London Riots

[BuffyElevated]

I'm really, really shocked at what's going on over there. I watch the news with my jaw dropped and I hope those of you in the area are being safe. My prayers for the country!!

 

[Fusions2]

I've just caught up on the latest news on the riots on Daybreak and I was shocked to watch one of their reporters help a young mum out of her house. She had been calling out for help for a while after her door was smashed in. She was truly terrified. It's so sad to see innocent people who just want to get on with their lives get caught up in all this. Daybreak managed to interview a rioter and his excuse was, he was angry.

 

[LizzieRainbow]

I cannot believe how bad this has become. I worry for the people down in London that just want to live their lives, they shouldn't have to be scared because this shouldn't be happening! There is no need to do this to your own country at all! I just hate that it is all happening.

 

[nightshade]

I've been glued to Twitter all weekend watching it unfold. It's just bizarre how much this has gotten out of hand.

There's been rumours of something being 'organised' in Bristol soon which is slightly worrying. As good as social media is, it's made it very easy to facilitate mass civil disobedience on such a large scale. I hope everything calms down soon.

I hope everything's ok, just saw on the news there was some riots in bristol last night

 

[November]

I havent seen a whole lot of coverage of the riots here but what I have seen has been scary. I hope everyone who is nearby stays safe and out of danger.

 

[Kean]

All the places that have been hit and what happened:

http://maps.google.co.uk/maps/ms?ms...&ll=51.558503,-0.055275&spn=0.114195,0.298691

Here's this map again, but this time combined with a 2004 Index of Deprivation Map. While not providing anything resembling an excuse, because there is none, the two maps together are at least thought provoking.

http://maptube.org/map.aspx?m=ol&s=...e/misc/londonriots_verified_20110809_1514.kml

---------- Post added at 04:32 PM ---------- Previous post was at 04:16 PM ----------

This arcticle is also worth a read. I have been trying express what I was feeling about the riots and the coverage of it, but this piece says it all. This violence didn't come out of nowhere, and it would be absurd of us to think it had. However unjustified and horrendous the actions of the rioters, there are reasons why they are doing this, and I don't think "mindless violence" comes anywhere near to explaining what we have seen over the last 3 nights, and are likely to see for many nights to come.

Panic on the Streets of London

I’m huddled in the front room with some shell-shocked friends, watching my city burn. The BBC is interchanging footage of blazing cars and running street battles in Hackney, of police horses lining up in Lewisham, of roiling infernos that were once shops and houses in Croydon and in Peckham. Last night, Enfield, Walthamstow, Brixton and Wood Green were looted; there have been hundreds of arrests and dozens of serious injuries, and it will be a miracle if nobody dies tonight. This is the third consecutive night of rioting in London, and the disorder has now spread to Leeds, Liverpool, Bristol and Birmingham. Politicians and police officers who only hours ago were making stony-faced statements about criminality are now simply begging the young people of Britain’s inner cities to go home. Britain is a tinderbox, and on Friday, somebody lit a match. How the hell did this happen? And what are we going to do now?

In the scramble to comprehend the riots, every single commentator has opened with a ritual condemnation of the violence, as if it were in any doubt that arson, muggings and lootings are ugly occurrences. That much should be obvious to anyone who is watching Croydon burn down on the BBC right now. David Lammy, MP for Tottenham, called the disorder 'mindless, mindless'. Nick Clegg denounced it as 'needless, opportunistic theft and violence'. Speaking from his Tuscan holiday villa, Prime Minister David Cameron – who has finally decided to return home to take charge - declared simply that the social unrest searing through the poorest boroughs in the country was "utterly unacceptable." The violence on the streets is being dismissed as ‘pure criminality,’ as the work of a ‘violent minority’, as ‘opportunism.’ This is madly insufficient. It is no way to talk about viral civil unrest. Angry young people with nothing to do and little to lose are turning on their own communities, and they cannot be stopped, and they know it. Tonight, in one of the greatest cities in the world, society is ripping itself apart.

Violence is rarely mindless. The politics of a burning building, a smashed-in shop or a young man shot by police may be obscured even to those who lit the rags or fired the gun, but the politics are there. Unquestionably there is far, far more to these riots than the death of Mark Duggan, whose shooting sparked off the unrest on Saturday, when two police cars were set alight after a five-hour vigil at Tottenham police station. A peaceful protest over the death of a man at police hands, in a community where locals have been given every reason to mistrust the forces of law and order, is one sort of political statement. Raiding shops for technology and trainers that cost ten times as much as the benefits you’re no longer entitled to is another. A co-ordinated, viral wave of civil unrest across the poorest boroughs of Britain, with young people coming from across the capital and the country to battle the police, is another.

Months of conjecture will follow these riots. Already, the internet is teeming with racist vitriol and wild speculation. The truth is that very few people know why this is happening. They don’t know, because they were not watching these communities. Nobody has been watching Tottenham since the television cameras drifted away after the Broadwater Farm riots of 1985. Most of the people who will be writing, speaking and pontificating about the disorder this weekend have absolutely no idea what it is like to grow up in a community where there are no jobs, no space to live or move, and the police are on the streets stopping-and-searching you as you come home from school. The people who do will be waking up this week in the sure and certain knowledge that after decades of being ignored and marginalised and harassed by the police, after months of seeing any conceivable hope of a better future confiscated, they are finally on the news. In one NBC report, a young man in Tottenham was asked if rioting really achieved anything:

"Yes," said the young man. "You wouldn't be talking to me now if we didn't riot, would you?"

"Two months ago we marched to Scotland Yard, more than 2,000 of us, all blacks, and it was peaceful and calm and you know what? Not a word in the press. Last night a bit of rioting and looting and look around you."

Eavesdropping from among the onlookers, I looked around. A dozen TV crews and newspaper reporters interviewing the young men everywhere ‘’’

There are communities all over the country that nobody paid attention to unless there had recently been a riot or a murdered child. Well, they’re paying attention now.

Tonight in London, social order and the rule of law have broken down entirely. The city has been brought to a standstill; it is not safe to go out onto the streets, and where I am in Holloway, the violence is coming closer. As I write, the looting and arson attacks have spread to at least fifty different areas across the UK, including dozens in London, and communities are now turning on each other, with the Guardian reporting on rival gangs forming battle lines. It has become clear to the disenfranchised young people of Britain, who feel that they have no stake in society and nothing to lose, that they can do what they like tonight, and the police are utterly unable to stop them. That is what riots are all about.

Riots are about power, and they are about catharsis. They are not about poor parenting, or youth services being cut, or any of the other snap explanations that media pundits have been trotting out: structural inequalities, as a friend of mine remarked today, are not solved by a few pool tables. People riot because it makes them feel powerful, even if only for a night. People riot because they have spent their whole lives being told that they are good for nothing, and they realise that together they can do anything – literally, anything at all. People to whom respect has never been shown riot because they feel they have little reason to show respect themselves, and it spreads like fire on a warm summer night. And now people have lost their homes, and the country is tearing itself apart.

Noone expected this. The so-called leaders who have taken three solid days to return from their foreign holidays to a country in flames did not anticipate this. The people running Britain had absolutely no clue how desperate things had become. They thought that after thirty years of soaring inequality, in the middle of a recession, they could take away the last little things that gave people hope, the benefits, the jobs, the possibility of higher education, the support structures, and nothing would happen. They were wrong. And now my city is burning, and it will continue to burn until we stop the blanket condemnations and blind conjecture and try to understand just what has brought viral civil unrest to Britain. Let me give you a hint: it ain’t Twitter.

I’m stuck in the house, now, with rioting going on just down the road in Chalk Farm. Ealing and Clapham and Dalston are being trashed. Journalists are being mugged and beaten in the streets, and the riot cops are in retreat where they have appeared at all. Police stations are being set alight all over the country. This morning, as the smoke begins to clear, those of us who can sleep will wake up to a country in chaos. We will wake up to fear, and to racism, and to condemnation on left and right, none of which will stop this happening again, as the prospect of a second stock market clash teeters terrifyingly at the bottom of the news reports. Now is the time when we make our choices. Now is the time when we decide whether to descend into hate, or to put prejudice aside and work together. Now is the time when we decide what sort of country it is that we want to live in. Follow the #riotcleanup hashtag on Twitter. And take care of one another.

Source: Penny Red

 

[Flannen]

I've seen a lot of people giving reasons for the scenes we have seen over the last three nights. The most common reflect the article above: that these are disaffected kids, who have no aspirations and job prospects and this is a reflection of how they feel. Now, I'm not disagreeing, or saying that this isn't why this is happening, but I don't think the rioters are consciously aware that this why they are rioting. Their behaviour is symptomatic of being disaffected and lacking aspirations but I've seen those kind of kids before and its not something they can always see for themselves or are able to recognise.

I've used the word "mindless" to describe the violence I've seen, but not because I think the violence has come from nowhere; because the people perpetrating appear to have absolutely no regard for human life, not to mention other people's homes and properties.

I am fully aware of the political and social motivations for some of these rioters, but when you see videos of a group of people, seemingly helping an injured and dazed young lad to his feet only to starting going through the bag on his back and mugging him, that's when I ask to see the message their trying to send out and where their political motivation is.

Thankfully, there's a flip side that represents the real feeling of community as armies of people around London come together to clean up the mess that has been made of the places they live in.

I don't know, I'll probably feel differently in a few days but at the moment, I'm still so upset, angry and shocked but what has happened and dreading what there still is to come.

 

[Kean]

I've seen a lot of people giving reasons for the scenes we have seen over the last three nights. The most common reflect the article above: that these are disaffected kids, who have no aspirations and job prospects and this is a reflection of how they feel. Now, I'm not disagreeing, or saying that this isn't why this is happening, but I don't think the rioters are consciously aware that this why they are rioting. Their behaviour is symptomatic of being disaffected and lacking aspirations but I've seen those kind of kids before and its not something they can always see for themselves or are able to recognise.

I've used the word "mindless" to describe the violence I've seen, but not because I think the violence has come from nowhere; because the people perpetrating appear to have absolutely no regard for human life, not to mention other people's homes and properties.

I am fully aware of the political and social motivations for some of these rioters, but when you see videos of a group of people, seemingly helping an injured and dazed young lad to his feet only to starting going through the bag on his back and mugging him, that's when I ask to see the message their trying to send out and where their political motivation is.

Thankfully, there's a flip side that represents the real feeling of community as armies of people around London come together to clean up the mess that has been made of the places they live in.

I don't know, I'll probably feel differently in a few days but at the moment, I'm still so upset, angry and shocked but what has happened and dreading what there still is to come.

I couldn't agree more. I posted the article because I think it is something that is been pushed aside in the coverage and the "mindless criminality" alternative doesn't satisfy me either, even though I too have spoken of it. But you really summed up my feelings with this line:

Now, I'm not disagreeing, or saying that this isn't why this is happening, but I don't think the rioters are consciously aware that this why they are rioting.

I don't believe the rioters, en masse, are motivated because of socio-economic backgrounds or their bleak prospects, but I do think those reasons are causes. If that makes sense.

What the article got spot on is saying that this is a society tearing itself apart.

 

[Washburne]

Didn't really get grasp on this until last night and I had, and are still having, trouble processing it all. From here I can't do much besides hoping that it starts moving in the right direction instead of getting worse all the time.

 

[Ianigsy]

I think things have become worse than they needed to be precisely because it kicked off while most of our senior politicians- including the Prime Minster and the Mayor of London- were on holiday. Add to that the problems that I mentioned earlier with the police in London and there's been no effective leadership to take control of the situation for three or four days.

There were reports of some trouble in Leeds last night, but from what I understand that's more to do with a turf war between gangs than rioting and looting.

 

[nightshade]

Started already tonight, Manchester, Salford, West Brom, Wolverhampton

 

[Nix]

I think it is really sad and unfortunately will not be finishing any time soon 🙁

 

[Enemies]

I don't understand why people are claiming to be rioting based on the fact that they have lost their jobs and homes during the recession, businesses have crumbled and money has been lost and whilst this is a terrible thing to happen to anyone, how can these people justify setting fire to peoples homes, property and cars? Surely this is just inflicting the same hardships on unsuspecting, innocent people that have happened to themselves, and wheres the sense in that?

If these people were rioting due to the recession why are they burning peoples homes to the ground and injuring innocent people? Why are they on the news boasting they can do anything they want tonight because theres no one to stop them?

I have also heard a lot of people defending the rioters (not here necessarily) and offering justification for what it is there doing. I wonder if they would feel the same way if it was there home burnt down, there child shot or there 100 year old business torn down in chaos?

Its quite scary to think that these people could come to any place they choose, including where you may live and commit these crimes. I feel for anyone affected by these riots and my heart goes out to them, its scary enough thinking your home town could be next without actually living through it.

 

[Flannen]

I don't believe the rioters, en masse, are motivated because of socio-economic backgrounds or their bleak prospects, but I do think those reasons are causes. If that makes sense.

What the article got spot on is saying that this is a society tearing itself apart.

I get what you mean. It's a product of the environment they're in; the socio-economic problems have created this apathetic attitude as opposed to them actively lashing out at their lack of prospects and aspirations. Is that what you mean, lol?

It seems the massive police presence has had an effect in London but it seems a bit hairy in the North.

 

[Kean]

I get what you mean. It's a product of the environment they're in; the socio-economic problems have created this apathetic attitude as opposed to them actively lashing out at their lack of prospects and aspirations. Is that what you mean, lol?

It seems the massive police presence has had an effect in London but it seems a bit hairy in the North.

Yes, that is exactly what I mean.

Here's another good article, this time from the Telegraph. I think it strikes much more of a balance between acknowledging the real grievances behind these riots and the abhorrence of them.

London Riots: The Under Class Lashes Out

No one seemed surprised. Not the hooded teenagers fleeing home at dawn. Not Ken and Tony, who used to live in Tottenham and had returned to stand vigil over the missiles and torched cars littering an urban war zone. Tony claimed to have seen the whole thing coming. "This was always going to happen," he said.

The police shot a black guy in suspicious circumstances. Feral kids with no jobs ran amok. To Tony's mind, this was a riot waiting for an excuse. In the hangover of the violence that spread through London, the uprisings seemed both inevitable and unthinkable. Over a few days in which attacks became a contagion the capital city of an advanced nation has reverted to a Hobbesian dystopia of chaos and brutality.

"In the evening there is fear, and in the morning they are gone. This is the fate of those who take our goods, and the reward of those who violently take our property." Isaiah 17:14. No such Old Testament fate awaited the pillagers of N18, strolling away from 21st-century megastores with a looted haul of iPod accessories and designer trainers.
This is the most arcane of uprisings and the most modern. Its participants, marshalled by Twitter, are protagonists in a sinister flipside to the Arab Spring. The Tottenham summer, featuring children as young as seven, is an assault not on a regime of tyranny but on the established order of a benign democracy. One question now hangs over London's battle-torn high streets. How could this ever happen?

Among several obvious answers, one is a failure of policing. The evidence so far points to more ignominy for the rudderless Met, as doubts emerge over whether Mark Duggan, whose death inspired the initial riots, fired at police. The stonewalling of Mr Duggan's family precipitated the crisis, and the absence of officers to intervene in an orgy of looting led to a breakdown of order suggestive of the lawless badlands of a failing state.

The second alleged culprit is ethnicity. But, as David Lammy, Tottenham's MP, has said, these are no race riots. The Eighties uprisings at Broadwater Farm, as in Toxteth and Brixton, were products, in part, of a poisonous racism absent in today's Tottenham, where the Chinese grocery, the Turkish store and the African hairdresser's sit side by side.

So blame unemployment and the cuts. It is true that Tottenham is among London's poorest boroughs, with 10,000 people claiming jobseeker's allowance and 54 applicants chasing every registered job vacancy. In other affected boroughs, such as Hackney, youth clubs are closing. Unwise as such pruning may be, it would be facile to suggest that homes and businesses have been laid waste for want of ping-pong tournaments and skateboard parks.

The real causes are more insidious. It is no coincidence that the worst violence London has seen in many decades takes place against the backdrop of a global economy poised for freefall. The causes of recession set out by J K Galbraith in his book, The Great Crash 1929, were as follows: bad income distribution, a business sector engaged in "corporate larceny", a weak banking structure and an import/export imbalance.

All those factors are again in play. In the bubble of the 1920s, the top 5 per cent of earners creamed off one-third of personal income. Today, Britain is less equal, in wages, wealth and life chances, than at any time since then. Last year alone, the combined fortunes of the 1,000 richest people in Britain rose by 30 per cent to £333.5 billion.
Europe's leaders, our own Prime Minister and Chancellor included, were parked on sun-loungers as London burned. Although the epicentre of the immediate economic crisis is the eurozone, successive British governments have colluded in incubating the poverty, the inequality and the inhumanity now exacerbated by financial turmoil.

Britain's lack of growth is not an economic debating point or a stick with which to beat George Osborne, any more than our deskilled, demotivated, under-educated non-workforce is simply a blot on the national balance sheet. Watch the juvenile wrecking crews on the city streets and weep for all our futures. The "lost generation" is mustering for war.

This is not a cri de coeur for the failed and failing. Nor is it a lament for the impoverished. Mob violence, despicable and inexcusable, must always be condemned. But those terrorising and trashing London are also a symptom of a wider malaise. In uneasy societies, people power "“ whether offered or stolen "“ can be toxic. Most of the 53 per cent of e‑democrats calling to have the death penalty reinstated (of whom 8 per cent would opt for firing squad or gas chamber) would never dream of torching a police car, but their impulses hardly cohere either with David Cameron's utopian ambitions.
What price for the Big Society as Tottenham, the most solid of communities, lies in ruins? The notion that small-state Britain can be run along the lines of Ambridge parish council by good-hearted, if under-funded, volunteers has never seemed more doubtful. Nor can Ed Miliband take much credit for his unvaried focus on the "squeezed middle", rather than on a vote-losing underclass that politicians ignore at their peril, and at ours.
London's riots are not the Tupperware troubles of Greece or Spain, where the middle classes lash out against their day of reckoning. They are the proof that a section of young Britain "“ the stabbers, shooters, looters, chancers and their frightened acolytes "“ has fallen off the cliff-edge of a crumbling nation.

The failure of the markets goes hand in hand with human blight. Meanwhile, the view is gaining ground that social democracy, with its safety nets, its costly education and health care for all, is unsustainable in the bleak times ahead. The reality is that it is the only solution. After the Great Crash, Britain recalibrated, for a time. Income differentials fell, the welfare state was born and skills and growth increased.

That exact model is not replicable, but nor, as Adam Smith recognised, can a well-ordered society ever develop when a sizeable number of its members are miserable and, as a consequence, dangerous. This is not a gospel of determinism, for poverty does not ordain lawlessness. Nor, however, is it sufficient to heap contempt on the rioters as if they are a pariah caste.
One of the most tragic aspects of London's meltdowns is that we need this ruined generation if Britain is ever to feel prosperous and safe again. If there are no jobs for today's malcontents and no means to exploit their skills, then the UK is in graver trouble than it thinks. Mr Osborne may congratulate himself on his prudence, but retrenchment also bears a social cost. We are seeing just how steep that price may be.

Financial crashes and human catastrophes are cyclical. Each reoccurrence threatens to be graver than the last. As Galbraith wrote, "memory is far better than the law" in protecting against financial illusion and insanity. In an age of austerity, there are diverse luxuries that Britain can no longer afford. Amnesia stands high on that long list.

Source: Here

 

[Cast No Shadow]

It's absolutely devastating. Cannot emphasise how sad I am about it, I have close friends who live in London, fortunately the girl I live with who is from there is not there at the moment, but hearing her worry about her friends and family is awful.

What's even worse is how copycats have spread it, it's now in the North, where I live, and one of my friends has told me how her dad has had to stay over at work, due to not being able to get home because of the scale of it.

It upsets me because it makes me admit just how low England has sunk, and it makes me want to disassociate myself from it. It makes me see just how terrible the government we have are, and how the people running the country don't have a clue about how to do so. Intervention is so necessary, yet it hasn't happened yet.

It makes me very sad to think about my grandparents generation, and how they fought to keep our country safe, not just for themselves but for future generations, and this is basically a "fk you" (sorry) to them, because they're destroying what was fought so valiantly to save.

We have so many young people risking their lives in the armed forces, while wasters who see violence as an answer are ripping up the country we should be proud of. I'd love to see National Service reintroduced for them.

They're bringing shame upon themselves, and I can't for a second manage to understand why.

 

[WileyDairyGnome]

This is ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous. I don't even know what to say.

I hope everyone who lives nearby stays safe!

 

[Fusions2]

If all these rioters are rioting over not being able to get a job then their only making the situation worse by targeting shops and businesses. It's only going to take longer because some businesses now have the task of getting back on track let alone thinking about advertising for jobs. These rioters just don't seem to see the bigger picture and that they are to blame for make their own situation worse. It's sad really.

 

[Summerlilly]

This is all so horrifying to me! I don't understand whats wrong with people. I was just there last week! ahhh! I can't even imagine being there.....Stay safe our UK friends.

 

[Ianigsy]

I was in a bookshop at lunchtime when a commotion broke out with people shouting at each other- it turns out one was accusing the other of trying to steal her purse, but until the police arrived (very quickly, I might add!) there was a small crowd of people standing around and I think everybody was thinking, "is this where something kicks off?".

Three men in Birmingham were deliberately run over and killed last night, and the father of one of them has just been on the news- apparently they were protecting their property from troublemakers. I think things might quieten down a bit tonight, though, if only because the weather has taken a wet and windy turn, so it won't be a night to be hanging around.