weird news coverage of london tonight

[Elliot]

'Seeing that there is a wider social context is not condoning nor apologising for anyone's actions.'

It is if it is used to provide a justificatory explanation as to why a small substratum of youths are committing acts of criminal violence.  London boroughs like Lewisham or Southwark have had decades of 'grass roots' 'community' initiatives to 'understand' and help the lumpenproletariat but what they haven't had is any form of systematic discipline - whether it is at home, in school or in the streets.  The credit boom of the 1990s kept them happy for a while buy giving their overindulgent mummas credit cards so they could buy £150 trainers, Playstations and smart phones.  Now the credit has dried up they are just taking for themselves.

The only grassroots experiment that has been massively effective at restoring community values was the New York experiment was the zero tolerance, of course V I Lenin tried a similar thing in 1918 in Moscow with equal success.  We should all stop trying to 'understand' these people and instead instill in them some community values.

[nfe]

There's no justification in anything I've posted. Nor in anything I've read elsewhere online.

Lumpenprolotariat, really? What is currently happening is the total antithesis of that label.

And of course zero-tolerance approaches are utterly absurd and simply cost the public masses of money, overcrowd prisons and set extremely frightening precedents.

[Johnny Mac]

Someone was shot dead in their car last night in Croyden.

There's no point trying to find reasons for the actions of c8nts like this. They're scum and don't give a f*ck. It's an opportunity to them to let off steam and grab what they can. They're all robbing and dealing drugs anyway i would of thought. So whats wrong with water cannon and rubber bullets? They can manage that in Belgium with a few football holloigans FFS!

[Transcend]

i think tear gas would be a good option.

[HTH AMPS]

Oh, and I'm not buying that 'economically disadvantaged' bull either.

Have a good look at what those thugs are wearing, especially the footwear.

I can only empathise with the people who's house was set on fire, or car, people who's shops were looted and destroyed.

yeah, they nicked them from Foot Locker or one of the other stores they looted. 

[HTH AMPS]

One thing is for sure, it doesn't appear like the government have any handle on this right now.

It'll be interesting to see the way they play it tonight - if it's left to escalate by stand-offish Policing, it will.  If they go in strong-arm, it'll have the same effect.  Its a tough situation for sure, but I think they have to be SEEN to be taking some kind of action. 

The parents of minors involved in this stuff need to be brought to account as well - surely any parent would be wanting to keep their teenage kids in the house with this kind of thing going on.

[nfe]

Well there's an extra 10,000 police in London, which should make a difference one hopes. Or the Met need ripped apart and starting over. They've already got a rubbish track record dealing with crowds, though it can't have helped that they're in the midst of reorganisation at the top after high profile resignations.

No mention of extra forces in other cities that I've seen though. Friends have been saying there's loads of police out in Birmingham, however, vastly more than last night.

[Johnny Mac]

The parents of minors involved in this stuff need to be brought to account as well - surely any parent would be wanting to keep their teenage kids in the house with this kind of thing going on.

In Tottenham they were looting shoes in shops with their kids and even getting the kids to try them on!

[Andrew W]

One thing is for sure, it doesn't appear like the government have any handle on this right now.

It'll be interesting to see the way they play it tonight - if it's left to escalate by stand-offish Policing, it will.  If they go in strong-arm, it'll have the same effect.  Its a tough situation for sure, but I think they have to be SEEN to be taking some kind of action. 

The parents of minors involved in this stuff need to be brought to account as well - surely any parent would be wanting to keep their teenage kids in the house with this kind of thing going on.

There are a LOT of riot vans around tonight. Saw nothing last night but today north of Oxford St and literally outside my flat window now, there's a ton of them. Don't know what they plan on doing but it's a much more high visibility presence tonight I think. Keeping our fingers crossed.

[Elliot]

Lumpenproletariat is exactly the correct term - the ungovernable masses below the working classes who have no interest or consciousness in anything but the immediate satisfaction of their wills and the enjoyment of criminality.

and zero tolerance policies have been highly successful in American when targeted on community policing and schooling of areas containing large numbers of lawless individuals.  It only sets 'dangerous' precedents (as opposed to the danger of having lumpenproletariat hoodlums mugging people?) to libertarians who wish to emphasise the supremacy of the rights of the individual over the wellbeing of the community.  Zero Tolerance is not absurd at all, it is an effective means of restoring order to communities where all the liberal community programmes in the world have failed. 

[nfe]

There's really rather clear class consciousness amongst these people, and an attempt to rise out of their situation (through very violent means, currently) by definition they are not lumpenproletariat.

I think putting people in jail for minor crimes at massive cost to the taxpayer is failure, personally. And you cite horrific abuses of people by the Cheka as a good example? Along with the misleading Giuliani example that's often used by people, regardless of his policies having little demonstrable effect on the crime rates which were already well in decline in New York and carried on in tandem with the general trends in other US cities without such a policy. Of course, the big economic boost and massive increases in jobs available to the poor might have had an effect. Just maybe.

[Ratrod]

Kudos and strength to these shop owners.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/video/2011/aug/09/london-riots-london

[nfe]

Kudos and strength to these shop owners.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/video/2011/aug/09/london-riots-london

Yeah that's been great. It must have really gotten up Nick Griffin's nose when he was tweeting all last night about the degenerate immigrants causing all the problems.

[Modular1]

This is totally the result of poor parenting. Total cliche but that really is the root cause of all this. If the kids were brought up to make effort in their education and better themselves there wouldn't be this despondency. They expect everything handed to them on a plate.

[Elliot]

Oh dear, the usual strategy of argumentum ad nauseum...

There is no class consciousness in the rioting.  There is a trashing of local communities including the robbing of local people's houses.  The nearest we have to any example of class consciousness is a group of teen girls telling the BBC its all about recession and kill the rich and people 'not respecting them'.  That is not class consciousness, those are just slogans for the media after the event.   What we have is organised criminality against   - and organised crime is the classic organisation of the lumpenproletariat.  So the term stands. 

Your criticism zero tolerance is just the standard libertarian position on this, i.e. zero tolerance caught a wave of lowering crime rates in the US.  Whilst that is true, it is not the whole picture and the experience in Hartlepool and Strathclyde in the UK confirms that of New York - that policing targeted at specific crimes in a community works.  Yes, it may not be the whole story but was shown to be a significant factor.  Again, I would prefer this to your undefined 'grass roots' nonsense that has been tried in London again and again in places like Lewisham and Lambeth and has just point blank failed. 

There is an underlying social context - but it is not poverty or social alienation, it the massive growth of city populations, the fracturing of communities by uncontrolled immigration and the collapse of tradition measures of social discipline.