weird news coverage of london tonight

[HTH AMPS]

I don't consider political leanings to be as simple as left/right or labour/tory.  I pretty much see myself as left-leaning politically, but I still believe we are WAY too soft in general in this country when it comes to discipline and punishment.  These kids are taking the p*iss  and talking openly about what they've done.

You see it time and time again - 'poor deprived communities' which get redeveloped only to be vandalised and turned back into the shitehole it was before.  To say this infuriates me would be an understatement.  Let the f*uckers rot.  I do feel sorry for the kids brought up by morons such as we've been seeing - they really have no future.  Kids will mirror their environment, good or bad, just to fit in and be accepted.  There is no evidence of parents instilling morals in their kids these days or any basic manners. 

I don't know where I'm going with this rant and don't pretend to have the answers - sometimes venting is needed, but I'd never consider venting by looting and smashing up the corner shop at the top of my street - WTF!  :?

[HTH AMPS]

See that guy from Salford on the news?
saying he can't get jobs because of all the immigrants and what not, so he supports going and smashing shops up.

He didn't appear to be a clear thinking gent though.

I saw this too and had a bit of a rant about it to my girlfriend. Goes to show that some people in parts of the country are still breeding with vegetables  :lol:

I think it was on the same report where a woman with a few kids was being interviewed outside a shop and she was sticking up for it saying stuff like 'I can't blame them, they have nothing to look forward to etc' when a random guy chirped in over her shoulder and then they started having ana rgument over it. She eventually told the guy to 'jog on', it amused me somewhat  :D

Yep, she was an utter moron.  I'm sure the world would weep at her loss; and thousands like her.

[Dmoney]

I went to a so called redeveloped area and it was eye opening. Maybe not an example of a general way things are done, but an interesting example as it happens. I think so called 'developers' have a lot to answer for.

My ex is from leeds and grew up in Holbeck and studied architectural history and we had a walk from Morley to Holbeck to photograph some stuff and take a look around (she wouldn't do that without me being with her due to her concerns for her safety). Holbeck is meant to be undergoing redevelopment, but it was mostly demolished tower blocks and demolished rows of terrace houses amongst neigherborhoods. It was quite bizarre. She explained to me that the jobs people used to have in that area were mostly manual labour related tasks.

The new buildings there are big office spaces for IT companies, web design, etc. Not garages, not factories. It seems the local people don't have the skillset required for the jobs being created in the area, so it just makes that place stagnant and displaces familes who have to leave homes in search for work. I guess it also has the potential to bring in a migrant workforce since the local community can't do the jobs on offer. They move into the area and you get tension. I could understand that (though I'm not an expert on it, and haven't studied it like my ex). Redevelopment and investment in an area is completely useless unless there is some thought about it. I wouldn't say london has clearly defined slums, but I think a lot of other cities might! Another example might be the redeveloped tower block in Surrey Quays. A completely negative example of urban gentrification.

Back in my home town (Burscough/Ormskirk) a bunch of offices were built about 5 years ago on the site of an old factory and they have remained more or less empty ever since. My friend has an IT company and they looked to getting one of the offices, but it was just too expensive. Seems like it was expensive for a lot of people! It's a rural market town. Who are people hoping to attract by building these things?

[Transcend]

Holbeck is an absolute dive and has been for as long as i've known its existed.

It's the only place i've been where people have openly started fights with people because theyre wearing different clothes.

But that also stands for the majority of places in Leeds.

Chapeltown, Gipton, Seacroft etc are just a few that are equally as bad if not worse

[Transcend]

THis makes some of those photoshop images seem poor

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=VW3p5Ol7oUI

[plastercaster]

"This was not protest, it was crime and it was done with such impunity, it begs the question, "who raised these people to behave this way?" The answer is, the state raised them. More specifically, the "Welfare State" of socialist dreams.

It houses them - badly. It educates them - badly. It doesn't even bother to police their drug taking and dealing very much and the "something for nothing" culture which pervades places like Tottenham results in them seeing the opportunity to steal as one to be taken gleefully and without consequence.

So are you saying that it would be better if the state (of socialist dreams  :lol:) stopped trying to raise and educate the hooligans that are looting?

I struggle to believe that the parents of these tw@ts were doing a great job of home schooling until the woolly liberals rocked up and ruined everything through the twin evils of schooling (expenditure up from 4.5 to 6.1% of GDP 1997-2010) and weak justice (which has somehow managed to bring our prison population up 84% since 1990).

Conservative
_________________________

Socialist

"there's a fine line between clever and stupid"  :)

Well I wonder which one's which?
Here's a thought- what happens when large events cause people to panic and lose sight of reason?

Code: [Select]

the British people (black/brown/white) have just taken a collective jump to the right.

/rising to troll bait  :lol:

[Afghan Dave]

Expenditure on schools doesn't correlate to success in education.

An effective judicial system isn't measured by the numbers incarcerated.

Both the above a self evident.

"what happens when large events cause people to panic and lose sight of reason?" - Is that supposed to constitute some kind of universal excuse or is there a specific scenario that absolves people of responsibility?

[clyde billt]

Saw a dozen plod file into someones house this evening. All wearing stab vests, apart from the guy with the tazer.
No wonder none of them showed their face down Purley Way on Monday if that's the ratio.
They did manage to get themselves lost first though.

Didn't see one police car on Monday night, saw loads of white vans, low loaders and ambulances mind you.
Been quite a lot of police action today, and still going on this evening.
About f****ing time

The 19 year old on the till I was talking to at Homebase the other day was crying because she couldn't get the looters out of her garden. No polis to be seen

I'm a bit bored of the all the "what's the cause" conversations on the forums and tv.
The time for that comes after the arsholes that did this get called to account, and the people we pay to stop this kind of shitee happening explain why they didn't

[Dmoney]

The school David Cameron called "brilliant" (Kingdale Foundation Comprehensive) is under investigation for supplying students with the answers to GCSE tests.

I don't think cutting funds to education is a good idea though. Also, how do you measure an effective judicial system? By looking at the crime rates? numbers of re-offenders? Soley increasing police powers and judges choice of longer and tougher sentences is only a small part of effective crime reduction. Sentences don't deter people who simply don't care. Ive done things in the past I knew it were wrong, I wasn't a child and I did it because I didn't care at all about the consequences and I wouldn't have cared no matter what the consequences on offer were. How do you deal with that mindset?

I have a good friend who works for a private school in london. He grew up in Birkenhead and went to public school like me. He said in the past, he would never have thought about paying to send his kids to private school out of working class principals, but now hes been to schools in london, he claims he would be forced to changed his mind. He told me if you send your kids to school in south east london, the chances of them failing to get into a good school a massively high, and then once your kid is in school, the chances of them being around disruptive scumbag kids is even higher. So how do you protect a good kid, keep them on the straight and narrow and in worthwhile education in that environment?

[Elliot]

By public school you mean state comprehensive school as opposed to the usual meaning of public school which is like Eaton and Westminster?

I am a South East Londoner, I grew up in a council estate and in fact I went to school in New Cross - lucky, it was Aske's on Telegraph Hill and I spent my teenage years $%&#ing around - luckily, I got lucky in my exams and managed to break the cycle ().  

However, I don't think I would send my child to a Lewisham borough state school at present (I now live in Honor Oak Park) if I had the money to afford it - they are just too full of trouble and I think this is one of the fundamental problems in estates today is a lack of positive identity.  When I was younger white kids were into Iron Maiden and Judas Priest because the metal image gave them a 'hard' image and the Caribean kids got into hip hop for similar reasons, now its the gangsta image that is totally negative.  How do you protect a good kid?  I think you need to have a long term community based policy (hard where politics is governed by the logic of advertising agents and subject to cynical goverments looking to buy favour with tax cuts) where the local community has a voice (and not those drawn from the training cadre's of mainstream political party advancement, as local politics often becomes) to create a positive image in the area.  Unfortunately, the disparate nature of our poorer boroughs make this a very difficult and long term solution.  Long term and difficult is not fashionable in politics.

More than that, the greater problem is not clever good kids (as teachers in bad schools often latch onto them) but disruptive 'average' kids who could do alot better with more attention. 

[Dmoney]

yeah. state school. now my poor education is coming out! i dont even know what kind of school i went to!
I used to live two streets up the hill from your old school then! I hear that school is a good one round here.

[Ratrod]

From various news sources, among the prosecuted rioters were:

A college graduate, a millionaire's daughter, a school teacher, a hair dresser, a pool guard, a mail man and a biological chef.

Are people going crazy? Is the layer of civilisation and decency that thin?

[Roobubba]

A biological chef? WTF is that?

[plastercaster]

Expenditure on schools doesn't correlate to success in education.

yes it does.


UN education index.

An effective judicial system isn't measured by the numbers incarcerated.

I wasn't talking about effectiveness- I'm talking about your "no consequence" assertion. More people are banged up even though levels of crime have fallen, thanks to Labour.

"what happens when large events cause people to panic and lose sight of reason?" - Is that supposed to constitute some kind of universal excuse or is there a specific scenario that absolves people of responsibility?

I don't think you've caught my drift here.

[Dmoney]

what is a biological chef?!  :lol:

I was talking to my colleague born & raised in peckham last night, he was surprised it wasn't even worse! That shocked me a little.

I'd say the layer of civilisation is pretty thin. Maybe that is the problem. I've been on a night out where my friends have been attacked for no reason by drunken bankers in the city, so peoples education and role doesn't always make a difference when it comes to morals. They say these kids don't realise they need to earn respect, fair enough, but when I deal with average people on a daily basis it's not like they are out to earn my respect... in fact they barely show me common courtesy.

London is rubbish for it. I mean, I tried to get off the train at london bridge recently, and some guy with his mate, both in their late 20's decided they would try and push onto the train while everyone was trying to get off... I find that disrespectful, they were even laughing about it, so when they tried to push past me I grabbed the first one and pushed them both back off the train, called them pricks, and waited for them to do something about what I'd said. With me incidents like that just add to a growing sense of misanthropy. It happens all the time. Maybe it annoys me more because I'm not from London and I never dealt with that stuff growing up.

maybe all people, all nations, just need to be chill with one another a likkle bit more, man.