Maybe we can afford both, and the British public is certainly generous when faced with famine and disaster overseas. But we really urgently need a fund to restore a business and a home to those innocents who have lost everything due to the riots of the last few days. Insurance is bound to be insufficient. If we can raise £45m for Somalia in a few days, then we can do the same for our own suffering people. If someone can set up a bank account, would we not all want to contribute?
As for the causes of the riot, it is distressing to hear politicians making their political points against a backdrop of burning shops. When the Norwegian terrorist Breivik carried out his assassinations, we blamed the extremist ideology that had infected him. We did not and should not ask whether the actions and beliefs of the people he killed were the cause, let alone the reasonable cause. There is no political action, let alone of the last 12 months, that can be blamed for the actions of the rioting youths. They were, after all, raised long before our current financial problems started to bite.
Very unpopular this, I know, but the amount of money that is going to be spent on the Olympics could have been put to so much better use in sorting out the problems of our inner city inhabitants. The Olympics will be over and done with and forgotten in no time – I am doubtful about the “legacy” – but the billions the show will cost could have been invested in health, education and welfare right now. And in policing.
Genuinely, I do not know what unique “problems of our inner city inhabitants” could have been raised, or solved, by the recent criminal activities of the few; the speed and range of dissent might be due to a combination of technology and selfishness.
The flashpoint is undisputed: a Londoner shot to death by the Met. Perhaps all the money spent on my health, education and welfare has enabled me to see where at least one problem lies.
On your first point, count me out for contributing to a charitable fund for businesses. I already do that – it’s variably called tax/insurance/business rates.
From the splendid isolation of a small cottage in Dorset, I enjoy musing about the condition of the people of the world. At the age of 19 I remember having nowhere to go on holiday while living in the centre of London, whilst everybody else did, and shouted about it.
I repeat ad infinitum that I am anti-consumerist. These children have little idea of any form of political thought, except that they want something from the shops which they can not afford to pay for. They are consumerists of the worst kind. They don’t stand behind the till robbing customers on behalf of corporate employers; they decided to rob from the more usually accepted side for ..ok theft and shoplifting.
Have mobile (surprise; surprise) will gang up to steal!
All those shops beaten up! How dreadful for the corporate owners. They are well insured.
I do sympathise with the small traders, one hair dress salon owner , one wine bar proprietor; they work hard, take responsibility, earn a crust; save for retirement. they do not deserve such contempt. Their children behave.
But what of the CCTV, and the chain shop manager, who is always subservient to a higher power. He ans his staff have no local sense of loyalty whatsoever. Their manager may change quite regularly. It’s all Sell! Sell! Sell!
Little sense of customer service and the customer always being right. If there is a CCTV watching he is potentially always wrong.
What “Hoodies”have in common I do not know.
It is probably a marketing campaign of some sort which sells a range of slightly aggressive products, and has saturated the market with them, including music downloads of aggro music. Gangsta rap.
I sat on a bus with a teenage girl who was listening again and again to the same piece of music. She let me listen and then told me the “story” of violence and murder in a particularly horrific way, that this so called music portrayed.
Me? I did not even like the loud music of Mick Jagger. I still don’t. Paul Macartney had style.
What future do the hoodies have to look forward to, but the army, if they are “lucky”
and the organised mayhem and murder of that.
Arab spring? Ha!Ha! Have mobiles, will demonstrate, capably assisted by western powers!
Me?I have got my peace, and my nephew courteously provides me with a good insurance.
Funny thing about my mobile; I can phone a list of 50 people ALL AT THE SAME TIME, from the middle of the street.
That would amount to an unlawful street demonstration in earlier days; more than two or three without a prior police permit.
With my new mobile phone I phoned the local constabulary and gave them my number. I understand that if they want to, they may intercept my conversations at any time.
Registration of mobile iphone numbers at point of purchase is essential.
We go from “phone hacking” to mobile phone organisation of criminal theft by large holiday making gangs in the course of a few days.
In the words of Michael Caine’s(Sir Monty’s)
autobiography “What’s it all about?!
I grow my own vegetables. Those Hoodies apprehended and sentenced, should be sentenced to do the same; they would enjoy it!
Let’s organize an unlawful demo!????
all this rioting is the governments fault in my opinion. They cut housing benefit giving people over a £60 a month shortfall on private houses, yet they give refugees council houses,what about cardboard city in london? when are we going to help our own? the government have cut all funding on training courses,left the minimum wage to low, im a hgv driver but i would be worse off to work this really encourages people to work dont it? they raise taxes , sell our gold resources,makes the rich richer and the poor poorer when is there going to be a government for the poor people? no wonder people are rampaging, people always want what other people have got yet they have no way of working to get it on the wages they pay, When is david cameron going to be brought to justice over the way he is running this country, tax payers pay for david cameron to have two holidays a year…im outraged
@GH:
Your garden sounds idyllic…. Mobile phones do not create thieves. Or, maybe they do, that could be the reason MP’s and Peers thieve via their expenses and why bankers rob their customers? That kind of thieving, because it is called white collar, is no different than lifting sneakers at foot locker. In fact stealing when you are well off is far more less morale than longing for a flat screen TV when you are poor and know you will never have the chance to buy it.
Perhaps if we play the Bach suites for unaccompanied cello it may make theft a thing of the past. It simply has to be heavy metal that causes this deviance.
Ahh, for Yo Yo!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZn_VBgkPNY
If someone was done wrong by the police, let’s have a protest and an investigation.
NOT destruction.
These riots arose out of utter greed partly and utter urge to destroy anything partly.
Yes, let’s try to improve services, esp. education. Good parenting and good citizenship.
I thank those who started volunteering to put things aright ……..
I am an immigrant not by choice but by force. I fled my country – fled ethnic conflict. Exacerbated by conflict-insensitive aid. State supports state, irrespective of violations of human rights by states. To foreign states the oppressed citizens are always wrong and oppressive states are always right. UN and Commonwealth are clubs for human rights violators. I watch immigrants come here.
STOP conflict-insensitive aid to other countries. It’s much more necessary to resolve conflicts than give aid – most instances of hunger are caused by oppressive governments.
Making war history will make poverty history.
Baroness! Baroness! Read my lips carefully for the first substantial contribution.
B…L…A…C…K…B…E…R…R…Y
Buy one get one Free! “My cousin ‘ad one mate, so now I’m getting’one free!”
Blackberry? “Free? Nooooooooh! Yer ‘ave ter pay fer vose!”
If the Blackberry technology is encrypted any more than the usual 0-1 digital technology, then the UK govt should
A) Sue Blackberry for substantial damages.
B) be perfectly capable of decrypting it, well before the gadget comes to market.
It IS the silly season and anything is better
than the usual run of paedophile murders, which are profoundly demoralizing, far more so than spontaneous riots round the country.
Not just one murder but a gang of opportunist thieves gives scope for far more holiday news coverage.
May Lord Hacker’s business be brisk.
Iran uprising? Facebook trickery.
Arab spring? More Facebook trickery
London Summer? Blackberry Gangsta Rap Hoodies.
No more; No less.
I may be the odd one out, not unusual, but I felt sorry for those kids. They were inarticulate and unemployable. Scruffy, no hope for a future life of any satisfaction in this society. They didn’t even know what they felt about their circumstances. This is a failure of consecutive governments for the last 40 years at least. State education in this country is a joke.
These people were unemployable, of a mix of races, speaking mostly with a cock eyed West Indian dialect and garbled words. And you say this government is not to blame. Are they going to do something about the sick education system we have? Or, is teaching our children about condoms, abortion clinics and how to have a good same sex lifestyle to continue being top of the list for teaching?
You should hang your heads in shame. You have fanned consumerism to the point of lunacy. Support and condone the celebrity show of rapist footballers whose main aim is paying prostitutes through the nose when the wife isn’t looking and getting the legal system to cover for them.
We have no leaders. Every person I have spoken to over these few days, both in London and with the so called Oxfordshire set, say the identical words. We have no government, we have no leader. What we have, have no idea what they are doing. They don’t know what is going on and if they do they condone it.
And as far as a whip round is concerned, let the bankers donate their annual bonus, that should more than cover it.
We already pay way over the odds for the services we are not getting. If you want to cover the costs of government inadequacy, stop all foreign aid and end immigration. That should go a long way to giving the relief you seek.
Any government, with two bits of sense, does not import millions of people it cannot afford to educate, give adequate housing and health care to and be sure their is enough employment before it brings them in to an overcrowded and under productive society.
You are way out of your depth. Anyone with a simple mind could have foreseen this coming.
And, what is on the grapevine serving Londoners as I write.
That this riot was encouraged by the police when they didn’t stop perpetrators when they began. There were few at the start and that encouraged others as they felt they would be safe doing it. Also, they say, the police knew shooting dead yet another man, without trial, would inflame the community. So many police deaths are kept quiet. Police allowed the rioters to continue, slowly and without any kind of hindrance, until the media had it in hand, laughing as they did so. It was, the word goes, because Police wanted the relentless news stories to let go of the hacking topic in order to take the heat off police involved. It needed to give the guy at the top a break. And they wanted to end the idea of cuts to the force as that is making a lot of police families upset.
Does any of this ring true?
Maude and I must have been born under the same star. I could not have put any word better myself, and not as well either. I don’t often accede to such superiority.
speaking mostly with a cock eyed West Indian dialect and garbled words
I ended up in a nut house with a severely broken leg and an op to the other one by mistake, lying between a recently released convicted murderer, and a West Indian lad who loved his granma and had a mania for gangsta rap music which he would never turn off.
On being questioned about the quality of the music and its loudness, he would say,
“This is my culture (culsha) man! this is my culture!”
It was, and surely recovered, it still is.
My point is that, it is their culture, and returning to the West Indies, Trinidad, Jamaica, where have you, is much the same as “going home again” for a Welshman.
They have their heaven and I have mine.Welsh is the language of it, but not for a Garbling West Indian!
It would seem that Blackberry is their favoured mode of communication and they do not mind phoning 50 people all at the same time, and keeping in touch with all of them simultaneously.
Ideal territory for an anti-consumerist (Anti-WTO campaigner) to organize discontent, whom the police will probably identify, in due course. Meanwhile Blackberry will print pound notes, from the “free” advertising.
Perhaps government buyers will order 50,000
themselves.
After the huge “success” of trying to topple Iran’s leaders and now half the Arab world
in conflict, I presume you are enjoying your
Facebook too. Similar group communication
but not quite the same.
The difference may be super-encryption, whilst Facebook merely specialised in quick delivery of riot images from demo torn cities.
In Libya? NATO moved in.
Maude is right on target, and you are “way out of your depth”;
(all-of-you, up-there-in-governance, and in Education, Economics, Religion, Citizenship Justice and Health); having neglected to raise Britons right.
Your Values-Systems are so obviously privilege-protective and fattening, skewed, imbalanced, inflated, distorted, screwed-up;
Your professions are still grossly failing to provide lifelong basic individual human development, and collective human development, that embrace not only the need for a sustainworthy British citizenship but for an overall lifesupportive Earth-citizenship as well.
Baroness Deech does not like the distress caused to her by “politicians making their political points” (whilst Britain burns)
but continues herself to try to score her own political points
e.g. by removing my previous submission to this particular topic, which mentioned hopeful new signposts contributed by Laszlo and Zizek respectively,
which they do in second editions despite the conclusion reached 30 years ago by Professor Lovelock and many others that “it is already too late to save the Earth and our own Human Race in any comfortable manner: drastic measures are needed, and urgently so” they then said.
So what true guiding light is the baroness clinging to when she comes waving such banners as “Charity Begins At Home” ?
What “Charity” ? and at whose “Home” ?
0621Th11Aug11.JSDM.
Property is theft is the communist creed, but
is it not rather more capitalism that is, especially the excessive kind condemned by the late Sir Edward Heath.
We have come much further than in his day,way past the excesses to super hyper capitalist excess.
We do also tend to export capitalist greed to other countries, who work to support, the large city appetites in North Western Europe.
That’s why they want to come here; they know that is where the food is, so they come with the food on the same planes. the food import business would not be viable without the immigrant passengers who come with it!!!!!
When they get here they are ALIENATED by the concrete jungle. The mormon approach and that of the Kentucky evangelical Christians, Rotarians what have you, is to take the health to Uganda,the (third) world, and hope that, understanding the insouciance of mega/metropolis life, will stay exactly where they are, and become noble in their own ethnic space.
Africa is the continent of the 21stC.
Government’s decision to grant financial aid for the affected community is a generous act. Those who own shops damaged in London riots will have a relief fund, as Prime Minister of the UK David Cameron has promised 20 million pounds to help compensate their damages. The total damage from looting and pillaging of several shops throughout England is said to total more than 100 million pounds.Related article I read: Prime minister pledges relief fund for shops hit by London riots . Damages cost as a net loss is really a burden.