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1 hour ago
Friday, 12 August 2011
Thursday, 11 August 2011
Ed Miliband's Statement On UK Riots
The victims are the innocent people:
Who live in many of our cities;
Who have seen their homes and businesses destroyed;
Their communities damaged;
And their confidence about their own safety undermined.
There can be no excuses, no justification.
This behaviour has disgusted us all.
It cannot be allowed to stand.
We will not allow it to stand.
I want to join the Prime Minister in mourning the loss of life we have seen, including those killed in London and Birmingham.
Our thoughts are with the family and friends of those who have died.
With Tariq Jahan whose son was murdered.
We stand with him.
He is the true face of Britain.
The Britain we are proud of.
I want to also thank our brave policemen and women throughout this country for the work they have been doing on our behalf.
And all of the emergency services.
We salute them for their courage, their dedication and their willingness to put themselves in harm’s way to keep our communities safe.
Thanks to them a degree of order has been re-established on our streets.
But from all sides of this House we know what the public want, and are entitled to.
A return to normality, as well as order.
Normality does not mean shops having to shut at 3pm because they fear looting.
Normality does not mean rushing home because you are scared to be on the streets.
Normality does not mean feeling fearful in your own home.
They want to have back the most fundamental of liberties: the ability to go about their business and lead their lives with security and without fear.
They have a right to expect it.
And we have a responsibility to make it happen.
To do this, Parliament needs to do its job.
Uniting against the violence.
And being the place where we examine and debate, frankly, all of the issues involved:
How we have got where we are;
What it says about Britain;
And what the response should be.
First, on policing.
Can the Prime Minister confirm that the additional operational costs the police are now facing will be funded from the Treasury reserve, and not place additional pressure on already stretched budgets?
Can he also confirm that the increased presence on our streets will remain in place as long as it takes, even beyond the weekend, until the police can be confident that the trouble will not recur?
The events of the last few days have been a stark reminder to us all that police on the streets make our communities safer, and make the public feel safer.
Given the absolute priority the public attach to a visible and active police presence, does the Prime Minister understand that they will not think it is right that he goes ahead with the cuts to police numbers he is planning?
Will he now think again?
Secondly, on criminal justice.
The public are clear that they want to see swift, effective and tough action to send a message about the penalties and punishment that follow from the violence we have seen.
We must see swift progress from charge to trial in these cases.
Can the Prime Minister confirm that there is the capacity within the courts and among our prosecutors to deal with cases swiftly, not just for first appearance but throughout the trial process?
It is right the Crown Prosecution Service is taking into account the aggravating circumstances within which the horrendous criminal acts we have seen in recent days took place.
Does the Prime Minister agree that magistrates and judges need to have those circumstances at the front of their mind so that those found guilty of this disgraceful behaviour receive the tough sentences they deserve and the public expect?
The Prime Minister mentioned the importance of CCTV in catching those responsible.
So will he undertake to look again at his proposals on CCTV to make sure they in no way hinder bringing criminals to justice?
Thirdly, we need all of our cities back on their feet and operating as normal.
That work began with the thousands of volunteers who reclaimed our streets and showed the true spirit of those cities and our country.
I welcome what the Prime Minister said on a range of support being provided.
Can he reassure us that the help that is provided will be genuinely needs-based without an arbitrary cap?
And can he assure us that these funds will flow straightaway so that people can get on with rebuilding their lives and communities?
Fourth, on the deeper lessons we need to learn.
The Prime Minister said in 2006 “Understanding the background, the reasons, the causes. It doesn’t mean excusing crime but it will help us to tackle it”.
To seek to explain is not to seek to excuse.
Of course these are acts of individual criminality.
But we have a duty to ask ourselves why there are people who feel they have nothing to lose, and everything to gain, from wanton vandalism and looting.
We cannot afford to let this pass, to calm the situation down, only to find ourselves in this position again in the future.
These issues cannot be laid at the door of a single cause or a single government.
The causes are complex.
Simplistic responses will not provide the answer.
We can only tackle these solutions by hearing from our communities.
What the decent people I met on the streets of London and Manchester told me, and will tell the Prime Minister, is that they want their voice to be heard.
They want us to go out and listen to them.
And before saying we know all the answers, or have simple solutions, we should all do so.
Can the Prime Minister explain how those in areas affected will have their voice heard?
Will the Prime Minister agree that there must be a full independent commission of inquiry, swiftly looking at what has happened in recent days, and what lessons we need to learn.
Not an inquiry sitting in Whitehall hearing evidence from academic experts but reaching out and listening to those affected by these terrible events.
They deserve and need to be heard.
We need to look at and act on all the issues that matter:
The responsibility we need from top to bottom in our society, including parental responsibility.
The take what you can culture, that needs to change from the benefits office to the boardroom.
A sustained effort to tackle the gangs in our cities, something we knew about before these riots.
And of course, Mr Speaker, questions of hope and aspiration.
The provision of opportunities to get on in life which don't involve illegality and wrongdoing.
When we talk about responsibility, we must not forget ours: above all, to the vast majority of law abiding young people.
They are a generation worried about their prospects and we cannot afford to fail them.
We cannot afford to have the next generation believe that they are going to do worse that the last.
They should be able to do better.
That is the promise of Britain.
Let me say in conclusion:
Successful societies are built on an ethic of hard work, compassion, solidarity, and looking after each other.
Ours must be one society.
We must all bear our share of responsibility for it.
It is right that we came back to debate these issues.
It is right that public order must be paramount.
But it is also imperative that even after order and normality are restored, we do not ignore the lessons we must learn.
We cannot afford to move on and forget.
For all the people who have been in fear this week, for those who have lost loved ones, homes, and businesses, we owe a duty to ensure no repeat of what we have seen.
This is our responsibility to the victims.
It is our responsibility to the country.
And we on this side will play our part in making it happen.
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staggering - Cameron 'simply doesn't accept that economic poverty leads to increases in crime.'
A Must Read: Let's cut the bullshit and start some serious debate shall we?
I'm sick to death of the partisan bollocks spewing forth from the usual cabal of out-of-touch opinion creators, both left and right, regarding the causes of the riots. Actual reasoned analysis is thin on the ground, little diamonds in a sea of bile, ignorance and cliche.
This is a question of morality.
I have yet to see a philosopher interviewed on the subject.
Moral regard is determined by who and what you identify with, which is itself comprised of the culture through which one grows up. A large number of youths clearly have no moral regard for the police or for their communities. Ergo, we can deduce that a situation has developed whereby large numbers of youths are growing up devoid of the kind of influences that generate shared cultural identity. This is clearly evident; conforming cultural appearance (as suits are to businessmen), a shared dialect (much like that shared between politicians and the business world, not a coincidence and yes, the same applies regarding the moral concern...) etc; natural examples of divergent cultural evolution of separated groups (just like genetic evolution does). This has made them so alien to the rich and powerful that they have zero chance of making it, no point in aspiration and through no fault of their own. It is a mighty rare person who can buck the human instinct to conform in groups... do we then demand it of those who have the least instead of addressing the real causes? Who has created the walls? Who has caused the segregation in the first place? Why is there such a huge gulf of worlds between the haves and have-nots?
There are no jobs. That's where most of us are forced to mix, forced to expand our moral concern by taking in structure, responsibility, exposure to people you would never normally mix with. What jobs there are do not pay enough, not to deal with the sheer volume of advertising generating needs and desires through a process of saturation (and now smart) bombing. Whereas before one person could work and still happily sustain a family, now both parents (where there are two...) have to work just to survive, members of the ever growing working poor. There are no pools, there are no clubs, there is no chance of ever buying a house, ever going to university. There is nothing but corruption in their eyes, foolishly looking directly at the Sun much too often; the greed and dishonesty of the haves (politician's expenses, Ian Tomlinson, phone tapping, bailouts) acting as convincing rationales for simply doing whatever they want to do. And why shouldn't they? They have no moral concern for us. Imagine if the Right's dreams came true, and all the people on benefits suddenly worked really hard, doing everything they possibly could to get ahead. What would change? Nothing, except they'd look like chumps instead of scroungers.
Yet despite this, they still have to be seen to be responsible even if they are victims of the system (in the same way that we have to assume free will, even if science tells us it aint so). Those kids have had little choice over their lives - that responsibility falls on the parents. Unfortunately they may be just as excluded has the youth. Either way, society progresses with the aid of law and justice, and in this case restorative justice HAS to be the way to go. Until these youth are forced to face their victims, until they are forced to spend time working in the communities they trashed, how will they gain the experiences to help them break out of this limited group identity?
It isn't a choice between "It's poverty, leave them alone!" and "use live ammunition, that'll teach the bastards!". Criminality isn't some ontological entity, some insidious cloud that infects people... it has a cause like everything else in existence. Neither is it a question of a bad soul which can be redeemed if broken first. It is a reaction; a reflection of parts of society that our leaders are blind to; a warning sign of severe cognitive dissonance. These youths and Politicians Inc are more alike than they realise: both are closed systems and both have moral regard for their own groups first and foremost. Society at large needs to realise this, because I fear the former will not be saved until we deal with the latter. Ben King @'Grime and Reason'
This is a question of morality.
I have yet to see a philosopher interviewed on the subject.
Moral regard is determined by who and what you identify with, which is itself comprised of the culture through which one grows up. A large number of youths clearly have no moral regard for the police or for their communities. Ergo, we can deduce that a situation has developed whereby large numbers of youths are growing up devoid of the kind of influences that generate shared cultural identity. This is clearly evident; conforming cultural appearance (as suits are to businessmen), a shared dialect (much like that shared between politicians and the business world, not a coincidence and yes, the same applies regarding the moral concern...) etc; natural examples of divergent cultural evolution of separated groups (just like genetic evolution does). This has made them so alien to the rich and powerful that they have zero chance of making it, no point in aspiration and through no fault of their own. It is a mighty rare person who can buck the human instinct to conform in groups... do we then demand it of those who have the least instead of addressing the real causes? Who has created the walls? Who has caused the segregation in the first place? Why is there such a huge gulf of worlds between the haves and have-nots?
There are no jobs. That's where most of us are forced to mix, forced to expand our moral concern by taking in structure, responsibility, exposure to people you would never normally mix with. What jobs there are do not pay enough, not to deal with the sheer volume of advertising generating needs and desires through a process of saturation (and now smart) bombing. Whereas before one person could work and still happily sustain a family, now both parents (where there are two...) have to work just to survive, members of the ever growing working poor. There are no pools, there are no clubs, there is no chance of ever buying a house, ever going to university. There is nothing but corruption in their eyes, foolishly looking directly at the Sun much too often; the greed and dishonesty of the haves (politician's expenses, Ian Tomlinson, phone tapping, bailouts) acting as convincing rationales for simply doing whatever they want to do. And why shouldn't they? They have no moral concern for us. Imagine if the Right's dreams came true, and all the people on benefits suddenly worked really hard, doing everything they possibly could to get ahead. What would change? Nothing, except they'd look like chumps instead of scroungers.
Yet despite this, they still have to be seen to be responsible even if they are victims of the system (in the same way that we have to assume free will, even if science tells us it aint so). Those kids have had little choice over their lives - that responsibility falls on the parents. Unfortunately they may be just as excluded has the youth. Either way, society progresses with the aid of law and justice, and in this case restorative justice HAS to be the way to go. Until these youth are forced to face their victims, until they are forced to spend time working in the communities they trashed, how will they gain the experiences to help them break out of this limited group identity?
It isn't a choice between "It's poverty, leave them alone!" and "use live ammunition, that'll teach the bastards!". Criminality isn't some ontological entity, some insidious cloud that infects people... it has a cause like everything else in existence. Neither is it a question of a bad soul which can be redeemed if broken first. It is a reaction; a reflection of parts of society that our leaders are blind to; a warning sign of severe cognitive dissonance. These youths and Politicians Inc are more alike than they realise: both are closed systems and both have moral regard for their own groups first and foremost. Society at large needs to realise this, because I fear the former will not be saved until we deal with the latter. Ben King @'Grime and Reason'
Cameron’s Broken Windows
Our son lives next to a Turkish mosque on Kingsland Road in Hackney, where some of London’s worst mob violence has occurred. When looters rampaged through Hackney last weekend, there were few police officers to stop them and residents had to chase them off with butcher knives, truncheons and baseball bats. Vigilante action succeeded where normal policing failed.
Kingsland Road resembles the bustling, ethnically mixed streets of Brooklyn. During the day, it is a home of sorts for unemployed young men with nothing to do; Britain’s youth unemployment rate is currently over 20 percent. During the economic boom a decade ago, though, nearly as many were out of work, and they did not all turn to crime.
To counter the risk that they might, there were storefront drop-in centers for young people in the neighborhood; these places are now shutting down, as are other community services, like health centers for the elderly and libraries. Local police forces have also been shrinking.
All are victims of what people in Britain call “the cuts” — the government’s defunding of civil-society institutions in order to balance the nation’s books. Before the riots, the government had planned to cut 16,200 police officers across the country. In London, austerity means that there will be about 19 percent less to spend next year on government programs, and the burden will fall particularly on the poor.
The rioters in London appear to be young men of varying races — despite reports of a monolithic mob of alienated “black youth.” But there is a racial dimension to this drama. The wave of riots began with protests against the police killing of a young black man, Mark Duggan. While initially peaceful, the demonstrations soon descended into violence. When the unrest spread to Manchester on Tuesday, many of the rioters there were apparently white.
An old-fashioned Marxist might imagine that the broken windows and burning houses expressed a raging political reaction to government spending cuts — but this time that explanation would be too facile.
The last time Britain saw widespread rioting, in the 1980s, street violence came after a long and failed political struggle against the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher, which suppressed trade unions and decimated social services. Today, the rioters seem motivated by a more diffuse anger, behaving like crazed shoppers on a spree; while some of the shops looted are big chains, many more are small local businesses run by people who are themselves struggling through Britain’s economic slump.
There has been a change in national temperament that has affected decent citizens as well as criminals. The country’s mood has turned sour. Indeed, the flip side of Britons’ famed politeness is the sort of hooliganism that appears at soccer matches and in town centers on weekend nights — an unfocused hostility that is usually fueled by vast quantities of alcohol. Fears of anarchic urban mobs date from Shakespeare’s time, and Prime Minister David Cameron has summoned these old fears, describing the present conflagration as “senseless.”
Mr. Cameron was good at selling people on the idea of cutting costs, but he has failed to make the case for what and how to cut: efforts to increase university fees, to overhaul the National Health Service, to reduce the military and the police, even to sell off the nation’s forests, have all backfired, with the government hedging or simply abandoning its plans.
In attempting to carry out reform, the government appears incompetent; it has lost legitimacy. This has prompted some people living on Kingsland Road to become vigilantes. “We have to do things for ourselves,” a 16-year-old in Hackney told The Guardian, convinced that the authorities did not care about, or know how to protect, communities like his.
A street of shuttered shops, locked playgrounds and closed clinics, a street patrolled by citizens armed with knives and bats, is not a place to build a life.
Americans ought to ponder this aspect of Britain’s trauma. After all, London is one of the world’s wealthiest cities, but large sections of it are impoverished. New York is not so different.
The American right today is obsessed with cutting government spending. In many ways, Mr. Cameron’s austerity program is the Tea Party’s dream come true. But Britain is now grappling with the consequences of those cuts, which have led to the neglect and exclusion of many vulnerable, disaffected young people who are acting out violently and irresponsibly — driven by rage rather than an explicit political agenda.
America is in many ways different from Britain, but the two countries today are alike in their extremes of inequality, and in the desire of many politicians to solve economic and social ills by reducing the power of the state.
Britain’s current crisis should cause us to reflect on the fact that a smaller government can actually increase communal fear and diminish our quality of life. Is that a fate America wishes upon itself?
Richard Sennett & Saskia Sassen @'NYT'
Kingsland Road resembles the bustling, ethnically mixed streets of Brooklyn. During the day, it is a home of sorts for unemployed young men with nothing to do; Britain’s youth unemployment rate is currently over 20 percent. During the economic boom a decade ago, though, nearly as many were out of work, and they did not all turn to crime.
To counter the risk that they might, there were storefront drop-in centers for young people in the neighborhood; these places are now shutting down, as are other community services, like health centers for the elderly and libraries. Local police forces have also been shrinking.
All are victims of what people in Britain call “the cuts” — the government’s defunding of civil-society institutions in order to balance the nation’s books. Before the riots, the government had planned to cut 16,200 police officers across the country. In London, austerity means that there will be about 19 percent less to spend next year on government programs, and the burden will fall particularly on the poor.
The rioters in London appear to be young men of varying races — despite reports of a monolithic mob of alienated “black youth.” But there is a racial dimension to this drama. The wave of riots began with protests against the police killing of a young black man, Mark Duggan. While initially peaceful, the demonstrations soon descended into violence. When the unrest spread to Manchester on Tuesday, many of the rioters there were apparently white.
An old-fashioned Marxist might imagine that the broken windows and burning houses expressed a raging political reaction to government spending cuts — but this time that explanation would be too facile.
The last time Britain saw widespread rioting, in the 1980s, street violence came after a long and failed political struggle against the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher, which suppressed trade unions and decimated social services. Today, the rioters seem motivated by a more diffuse anger, behaving like crazed shoppers on a spree; while some of the shops looted are big chains, many more are small local businesses run by people who are themselves struggling through Britain’s economic slump.
There has been a change in national temperament that has affected decent citizens as well as criminals. The country’s mood has turned sour. Indeed, the flip side of Britons’ famed politeness is the sort of hooliganism that appears at soccer matches and in town centers on weekend nights — an unfocused hostility that is usually fueled by vast quantities of alcohol. Fears of anarchic urban mobs date from Shakespeare’s time, and Prime Minister David Cameron has summoned these old fears, describing the present conflagration as “senseless.”
Mr. Cameron was good at selling people on the idea of cutting costs, but he has failed to make the case for what and how to cut: efforts to increase university fees, to overhaul the National Health Service, to reduce the military and the police, even to sell off the nation’s forests, have all backfired, with the government hedging or simply abandoning its plans.
In attempting to carry out reform, the government appears incompetent; it has lost legitimacy. This has prompted some people living on Kingsland Road to become vigilantes. “We have to do things for ourselves,” a 16-year-old in Hackney told The Guardian, convinced that the authorities did not care about, or know how to protect, communities like his.
A street of shuttered shops, locked playgrounds and closed clinics, a street patrolled by citizens armed with knives and bats, is not a place to build a life.
Americans ought to ponder this aspect of Britain’s trauma. After all, London is one of the world’s wealthiest cities, but large sections of it are impoverished. New York is not so different.
The American right today is obsessed with cutting government spending. In many ways, Mr. Cameron’s austerity program is the Tea Party’s dream come true. But Britain is now grappling with the consequences of those cuts, which have led to the neglect and exclusion of many vulnerable, disaffected young people who are acting out violently and irresponsibly — driven by rage rather than an explicit political agenda.
America is in many ways different from Britain, but the two countries today are alike in their extremes of inequality, and in the desire of many politicians to solve economic and social ills by reducing the power of the state.
Britain’s current crisis should cause us to reflect on the fact that a smaller government can actually increase communal fear and diminish our quality of life. Is that a fate America wishes upon itself?
Richard Sennett & Saskia Sassen @'NYT'
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