Oh dear, the usual strategy of argumentum ad nauseum...
... :roll:
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.
There is a large number of people from the same social class seeing themselves as an oppressed group who should do this to get one up on the overlords, essentially. That's class consciousness, however negative a version. It is not organised in any sense other than "Let's go smash that thing up there, now this one here".
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.
And your support of it is the standard rightist position, supported by a vastly lower number of criminologists, oddly enough. Probably because they're all bleeding-heart, lefty fags, one imagines.
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.
Massive population growth of city populations?
Birmingham - in steady decline for 60 years.
Liverpool - in steady decline for 80 years.
Inner London - 75% of what it was in 1951 (though has raised 5% in the last 20 years, I'll grant you).
Greater London - 85% of what it was in 1951 (Though up 4% in the last 20 years).
The immigration one can be argued, though it's easily stated that in the UK the vast majority of "immigrants" have been here several generations and came to fill much needed jobs. Unfortunately the low paid jobs filled by those folks brought over by invitation of the government gradually vanished abroad again. Leaving the children of those folks with little in the way of job prospects in a similar class, and they were fighting against institutionalised racism regardless.
But hold on. We're endorsing talking about underlying context. Wonderful! That's exactly what I was getting at. There needs to be actual discussion and not "They're scum stick 'em in the jail job done" as that simply encourages it to continue indefinitely.
