THE POSTS MOSTLY BY GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION

THE POSTS MOSTLY BY GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION

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Boston artist Steve Mills - realistic painting

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

London riots-Seven out of ten Britons are against immigration

Seven out of ten Britons are against immigration

The vast majority of Britons think there are too many immigrants in the UK, that immigrants place too much pressure on public services and that high immigration affects job prospects, an IPSOS Mori poll has revealed.
Seventy-one percent of respondents said there are ‘too many immigrants in this country’. The poll surveyed citizens of 23 countries around the world, and only Russia (77 percent) and Belgium (72 percent) were more concerned about immigration.

Seventy-six percent stated immigration places too much pressure on public services, such as health, transport and education – the highest percentage of all countries asked – and 62 percent said immigration has made it more difficult for them to find employment.
Just 27 percent believed immigration is good for the economy, and only 33 percent thought immigrants ‘make Britain a more interesting place to live in’ – proving public opinion flies in the face of those oft-repeated racist lies of the left.
All questionnaires were purposefully ‘weighted’ to ensure demographics were ‘balanced’ and that ‘the sample’s composition reflects that of the adult population according to the most recent country Census data’, suggesting the actual amount of indigenous Britons against immigration is far higher.
The results of this latest poll represent a continuation of the high level of opposition to immigration in Britain and across the West.
In December 2010, 73 percent of those surveyed said they would be ‘unhappy’ if Britain were to become a majority-non-white nation, proving public antipathy towards immigration is not just a matter of numbers, but of race.
In January 2011, 78 percent said they want immigration cut back, and in May this year, up to 92 percent of respondents said they wanted immigration levels drastically slashed.

Nick Griffin-How we’d restore order

 Nick Griffin

How we’d restore order

Nick Griffin warns of the dangers of government and police weakness and spells out how the British National Party would bring peace back to our streets.

“Bring in the Army now to save lives.” That’s one of five core demands put forward by British National Party leader Nick Griffin in response to the wave of black mob violence sweeping England.

The party’s North West of England MEP has also called for the use of water cannons and plastic baton rounds, the setting up of emergency courts to hand down immediate five-year prison sentences to rioters and looters, and the subsequent expulsion of immigrant rioters and their dependants from Britain.


“The authorities have only hours, or at most a couple of days, to get the mayhem under control, or it is liable to spill out into inter-community violence on a truly devastating scale,” Mr. Griffin has told our News Team.

“The media are doing their best to cover up the extent to which innocent white and Asian people are being targeted simply because they are not black. Most strikingly, the Daily Mail censored its own website once a higher-level editor spotted the power of the picture they were running of a white woman who had been forced to strip naked by rioters in an act of calculated racist humiliation.
“From grass-roots reports we’re getting from all over London and from Birmingham, the few photos and passing mentions of the issue that have been carried by the media are only the tip of an iceberg. The truth appears to be that hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of people have been brutally mugged, or had their bikes, cars, shops and even homes attacked because they are ethnically British, East European or Asian.

“This is why, unless the authorities stop this now, it is inevitable that the self-defence organisation already seen in the Turkish community will spread, turning what is still at present primarily a giant exercise in shopping with violence into a far more ugly set of racial clashes and full-scale conflict between different ethnic and religious groups.”

Act now to save lives

“The ConDem government are literally playing with fire in believing that the police can get a grip on the situation without the help of proper anti-riot equipment and the army,” warns Mr. Griffin. The liberal Tories now running the country believe that it’s too Politically Incorrect to treat black rioters with the same tough measures as are routinely used against young Republican and Loyalist rioters in Northern Ireland.

But this pathetic squeamishness could all too easily lead to people being killed.
“I urge the government and police to stop pussyfooting around and get tough. I urge members of our community, and the significant number of decent and settled members of ethnic minorities who recognise that we speak for the Silent Majority, to stay calm and to stay off the streets unless failure by the authorities leaves them absolutely no choice but to take action to defend their homes, families and neighbours.

“And I urge British National Party activists and new supporters to download, print and distribute the leaflets that we will be putting on this site as events unfold. People out there are angry and frightened. They want and deserve answers and hope. It is clear that they will find neither from the political elite or the sensationalist but Politically Correct mass media. They will find both in the British National Party.”

London Burning after three days of race riots

London Burning after three days of race riots

 Adam Walker

The weekend’s devastating riots in Tottenham have shocked many. However, the crimes are just the latest in a series of tragic events that would never have happened if the left had not decided to subject the people of this country to ‘multiculturalism’.

Saturday night’s violence saw 26 police officers injured – with eight admitted to hospital – when 300 people attacked police in north London on Saturday night and into the early hours of Sunday.

Shops were looted, police cars and a double-decker bus set alight, and petrol bombs thrown at officers.
Although the news channels are hard at work portraying the perpetrators of these crimes as the victims, wheeling out black ‘community representatives’ who blame the ‘racist’ white police for black violence, the truth is that this is just the latest battle in the immigrant-on-indigenous war forced upon this country by those who aid and abet mass immigration.
The area that witnessed last night’s horrific scenes was very close to that of one of Britain’s most notorious riots, just over 25 years ago. In 1985, PC Keith Blakelock was hacked to death by men with knives and machetes on a rundown housing estate in Tottenham when around 500 mainly black youths rampaged through the streets, attacking police, looting and setting fires.
Both Tottenham riots are just two in a series of such events in Britain over the last 30 years.

Thirty years of hate: Britain's worst race riots

1981: More than 300 people are injured, including 279 police officers, as black men hurl petrol bombs in Brixton, south London. The two-day clash causes £6.5m damage. Later in the year there is another riot in Brixton, as well as riots in Manchester, Southall and Toxteth, Liverpool, where a man is killed.
1985: Trouble flares up again in Handsworth, Birmingham. Black rioting leaves two people dead and dozens of buildings gutted by firebombs. More than 50 cars are set alight and two shops gutted.
1985: Broadwater Farm. White PC Keith Blakelock is hacked to death in a racist murder by men with knives and machetes.
1995: A policeman is almost kicked to death after being pulled off his motorcycle during a second immigrant riot in Brixton.
1995: Three nights of fighting causes more than £1m worth of damage after gangs of Asian youths run wild in Manningham, Bradford.
1998: A group of 100 youths throw bottles, cans and stones at police as the five suspects of the murder of teenager Stephen Lawrence arrive at the inquiry.
2001: Bradford, Oldham, Leeds, Burnley. Muslim Asian youths fight on the streets of northern towns, hurling petrol bombs and stones. Eighty police officers are injured in Bradford alone.
2005: ‘Black British’ and ‘black Asians’ riot for two consecutive nights, with both groups committing a string of violent crimes against each other, including two murders.
2011: The race war has entered its most dangerous phase yet with gangs attacking hospitals and looting in broad daylight in scenes that look more like a US disaster zone every day.
 
 
Police attacked as rioting spreads

As fire hoses continue pumping water onto smouldering buildings in Tottenham, emergency services have been dealing with disturbances across London after fresh bouts of rioting and looting broke out.
Police officers were being deployed to respond to "copycat criminal activity" across the city.
Disturbances erupted on Sunday in several boroughs in north, south and east London, with reports of trouble in Brixton, Enfield, Walthamstow and Islington.
Three officers were taken to hospital after being hit by a fast-moving vehicle at 12.45 a.m. on Monday, a Metropolitan Police spokesman said. The officers had been in the process of making arrests in Chingford Mount, Waltham Forest, after a shop was looted by youths.
Meanwhile, a fight broke out when rival gangs attended King's College Hospital after two victims of minor stabbings were admitted, police said. The hospital has brought in extra security for the rest of the night, and officers remain on scene dealing with the initial stabbings.
Six fire engines were dispatched to deal with a blaze at a Foot Locker shop in Brixton, south London, and witnesses saw riot police clash with looters at a Currys store nearby. A photographer on the scene said:
"A couple of hundred youths were rioting and looting. Riot police went in to get them out and there was a big fight in the street. Youths were throwing rocks and bottles and there was a bin on fire. They used a fire extinguisher to push the police back so they could get back into Currys and continue taking things out."
Elsewhere, more than 30 youths, many in masks, vandalised and looted shops in Walthamstow Central, including BHS. "Officers attended the area, and the situation is currently under control. Groups of youths are continuing to target shops in Waltham Forest, and officers are on scene," a spokesman commented.
Police Commander Christine Jones said: "Officers responding to sporadic disorder in a number of boroughs made more than 100 arrests throughout last night and early this morning. This is in addition to the 61 arrests made on Saturday night and Sunday morning."
She went on: "Officers are shocked at the outrageous level of violence directed against them. At least nine officers were injured overnight in addition to the 26 injured on Saturday night. We will not tolerate this disgraceful violence. The investigation continues to bring these criminals to justice.

Steve Squire at the scene in Enfield said: “You get what you vote for! It’s time the people of London woke up to the reality of living in this tinderbox. We have a serious situation building here, and our only hope is to stop this madness politically – and time is fast running out, as scenes this week have shown us.”

London riots-The black ‘community leader’ interview that went wrong

The black ‘community leader’ interview that went wrong

The BBC was forced to cut short an interview about the UK riots with former black panther member and convicted criminal Darcus Howe on Tuesday morning when he viciously turned on the interviewer.


Trinidad and Tobago-born Howe said the wanton destruction of Britain witnessed in the last two days was not a riot but an ‘insurrection’.
Howe is just one of many ‘black representatives’ who has been wheeled out by the anti-white mass media since the riots began in order to disseminate platitudes about ‘police racism’ and to play down the blatantly obvious fact that the vast majority of the rioters are black. But unfortunately for the BBC, this propaganda exercise did not go to plan.
Howe said: ‘They have been stopping and searching young blacks for no reason at all. I have a grandson; he’s an angel.’
When the interviewer put it to Mr Howe that any alleged actions by the police were not justification for mass rioting, he replied, ‘Where were you in 1981 in Brixton?
‘I don’t call it rioting. I call it an insurrection of the masses of the people. It is happening in Syria, it is happening in Clapham, it has happening in Liverpool, it is happening in Port of Spain, Trinidad.’
He then angrily told the interviewer to ‘have some respect for an old West Indian negro’ and to stop accusing him of being a rioter. He uttered an unintelligible insult, and the interview was promptly cut short, to much embarrassment in the pro-multicultural newsroom.
In the 1970s, Howe was a member of the British Black Panther Movement. He was arrested for riot, affray and assault and imprisoned for three months for assaulting a police officer, yet he has been rewarded by British TV stations with a lucrative career in broadcasting.

Michael McCarthy-No shame, no limits

No shame, no limits: Has the behaviour of the mob destroyed the idea of British civility for ever?

On Monday night rioters across the capital showed that authority held no sway over them. The Independent’s commentators discuss the riots that have shaken a nation.
By Michael McCarthy
Wednesday, 10 August 2011
The battle for Britain: rioters in Hackney, east London on Monday

The battle for Britain: rioters in Hackney, east London on Monday


Twitter is a remarkable medium through which to follow a major event like violent disorder, especially when the micro-blogging service has been embraced by thousands of people. It makes possible a panoramic view of events and an equally wide view of people's reactions at the same time. I spent until the early hours of yesterday morning observing the rioting in London via thousands of tweets, from the comfort and safety of my desk, while my younger colleagues were out risking their necks to report it.
But the advantage of being an armchair observer via Twitter is that you not only get news of events long before the news agencies have broadcast them, you get a very real sense of the public mood and its shifts. And late on Monday evening, as the violence spread across London, the mood of the citizenry noticeably changed, shifting from anger and outrage to fear.
What began to terrify people, especially in areas where the police were absent, was the seemingly limitless nature of what the rioters would do. It had gone far beyond a barney with the coppers and the looting, in particular, it went past all previous bounds; the rioters would loot everything, everywhere; they would attack and rob anyone they came across; they began to break into private houses.
I think people were so frightened because something had been loosed and was on display, which was new to many people – and that was the sight of very large numbers of people, mainly young men, who were no longer constrained by our culture. The role of culture in making British society what it is, and in giving it its remarkable strengths, is not often remarked upon, but it is enormous. We are, or we have been, a culture-bound society: we have been governed largely by informal constraints on our behaviour.
This is in sharp contrast to a society like that of the United States, for example, which is largely a rule-bound society. To give just a single instance: drinking alcohol in the street used to be rare in Britain, because it was frowned upon – but in the US there are local laws specifically forbidding it. The rule-bound society, which is the reason for the vast proliferation of lawyers in the US, arose in America because the founding fathers created a new nation from scratch, starting with a written Constitution that set out the first principles and then writing down and proscribing everything else about people's behaviour.
Britain, whose governing process evolved slowly and organically, does not even have a written constitution, merely a set of understandings about how things ought to be done.
But these understandings have, in the past, been widespread and very powerful. The bus queue and the idea of queuing generally is an example that persists; I remember my shock and spluttering resentment when I first went skiing, years ago, and stood patiently with the other Brits in the queue for the chairlift and watched as the little French and Italian kids skied to the front and forced their way in. (An example that has fallen by the wayside is giving up your seat to a woman on public transport. When I was a boy, no woman on a bus or a train would be standing if a man had a seat to offer her; now the man who gets up is the exception.)
These may seem like relatively trivial instances, but cultural norms exercise much deeper and more important influences. I once sat down to try to work out what was the single most valuable thing about British society and I concluded that it was our relatively incorrupt civil service. In the past, if you wanted a new driving licence, say, you filled in the application form and posted it to the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency in Swansea (now you do it online), and back your licence came. You did not include a £20 note in the envelope; you did not ring up the guy in the department who was your wife's second cousin and ask him to speed it up. Yet in many parts of the world, that is how things are routinely done.
The reason people in Britain behaved differently was the culture, the culture of shame, if you like; it would be shameful to do otherwise. We can probably locate the origins of this in two factors: mid-Victorian religious morality and the nature of the British national psyche. Victorian morality spanned society, with Methodism and the other free churches strongly influencing the working class and the upper classes in their Anglican public schools being animated by Dr Thomas Arnold's ideal of the education of a Christian gentleman. The two streams came together in a general national understanding, across the classes, that behaviour should be civilised. It is one of the reasons why revolutionary Marxism never took root here and the Labour Party embraced parliamentary democracy instead.
The British psyche was the fertile soil in which this understanding flowered: we are not an aggressive or violent people. The idea of the British bulldog is a myth and never more clearly shown than by the tribulations of the citizen army that landed in France on D-Day in 1944. Max Hastings' gripping account of the subsequent Normandy campaign, Overlord, makes very uncomfortable reading, for it demonstrates in detail how the British Army was outfought by the Germans until overwhelming firepower eventually beat the Nazi war machine down. When the odds were equal, Hastings said, the Germans always prevailed. This is not to minimise by one jot the courage and self-sacrifice of the British forces, it is simply that we were not naturally good at fighting. We were brave and stoical but not imaginatively aggressive, which is a different thing – and what the Germans were.
This combination of a peaceful national character and an accepted moral outlook on how we ought to behave produced (especially after the Second World War, when people had got used to being told what to do) a society of social cohesion and stability: the low point for crime in British history was 1953. This is the society into which, as a baby boomer, I was born. And it was one of the many dazzling advantages we enjoyed, along with plenty to eat, free health, free education, freedom of speech and ever-rising expectations.
As the Fifties became the Sixties, society became liberated and far less docile and there were rumbles, there was industrial unrest: Mods and Rockers fought on the beach at Brighton; students demonstrated against the Vietnam war. But somehow, although it provoked indignation from retired colonels, none of this really stepped outside the bounds of the culture.
I can remember when I first saw the cultural norms transgressed; it was on a Sunday evening in August 1976, at the end of the Notting Hill Carnival, which I had been covering as a young reporter for the Daily Mirror. The event ended in rioting. I had covered riots before, in Northern Ireland, but that evening I saw something new. It wasn't just people throwing rocks at the police. There were groups of young men on the street, openly brandishing knives and openly looking to rob. It was chilling. It took me some time to work out why it was different, but eventually I realised that it was the openness of their behaviour which was so startling. To anyone of my generation, it was unthinkable that you would behave so shamelessly, that you might strut about in the street with a knife. And it was clear that those people rioting had been socialised in a different way, so that the informal constraints on behaviour which had been such a key part of our culture had no effect on them whatsoever.
So with the looting on Monday night. This was a multi-racial phenomenon. There were plenty of black rioters and plenty of white rioters, too. But what united them was the abandonment of all restraint and that the cultural norms which had once been so powerful in British society were irrelevant to them, with perhaps the most egregious example of all being the young man who was robbed even while he was injured. People were still stunned yesterday by what had they had witnessed; here's a tweet from anIndependent contributor, picked from many similar ones: "Am still thinking about what I saw last night. It was like watching packs of wild dogs bring down antelopes."
We have plenty of rules and plenty of laws like every other nation, but what has held British society together, given its relative stability and unique values, has been culture. It is clear that there is a growing section of young men and women who have been so socialised that this culture means nothing to them and this will have to be recognised. This is probably not something that policy can deal with; it cannot be ameliorated, it can only be confronted.
It does not mean that we cannot have civil governance, but it will increasingly have to be based on rules which are enforced, rather than on universally accepted norms of behaviour. Those norms were the best thing about British society and long after the burnt-out streets of Hackney and Croydon and Ealing have been rebuilt, their loss will be resonating with us still.

Damian Thompson-London riots: This is what happens when multiculturalists turn a blind eye to gang culture

Damian Thompson

Damian Thompson is Editor of Telegraph Blogs and a leader writer for the Daily Telegraph. He was once described by The Church Times as a "blood-crazed ferret". He is on Twitter as HolySmoke.

London riots: This is what happens when multiculturalists turn a blind eye to gang culture


Screen Shot 2011-08-08 at 23.23.57

The roots of these appalling events are many and tangled, but for the moment let’s just focus on one: the way Britain’s educational establishment has cringed helplessly in the face of a gang culture that rejects every tenet of liberal society. It’s violent, it’s sexist, it’s homophobic and it’s racist. But it is broadly tolerated by many people in the black community, which has lost control of its teenage youths. Those youths scare the wits out of teachers and social workers – and some police officers, too. The threat of physical violence is ever present in many schools, and one can hardly blame individual teachers for recoiling from it. But we should and must blame those schools and education authorities that have made extra space for gang culture in children’s lives because they believe it is an authentic expression of Afro-Caribbean and Asian identity. We are seeing a lot of black faces on our screens tonight; it’s a shame that the spotlight can’t also fall on those white multiculturalists who made this outrage possible.

David Green-London riots

London riots: why did the police lose control?

The police have become so sensitive to the issue of race that it is impairing their ability to do the job.

Riot police stand in line as fire rages through a building in Tottenham, north London - London riots: why did the police lose control?
Riot police stand in line as fire rages through a building in Tottenham, north London Photo: PA
What caused these riots and why did the police lose control? Some commentators think the disorder was understandable and justified; some say the police “had it coming”; others that the violence was only to be expected given the unemployment and poverty in the area.
Some local people told journalists of their resentment towards the police. One student said: “The police never talk to us, they ignore us, they don’t think we’re human in this area.” A youth worker claimed: “The way the police treat black people is like we’re nothing.” And a retired accountant who has lived locally for 30 years reported that some of the police “behave in an arrogant manner that puts people’s backs up”.
Other residents who witnessed people carrying off carpets, trainers and watches noticed that they included individuals of all “colours and creeds”, suggesting an outburst of sheer lawlessness rather than righteous retaliation for past racial slights.
Did the police inflame the initially peaceful crowd protesting about the shooting last Thursday of Mark Duggan? It will be impossible to answer that question until the independent inquiry is complete. But what should we make of another theory, that the police handled the rioters with kid gloves because they were paralysed by fear of being called racist?
Anyone in touch with police leaders will know that most are fully signed-up supporters of the doctrine that the police should use force only as a last resort. As one of the famous “nine principles of policing”, published in 1829 at the very founding of the Metropolitan Police, puts it, the police should “use physical force only when the exercise of persuasion, advice and warning is found to be insufficient… and to use only the minimum degree of physical force which is necessary on any particular occasion”.
This was the policy of the Met during the recent protests against student fees. It had worked well enough a few days earlier when the trade unions held a march against the cuts, but the student protests turned violent. Reluctance to use force is right and we should be reluctant to reproach the police for it. However, a second attitude was at work in Tottenham. Since the Macpherson report of 1999 the police have been hyper-sensitive about race. This attitude has now become so paradoxical that they find themselves standing aside when members of ethnic minorities are being harmed. The people who ran shops, or who lived in the flats above, were not given the protection they deserved.
The police have been made to feel that they are the “white police”, and that they lack legitimacy in “black areas”. This unfortunate attitude began with the report by Lord Scarman on the Brixton riots of 1981. He said: “There is widespread agreement that the composition of our police forces must reflect the make-up of the society they serve.” He found that ethnic minorities were significantly under-represented. Soon after the Macpherson report made a similar observation in 1999, the Government set a recruitment target for ethnic minorities of 8 per cent.
Scarman’s remark that the police should reflect the make-up of society is profoundly wrong. The police have never been representative of the social or ethnic breakdown of society. Police officers are people who have been chosen because they deserve to wear the uniform, not because of their ethnic status. They are individuals who deserve to be part of a profession that upholds the law without favour or affection, malice or ill-will. So long as that remains true, then every officer is entitled to respect, whether black or white, male or female. The legitimacy of the police has nothing to do with the racial composition of the force. It has to do with impartial enforcement of the law.
Instead of upholding strict impartiality, in 2002 police leaders published a “hate-crime manual” via the Association of Chief Police Officers. It was a defining moment that undermined the highest traditions of policing. The ideal of impartial justice was dismissed with particular scorn. “Colour blind” (in quotation marks to signify its implausibility) policing was defined as “policing that purports to treat everyone in the same way. Such an approach is flawed and unjust. It fails to take account of the fact that different people have different reactions and different needs. Failure to recognise and understand these means failure to deliver services appropriate to needs and an inability to protect people irrespective of their background.” Impartial justice was now “unjust” and it’s not surprising that many rank and file officers have had difficulty accepting the new approach. But their concerns have been given short shrift. They were to be “retrained” or disciplined. And yet it was not easy for officers to be sure how they could stay out of trouble. In another section of the manual they were told: “Anyone who is unable to behave in a non-discriminatory and unprejudiced manner must expect disciplinary action. There is no place in the police service for those who will not uphold and protect the human rights of others.”
In this kind of atmosphere, it’s not surprising that officers in charge of a riot think it safer to wait for orders from the top rather than use their discretion to protect the public without fear or favour.
Another element of police practice contributed to their failure. The police do not have deep roots in most localities and especially areas such as Tottenham. Few, if any, officers live locally. In earlier times, policing was seen as primary prevention, based on a visible uniformed presence. Gradually, under pressure to appear more “efficient”, policing became more a matter of reaction and detection. Officers waited for calls and responded as fast as possible, while teams of investigators tried to solve past crimes. Only in the past couple of years has it begun to be accepted that primary prevention has its merits, and the Government is supposed to be moving towards neighbourhood policing with named officers covering particular areas and charged with getting to know everyone. An officer who knows the law-abiding locals as well as the miscreants is in a much stronger position when things go wrong than the officer whose “response unit” has been called in to deal with some trouble every now and then.
Coalition cutbacks in the number of police officers have also been blamed for the riots. It goes too far to blame the Government, when the immediate perpetrators were unequivocally at fault, but cutting police numbers doesn’t help. The Coalition plans to cut spending on the police by 20 per cent. In the 12 months to the end of March 2011, the number of officers fell by 4,625 to 139,110. The number of community support officers also fell by 1,098 to 15,820. At the same time the number of police volunteers, or special constables, increased by 2,916.
So much for the underlying factors, but even after they have been taken into account, there has been an inexcusable failure of police leadership in the first few days of these riots. CCTV pictures of looting are now available and it seems likely that the police would have been watching from their control rooms. If they could see the window of a carpet shop or a jewellers being smashed and looters taking their pick of the goods, why didn’t they immediately dispatch a dozen officers to arrest every culprit? There are always people who are willing to become criminals for a day if they calculate that there is little chance of being caught. It seems likely that televising the fact that the police would just stand there while mass looting took place led to its spread to other localities the next night.
Being reluctant to use force can be admirable. But when events have got out of control, the fullest use of police powers is justified. The present generation of police leaders gained promotion by mastering the art of talking about “issues around” racism or bearing down on hate crime “going forward”. Learning the management buzz words of the last few years has not produced leaders able to command men in a riot. The injuries sustained by officers show that we have plenty of men and women prepared to be brave when needed, but they are lions led by donkeys who listened a bit too intently to the sociology lectures about “hate crime” at Bramshill police college.
David Green is Director of Civitas

Philip Johnston-London riots

London and UK riots: The long retreat of order

To understand the cause of these riots, we need to accept that the police ceded control of the streets to the criminals decades ago.

A rioter in London poses in front of a burning van Photo: GETTY
When rioters rampaged through the suburbs of Paris six years ago, Nicolas Sarkozy, then France’s interior minister, called them racaille. While this can mean “rabble” or “riff-raff”, it also translates as “scum”.
You cannot imagine a British politician using that term to describe the youths who have turned London into a war zone. Yet it is the word that will have been on the lips of all decent people as they watched – appalled, shocked and ashamed – while the capital and, later, other cities were trashed by elements of their criminally inclined underclass. Epithets like “rabble” or “riff-raff” are too mild for the lawless, feckless, mindless and amoral thugs who forced passers-by to strip naked while they stole their clothes; or who torched a furniture warehouse that had withstood the Blitz; or who ransacked shops across London. What else do you call them?
If ever we wanted proof that Britain has been divided into two nations, then here it was. But hasn’t it always been? You did not need to look far beneath the surface at any time over the past 200 years or more to find people ready to loot and rob and steal. After all, the London mob is hardly a new phenomenon. The word itself was coined in the late 17th century as the city’s population grew and aggressive crowds, fuelled by alcohol and perceived grievance, took to the streets with alarming regularity.
Although there were law enforcement officers – salaried watchmen – to patrol the streets, they were too few to make a difference, or influence bad behaviour decisively. So, in order to counter the mob, the Metropolitan Police was established in 1829 by Sir Robert Peel, and gradually the disorder subsided. While sporadic crowd violence broke out on occasion, it was not until the late 1950s and the Notting Hill race riots that further widespread trouble occurred. Since then, there have been disturbances linked to protests over the poll tax, policing in Brixton, and, most recently, student fees.
Yet the riots we are seeing now are fundamentally different from those that have gone before. They might, ostensibly, have been triggered by the police shooting of Mark Duggan, a notorious gangster, in north London; but they are fuelled by pure greed, by a belief that something can be had for nothing. The usual brakes on such behaviour – either an appreciation that it is wrong, or by the prospect that the culprit will be caught and punished – are largely absent.
For this, we have to thank four decades of politically correct policing, and a gradual breakdown of the informal network of authority figures that once provided an additional element of control over the bad behaviour of young people. Adults are now reluctant, or too scared, to step in and stop things getting out of hand, or to impose a wider moral code – and in any case, they are no longer listened to. Deference to age and authority has been eroded by years of genuflection to the twin gods of multiculturalism and community cohesion.

The police, bludgeoned by criticism for the way they handled the Brixton riots 30 years ago and the Stephen Lawrence murder in 1994, have become more like social workers than upholders of law and order. And the places that have really suffered as a result are the most deprived: they have to bear the brunt of the criminality and the fear, squalor and alienation that accompanies it.
In recent years, a myth has been allowed to grow up – motivated in part by the approach of the Olympic Games – that London is one of the world’s safest big cities. In terms of its murder rate, that may be true. But no one living in the capital is unaware of the existence of a minority ready to descend into lawlessness at the drop of a hat.
There has long been a disconnection between this reality and the self-congratulation of police and politicians inspired by dodgy crime statistics and phoney targets: the truth is the capital has far more crime than 40 years ago, and parts of the city are no-go areas for the police.
Part of the problem is that the breakdown of the family (or an unwillingness to form one) has left a generation of feral adolescents without fathers or any adult males to act as role models. Parents rarely know what their children are doing, and exercise little power or authority over them. Instead, their loyalty is to the gang and to its codes, rather than to the prevailing moral orthodoxies of the majority of the population. Low-level criminality is a way of life – as, for some, are drugs, robbery and routine armed violence.
These young people know that if they are caught committing an offence, they are unlikely to be punished, or certainly not as severely as was once the case. If Britain today jailed the same ratio of people relative to the number of the most serious offences – burglary, robbery and violence – as it did in 1954, there would not be 80,000 behind bars, but 300,000. It may well be true, as penal reformers maintain, that there are some people in jail who ought not to be; but by the same token, there are an awful lot who should be who aren’t.

Another big change is the official attitude to crimes against property: they are no longer considered important. Burglaries have a pitifully low clear-up rate. Under the fixed-penalty notice system for shoplifting introduced by the last government, the police are expected to levy a fine of £80 if the items stolen cost less than £200. There was a time when theft was regarded as a serious crime, and it still carries a maximum jail term of seven years on indictment. Yet thieves are now being treated in the same way as motorists whose cars have remained too long in a parking space. To the exasperation of retailers, the deterrents to shoplifting have virtually disappeared over the years. The industrial-scale looting and recreational rioting that have taken place around London are the ultimate expression of this lax attitude.
To find out what has gone wrong, we do not need to delve too deeply into the specific causes of the appalling events of the past few days, or establish commissions and inquiries. We know what has gone wrong. The police lost control of the streets not in Tottenham, last weekend, but many years ago. Arguably, their failure to intervene robustly on Saturday and to let the looters carry on unmolested for hours owed much to the non-confrontational nostrums that have guided the policing of ethnically diverse areas, with disastrous consequences. On this occasion, they let the impression develop that here was a chance to plunder with impunity. Once that had taken a grip across the capital, and elsewhere, it became far more difficult – if not impossible – for the police to regain control.
There will be a temptation to beat ourselves up as a society for not doing enough to address problems faced by these groups, especially the inadequate education and consequent lack of qualifications that makes it hard for them to get jobs, which largely go to immigrant workers from eastern Europe. That should be resisted. Billions of pounds have been spent trying to improve schools and regenerate run-down areas. The suggestion from some Left-wing politicians, such as Ken Livingstone, that the riots were due to the impact of Government spending cuts is grotesque. If anything, the biggest problem has been the creation of a sense of entitlement sustained by an overly generous (and no longer affordable) welfare system, which expects nothing in return for the benefits dispensed.
Mercifully, some of these issues are being addressed by the Government – though not without sustained opposition from those who helped to created the mess in the first place. David Cameron was commendably tough in his rhetoric yesterday, after cutting short his holiday to return to London. The Prime Minister has promised a robust police response and condign punishment for all those involved in the rioting. This is what all decent people wish to see – but it will mean reversing a culture that is now deeply rooted in our national life.
Mr Cameron’s first duty is to keep order and protect property. That is the contract the people have with the state, which prevents us from taking the law into our own hands. That is what policing by consent means. The dreadful events of the past few days have shown how far that contract has broken down.

Andrew Gilligan-London riots

London riots: 'Bleeding, I called 999. A tired man told me to go home'

Andrew Gilligan reports on his own experiences of the lawlessness that swept across much of London and elsewhere.

A car on fire in Hackney
A car is set on fire in Hackney Photo: GETTY IMAGES
It was one of those microseconds when you know exactly what is about to happen, without the slightest chance of stopping it.
The big black boy rode his bike straight at me, crashing me off my own and leaving us both tangled up on the ground. Then four more of them were racing towards me, clawing at my legs to get them off my bike, kicking me in the head as I tried to hold on. Two minutes later, it was all over. Ten minutes later, no doubt, it was being used to loot a newsagent’s.
Bleeding a little, I thought I might as well call 999. It was a recorded message. After four and a half minutes, a tired man answered. “There’s nothing we can do,” he said. “You know what’s going on. We have to give priority to saving people’s lives. I suggest you just go home.”
He was right, of course. I was in Hackney - which, that evening at least, was a law-free zone. That’s the worst thing about riots. Across much of London on Monday night, if someone had decided to break down your door and rape your daughter, there would have been nothing to stop them. There would have been no one to call.
When I was mugged, I was on my way home from a day in Tottenham, listening to the stories of the people who had lost far more and been at far greater risk than me, burned out of their homes at 30 seconds’ notice.
They called 999 too, frantically, desperately, as the riot moved closer. There were 100 police just up the road. The emergency operator could do nothing but listen to their terror.
I finished my journey in a cab. Three or four times, we had to stop and skirt round hooded boys spilling into the road, our windows closed and the door lock on. If they had fancied my taxi, there would have been nothing I or the driver could have done about that, either.
Even on Monday, the victims of Tottenham, black and white, were already tired of outsiders blaming racism, police brutality, or cuts. (What were they rioting about in prosperous, suburban Enfield – rising season-ticket prices?) The real reason for the rioters’ behaviour is much simpler: because they can.
Forget BlackBerry Messenger. After seeing — on television — how much leeway the looters of Tottenham were allowed, every criminal and every excitement-seeking child in London took note.
By the next day, critical mass had been achieved. Disorder had erupted on a scale much more difficult to suppress than the original outbreak.
There are, and always have been, plenty of people keen to break the law. On my taxi ride, I saw many other youngsters in twos and threes, hoods up, looking for the next crowd to join.
These are sights, with variations, that I have seen in foreign conflict zones: the loss of state authority and the loss of individual inhibition from being in a big group. But in London, the geography of fear is particularly potent.
Unlike Los Angeles or Paris, the riots are not happening in ghettos where nobody goes. They are happening amid the organic gastropubs and latte bars. Alongside poverty, inner London is full of the sort of middle-class progressives who agree with Ken Livingstone that the rioters “feel no one at the top of society, in government or City Hall, cares about them or speaks for them”.
I predict a lot of those people, as they cower behind their sash windows, are revising their views tonight. The hardening of liberal opinion in London is palpable, and is taking even the likes of Boris Johnson by surprise.
In my neighbourhood, Greenwich, they boarded up the shops at noon. God knows how much damage this is doing to the economy. It’s a beautiful, sunny evening. But our area is empty, like so much of inner London, as we wait in our homes with the TVs on to discover if they will be coming for us tonight.