Riots in London

Of course, there's always the ultimate weapon: the massed Welsh choir:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFwyIePRm1A
Zulu- The Final Attack.

tigerlily wrote:Thank you Felix, Twood, and Nash for letting us know you are ok.

I wish LaRue would check in....or is she still in the US?? I can't remember when she said she was going there.

Take care, all of you!

the same from me also.


Felix, that utube vid of the robbery...i guess that kind of thing is happening everywhere...it was horrifying, the poor people.

Riots spread north as capital cools

August 10, 2011


A Miss Selfridge shop on fire in Market Street in Manchester city centre

Rioting and looting spread to Manchester and the Midlands from London with plans to prevent a fourth night of violence on the streets of the capital appearing to have worked.

Prime Minister David Cameron flew back from his holiday early to join police chiefs in warning rioters they would face the full weight of the law. He chaired a meeting of the Government's emergency Cobra committee, with another due to take place.

A total of 768 arrests have now been made in connection with violence, disorder and looting in London in recent days, Scotland Yard said.

Businesses and shops across the capital shut down early in a bid to avoid attack from the gangs of youths who have ransacked buildings across the city over the previous days. Many firms also sent staff home amid fears that rioters could attack again.

The Metropolitan Police flooded the streets with officers - nearly three times as many as were on duty on Monday night - to quash concerns they were losing control of parts of London. The situation appeared relatively calm, with a handful of arrests reported in the Canning Town area.

Some 30 other forces lent officers to bolster the numbers for a massive policing operation intended to put a stop to the horrific scenes witnessed across the country since Saturday. Scotland Yard ruled out involving the Army for now but said police were "not scared" of using plastic bullets to bring the unprecedented riots under control.

In Manchester however, rioters set fire to a branch of fashion store Miss Selfridge in the city centre. Hundreds of youths rampaged on the streets, leading to running battles with riot police. Greater Manchester Police said it was engaged in outbreaks of disorder in both Manchester city centre and Salford. Assistant Chief Constable Terry Sweeney vowed: "We will not allow such mindless criminal damage and wanton violence to go unpunished."

Elsewhere in England, police in Birmingham are investigating reports that a gun was fired during fresh rioting in the city that saw 80 people arrested. West Midlands Police said there have been unconfirmed reports that a firearm was used near Aston, an area north east of the city centre.The trouble saw looting and vehicles set alight in Birmingham, West Bromwich and Wolverhampton.

Parliament will be recalled for a day on Thursday to discuss the developments.

Mr Cameron has pledged to speed up court procedures to deal with the "many more" arrests expected as police scour hundreds of hours of CCTV for evidence about those responsible for the violence. He warned the young people involved in the riots: "You will feel the full force of the law. And if you are old enough to commit these crimes, you are old enough to face the punishment."

AOL

Every now and again, a spot of self-congratulation can be excused.

Second paragraph of the editorial in today's London Evening Standard:

"London today feels our own again, thanks not just to the police but to the efforts of decent, neighbourly people who helped clean the streets. We should all feel grateful to public service staff for their work in dreadful circumstances, particularly bus and Tube drivers, who kept the city moving, and the fire services, who performed heroically...."

Praise for London Underground staff from The Evening Standard is as rare as hens' teeth: Boris brown-nosers to a man/woman, they caricature us almost every day of the year in their columns as vile left-wing militants. So their acknowledgement of the role we've played in maintaining some vestige of civilisation in this city over the past few days is all the more welcome.

When Tottenham went up in flames we had to close Wood Green Tube station.

When Bethnal Green erupted, we had to close Bethnal Geen and nearby Stepney Green stations.

When Ealing went up, Ealing Broadway closed.

There were a few other station closures, too, but I can't recall all the details.

But, by and large, we've managed to keep this city running.

So far.

But, in a way, this article from the same Tory rag on the same day is even more interesting because of the criticism it levels at Tory Prime Minister David Cameron's response to the riots:

******************************************************************************

The riots are David Cameron's biggest test yet

Matthew d'Ancona

10 Aug 2011



When Parliament meets in emergency session tomorrow, it will conduct two snap audits, interlinked but separate: first, of the nation's social fabric and, second, of David Cameron's premiership. This is the greatest test to date of the PM's mettle and of his statesmanship.

Political legend has it that a child once pointed at Lord Randolph Churchill and asked: "Mama, what is that man for?" A Prime Minister who cannot preserve the social order faces similar questions, and rightly so. Cameron did himself no favours by failing to come home until yesterday. The public was left with the impression that his return was forced rather than instinctive; that it was the consequence of political calculation rather than of reflexive empathy with the nation's anxieties.

His dithering and delay over the weekend left the televisual field open to the rioters. On Monday evening in particular the stage was left clear for the rioters, their moment of vile celebrity on our television screens ensured by the absence of any serious competition from the political class. Hackney, Croydon, Ealing: the images of conflagration were more or less uninterrupted, a sort of open-mike night for the thuggish to do their worst on national television.

At a subliminal level, Cameron was also subverting the basis upon which his Coalition came into being. Fear of disorder, as I have written before, was the midwife to its formation. In those nervous days after the general election it was the scenes of rioting in Athens, as the mob protested over the Greek financial crisis, that focused the inter-party talks in Whitehall and impressed upon politicians and senior civil servants alike the urgent need to secure a deal as quickly as possible, to calm market neurosis and - above all - to establish unambiguously who was in charge. If that was clear to Cameron in May 2010 - and it was - why did it take him so long to perceive the much sharper dangers in August 2011?

In his brilliant history of London, Peter Ackroyd notes that "the curious and persistent feature of London life is that 'law and order' has never collapsed and that civic peace has been maintained even in the face of grave disorder … Its mobs have never yet dominated it". That is true - so far - but will be scant comfort to those outside the capital in West Bromwich, Wolverhampton and Manchester sifting through the debris of last night's mayhem.

The deployment of 16,000 police officers on London's streets made a significant difference but this disorderly virus is both mobile and mutating fast. It has already moved on to infect other cities - cities whose immune systems are much less robust than London's. The social contagion spreads and those charged with containing it face an unenviable task.

But contain it they must. Predictably, the first four nights of disorder have triggered a rhetorical riot of analysis and over-analysis, an intellectual glamorisation of young men stealing plasma screens and trainers. The Left has stormed in with a wearyingly familiar narrative involving spending cuts, tuition fees, the abolition of the education maintenance allowance, closed youth clubs and (what they really mean) the presence of a Tory in No 10. To see this at its slippery worst go to iPlayer and watch the angry exchange between Michael Gove and Harriet Harman on last night's Newsnight. Labour's deputy leader notionally condemned the riots, while insinuating - disgracefully - that the mayhem is somehow connected with the Coalition's policies.

Yet many on the Right have also defrosted their favourite analyses in the microwave much too quickly, alluding instantly to the terrible impact of welfare dependency, family breakdown and the inability of inner-city schools to help the "underclass''. These are indeed dreadful social pathologies, many of them first explored in Losing Ground (1984), the pioneering study by the US political scientist Charles Murray. But I do not share the certainty of some on the Right that what we are seeing on Britain's streets can be neatly explained with reference to such analyses. Indeed, I see little political or sociological content of any kind - only a violent consumerism, in which the only right being fought for is the right to free trainers.

There was a time when English mobs fought for "Church and king". Now they smash windows for "Adidas and Nike".

For guidance I would turn not to Marx or to Murray, but to Thomas Hobbes. This much-misunderstood political philosopher was not a defender of authoritarianism for its own sake but understood that "commodious living" depended upon the preservation of basic order. For Hobbes, the alternative was a "state of nature" in which life would be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short". Only a "common power" could prevent the war "of every man against every man".

What we are seeing on the streets of Britain this week is a sporadic glimpse of the Hobbesian state of nature - localised and digitised for 21st-century consumption. These are Riots 2.0 - broadcast in real time on Twitter, organised on BlackBerrys, agile and nimble to an extent that would have been unthinkable in the Eighties.

The first and most basic task of any government is to keep the peace; to protect those it serves from the passions, frustrations and caprice of their fellow citizens. One man's legitimate grievance is another's unjustified whinge: the state, enacting the law, preserves a modus vivendi so that conflicts of interests, unsatisfied demands and sheer anger do not lead to social breakdown. And that is all that counts right now. Until order is restored, all else is distraction. Until the shops stop being boarded up at 3pm, all analysis is pointless. Until the fires are doused, the public will look at Cameron and ask: "What is that man for?" So, Prime Minister: what is your answer?

Ever the political opportunist behind the bumbling Bertie Wooster mask, London Tory Mayor Boris Johnson- obviously still smarting from the furious heckling he received from Londoners on his equally belated return from vacation- has dared to contradict his beloved leader's policy of cutting police numbers (see posts passim).

The creep- darling of the last few Conservative Party conferences- has his eye on the leadership...but Londoners won't forget or forgive his own ineptitude over the past week in a hurry.

Ah, Boris, and Dave. Perfectly at ease with Bullingdon Club, Pomerol '61-inspired vandalism, but 9 million lightyears removed from the black hoody, thieving, violent culture that has spawned all this. Teresa May is another hooray, completely out of touch, who can barely pass a coherent sentence, beyond the usual platitudinous toilet., on the way to combat this. They won't have to. It ain't extreme Islam. It'll be history by next week.

Still Boris' bicycles are lovely. Hopefully, he'll also introduce black tie punting to the waterways our our multi-ethnic, egalitarian, fair city

precinct14 wrote:It'll be history by next week.

It'll be history until the brand new trainers wear out.

Coming events cast their shadows before.

The Jolly Roger has been flying from the building opposite Aldgate Tube station for the past 3 weeks.



Much of the business of Life is about reading the Signs.

Anyone with the eyes to see should have interpreted this as a straw in the wind.

If you skipped over the Evening Standard's column on David Cameron's inept leadership before and during recent event on the previous page, you'll have missed the quote from Peter Ackroyd, author of the definitive London: the Biography.

Do pay attention.

Here's a rather santised illustration of London's 1780 Gordon Riots:

But anyway....

Parliament has been summoned to resume early from its Summer recess. They meet today to discuss recent events.

I very much doubt whether the young looters and arsonists they'll be discussing know much about the recent MP's expenses scandal, phone hacking revelations touching 10 Downing Street or the bankhanders taken by police to feed stories to the Murdoch press.

But isn't the early resumption of Parliament going to look rather like pigs with their snouts in the trough discussing younger pigs with their snouts in the trough?

We live in a consumerist society.

We're bombarbed with images from "Reality TV" of instant celebrity and riches presented to graceless and stupid people.

Black youths in Tottenham and Toxteth absorb the same media drivel as the rest of us.

They KNOW they'll never get there.

I heard the recent rioting described on BBC Radio 5 Live the other night by one droll commentator as "Late-night shopping without the inconvenience of payment".

eddie wrote:I heard the recent rioting described on BBC Radio 5 Live the other night by one droll commentator as "Late-night shopping without the inconvenience of payment".

Levi's postpones release of new advert which contains scenes of rioting

By Sarah Karmali, Aug 10, 2011

In a serious case of unfortunate timing, denim brand Levi's has had to postpone the release of their latest ad campaign, because it contains scenes of rioting.


Untimely? Levi's has postponed UK distribution of their new advert, which contains riot scenes. Photo:Levi's/YouTube

The short video contains footage of demonstrators confronting riot police in the street, in a manner comparable to the shocking scenes played out in real life across the UK over the past four nights.

Originally released on the Levi's Facebook page yesterday, distribution of the video advert has since been postponed in the UK, after the company came under fire for their poor timing. It will no longer be released on British television or in cinemas, as originally planned.

The advert, entitled Levi's Legacy and featuring the tagline Go Forth, was filmed during the May Day celebrations in Berlin.

AOL

http://www.news.com.au/travel/news/british-tourism-campaign-replaced-by-mock-ad-inviting-visitors-to-loot/story-e6frfq80-1226112859570

people should all be crying for Britain, not making fun of her....

Cameron in tribute over riot deaths

August 11, 2011


Shazad Ali who died after he and two others were mowed down by a car while protecting their community from looters in Birmingham

Prime Minister David Cameron has offered his condolences to the families of three men who were killed while trying to protect shops from looters in Birmingham.

Speaking during a visit to a West Midlands Police command and control centre in Edgbaston, Birmingham, Mr Cameron described the deaths as "truly dreadful".

Asked what he would say to the victims' families, the Prime Minister replied: "They have my deepest condolences. I think everyone in the country is going to be thinking about them and their families and what happened."

Mr Cameron added: "It was a truly dreadful incident and I know that the police here in Birmingham, here in the West Midlands, are working night and day to get to the bottom of what happened and bring the perpetrators to justice.

"We rely on the police to keep our communities, to keep our country, to keep our shops and homes safe.

"They need our support in doing that job."

The father of Haroon Jahan, at 21 the youngest of the three victims, appealed for calm after the deaths of the three men. Tariq Jahan said: "Today we stand here to plead with all the youth to remain calm, for our communities to stand united."

Mr Cameron was visiting Birmingham after the deaths of three men, named by their grieving families as 21-year-old Haroon Jahan and brothers Shazad Ali, 30, and Abdul Musavir, 31.

The friends were struck by a car in Dudley Road, Winson Green, Birmingham, as they attempted to protect a petrol station and nearby stores.

Later, there were touching scenes in Birmingham as hundreds gathered at the petrol station on the main road and held a candlelight vigil. Mr Jahan stood in the middle of the semi-circle of well-wishers as they lit candles. He looked emotional and tired as he was comforted by others, many of whom laid a hand a his shoulder.

AOL

tatiana wrote:
http://www.news.com.au/travel/news/british-tourism-campaign-replaced-by-mock-ad-inviting-visitors-to-loot/story-e6frfq80-1226112859570

people should all be crying for Britain, not making fun of her....

Yep, the past week hasn't been a great advert for the London 2012 Olympic Games, has it?

'The Nazi war machine couldn't break the British, but the modern welfare state has.' Ann Coulter

Old Mack wrote:'The Nazi war machine couldn't break the British, but the modern welfare state has.' Ann Coulter

Fuck off out of this thread, mad boy.

Old Mack wrote:'The Nazi war machine couldn't break the British, but the modern welfare state has.' Ann Coulter

What a load of BOLLOCKS

Ultraliberals are blaming the Goverment for the riots and the not the criminals...as usual !

Old Mack wrote:Ultraliberals are blaming the Goverment for the riots and the not the criminals...as usual !

Not in my experience, everyone I know and everything I have read blames the thugs. No-one is excusing them.

Where is your evidence for this statement?

Old Mack wrote:Ultraliberals are blaming the Goverment for the riots and the not the criminals...as usual !

Mad self-promoting narcissistic Yank on welfare, too deranged or idle to work, disses violent English youths on unemployment benefit in the midst of a global recession created by US bankers.

What a strange world we live in.

Clearly, Reality TV has overlooked its next rising star.

I can't believe I haven't seen anyone blame Clegg yet.