation.
One of the most striking aspects for me is the way in which many of the perpetrators seemed happy to be photographed in the act of rioting and looting. They have been in a fantasy bubble where their actions were somehow normal and therefore not subject to any penalty. Their fantasy bubble is about to be burst.
FAFO?
Fuck around, find out
Fuckwit arseholes face oblivion.
Fat arse fat orifice?
Given the wreckless way pound shop Bond villain Elon Musk is
using Xcrement/Twatter to foment divisiveness, isn’t it time he
and his platform were made accountable for their role in all this?
A boycott would be a good start.
Emergency legislation hitting EM with a series of escalating fines
would be even better.
Musk is a Trumpian provocateur, still getting his revenge on the girls who laughed at him when he was 13. Or on his dad who said he’d never amount to anything, or whatever it was that made him into such a repellent, attention-seeking, bad hair transplant piece of crap.
Adapt of the Spiitting Image 80s classc
If I was a billionaire (or even a humble millionaire), I like to think I would spend the bulk of my time doing good, using my fortune to help people, Secret Millionaire style.
If you had more money than any normal person could possibly spend, why wouldn’t you focus on making the world a bit better, rather than enabling some of those who seem determined to make it worse?
Normal People don’t become billionaires. All billionaires without exception are greedy and want more and more. This can apply to moderately rich people too . We have a slew of expat acquaintances with mansions out here and properties scattered around the Home Counties, investments in tax havens, huge pensions etc. Almost without exception they are very, very careful with their money, some to the point of stinginess. Kind hearted, generous people like what I am whilst not exactly on the breadline wonder if it’s really worth driving 5 miles to buy petrol 20 cents cheaper per litre than our local garage ..twas ever so
Love to know how you define expats, L.
Having spent almost 35 years working all over Africa, Asia and the Middle East, I can honestly say I’ve never encountered anyone remotely like the people you describe in your post.
And that includes the 1% of expats I’ve met whose skills and know how were deemed worthy of full overseas packages (return Business Class flights and full medical and dental for themselves and their family members, plus schooling for the. kids, club memberships for themselves, etc).
While these people weren’t always especially nice, they were generally extremely good at discharging the respsonsibilities that come with high-profile jobs.
Where they were available, the rest of us – me included – had to muddle along on basic contracts (rudimentary accommodation plus the standard four-week holiday allowance and one return (economy class) flight home per contract year).
In places like Hong Kong, I and most English speakers I knew simply got off the plane and happily accepted local rates for any jobs we applied for and were offered.
I’m not defining expats per se just a selection of some retirees who live around here in what is nothing more than an exclusive gated village where gin & tonics are taken at four o’clock and everybody speaks English and watches English tv and everybody, on paper at least, is a millionaire .
There are tons of other expats around who work and integrate and have good French friends and, without exception, are not retired millionaires.
OK, get where you’re coming from.
Think that with its connotations of louche Lotus eaters, expat is one of those terms whose meaning has become debased over time.
When I first went to the Middle East (Saudi from 1981 to 83) I got a basic expat deal (rudimentary accommodation, four weeks holiday, return flight per contract year).
Every time I went home people’s perception of what an expat was fell into three categories:
Those who seemed to think I was trousering Croesus-like riches for spending my days sipping cocktails (non-alcoholic) banging out advertising copy on an endless sun-kissed white sand beach.
Those who envied my having a job like the one described above and were convinced I could score them a similar deal (offered to take their CVs back with me but 99 times out of 100 they couldn’t be arsed to write them).
Those who correctly believed that luck played a large part in my getting out of the UK, but incorrectly believed that my good fortune had been somehow achieved at their expense.
The worst expats I met in Saudi were the ones who ended up spending year after year cocooned in gated compounds where their every need was met by servants and they could lounge poolside drinking s much illegal booze as they liked safe in the knowledge the police would never venture inside.
Most of this latter group had become so institutionalized to a quality of life they were never likely to enjoy anywhere else, it was impossible to imagine how they might ever fit back in to life in the UK
In related news, I see that the brave new world envisaged by Lord Timpson, the prisons minister, hasn’t survived its first real brush with reality. The notion, you might recall, was that short prison sentences were counter-productive and community based measures would be far more effective in terms of rehabilitation.
Unlike most ministers, Timpson is not a politician but a compassionate individual who “walks the talk” by giving offenders a second chance when few others are willing to.
As he’s only been in charge of his ministerial portfolio for three weeks, it seems a tad premature to dismiss him on the basis of proposals he’s had no time to implement.
Care to clarify the reasoning behind your lack of regard for the man?
He is being naive, basing his proposals on his experience of prisoners he cherry picks for his businesses. But my point was less about him than those who were applaudong his appointment.
To give a local example, many here in Cambridge were very supportive of the proposed shift to community sentences. Yet last week the same people were outraged when a local substance abusing bike thief avoided jail for breaching his CBO.
That’s just people, tho’, innit?
With too few police to enforce the law and not enough cells for those who break it, the problems facing the UK policing and prison systems are both huge and hugely complicated.
Timpson has had less than a month to properly assess the situation.
To dismiss him based on one case, the exact circumstances of which are unclear and the legal precedents for the handling of which predate his appointment is both unreasonable and unfair.
Re Timpson’s “cherry plcking” of prisoners for his businesses.
Don’t all employers hire staff members on the basis of their suitability?
Surely winnowing out of – say – housebreakers from those he entrusts with cutting keys for customers in his stores is common sense
There is a recidivism rate in England of 60%; Norway is 20%.
The English system is broken, and trying to find alternatives strikes me as a good idea.
Apropos of nothing, don’t we think the next 4 or 5 years are going to be really hard for Labour?
The riots to sort out so early on their watch (They seem to be trying to be tough) , the connected immigration issues and the huge financial constraints they are already under. Cuts and tax rises…I hope they can sort it all out but I’m fearful
It seems like the courts are coming down very hard and very quickly on the violent offenders, but is that a long-term solution?
I hope the government has the right people in place to come up with some workable answers.
Repurpose the Bibby Stockholm barge.
Something that crossed my mind too.
Still leaves the same problem of where could they put it where it’s being there won’t upset the locals.
Possibly forget to anchor it.
Yes. Send them on a cruise.
Tow the ship out to the middle of the North Atlantic, put it on a South heading where it will comfortably miss Africa. Then lock the helm, set the engines slow ahead and wave it goodbye.
HMP Bibby McBibb Face
https://x.com/NicholasPegg/status/1820067409916551655?t=WeRjCvuaRrgTUIK_0dhbtA&s=19
To be insulted by these facists is so degrading.
Here’s the Nicholas Pegg post text copied:
“I remember the riots. I remember mainly the prison sentences they handed out afterwards… ten years, incredible sentences, and all of a sudden there weren’t any white thugs wanting to go down to Notting Hill to cause trouble.” – David Bowie on the racist riots of August 1958.
This quote is from an interview in the 80s.
Look at those cavemen go.
That must have been a few years (five?) after the. Dame came a cropper following his own flirtation with fascism at Victoria Station
Predictable reference to discredited allegation. 🙄
Discredited by who exactly?
Denials and apologies do not a discrediting make
While he might have been able to argue away the incident at Victoria Station as an unfortunate angle of him waving to his fans, he’s on record as saying “I believe very strongly in fascism…Adolf Hitler was one of the first rock stars” and “Britain would benefit from a fascist dictatorship”.
Although he subsequently apologised for making those stupid remarks,his contrition does not mean the fact that he made those remarks has been discredited or should be forgotten.
Oh God I should have known this would be dug up. The rockstar thing is just an observation. Reading further he says it would be good to have a facist dictatorship to get it out of the way so as to have a new liberal era. Some whacky thoughts when off his head. Nothing racist directed at minorities. He was fascinated by these mythologies from nazism also King Arthur. Naive, daft stuff. Should we continue to raise it for all time as unforgiveable behaviour? I think not.
Would we be as tolerant and forgiving of an artist whose work we didn’t find quite so great?
I think not
Well, I wrote what I think, so there it is. Meanwhile, riots, eh?
I bet that train pulled out of the station on time!
Re: Notting Hill Riots/the Sainted Dave
His greatest crime has to be that he was in the ‘Worse Film Ever Made’ – Absolute Beginners, set in 1958, and based on a remarkable novel, but, crucially, made slap bang in the middle of the dire.
If he had any sense of how woeful that film would be, he wouldn’t have goose stepped anywhere near it.
To continue the train motif (or 𝔩𝔢𝔦𝔱𝔪𝔬𝔱𝔦𝔣 as he would have called it at the time), DB’s career really hit the buffers in the early- to mid-80s
Even worse than “Just a Gigolo”?!
I saw that. Dragged on for what seemed like a thousand years.
There’s a riot going on?
Who predicted that?
The Yorkshire Tea Ad Hitmakers.
Surely their big hit was “There’s a Reet Lot Going On”
Sentences of 32 months after discount for guilty plea
That awful Twitter brought this to me. It’s a Downfall meme clip. https://x.com/DachshundColin/status/1821835822913438162?t=BRTtIGuEyJ57Rrvm3C0YRA&s=19
I read in this morning’s paper that that stupid climate change and lockdown denial woman who was first to post the false tweet about the asylum seeker has now been arrested as well
I see today that a 53 year old woman who posted a stupid comment on FB for saying t mosques should be burnt down got 15 months ( first offence.). One of my wife’s client’s got a suspended sentence for very specific threats to kill a vicar and MP.
I wonder what kind of sentence they’ll hand out to the company director woman from Cheshire who was supposedly first to tweet the fake name blamed for starting the riots
I suppose the lesson to be learned from all this is that if you’re going to make twattish and/or inflammatory comments on social media you should at the very least educate yourself on the virtues of VPNs.
Weren’t these folks around in 2011?
Here’s how it goes…
Protest/riot, we’ll see.
Protests/riots, leading to widespread protests/riots, potentially leading to a complete breakdown of societal norms?
Might be better not to nick that bottle of water.
Terrific Panorama special on the riots on BBC earlier tonight.
No great fan of plod but Jesus those officers under bombardment
on the street deserve medals, if not pay raes
Well worth catching on iPlayer if you have 30 mins