London riots

[Leefro]

Shops and cars damaged in Bristol disorder

Shops have been damaged and cars set on fire after disorder broke out in parts of Bristol.
About 150 people are said to have been involved in the trouble in several areas, including in the city centre and the Cabot Circus and Broadmead areas.
Avon and Somerset Police said four arrests were made but more were expected as CCTV is reviewed.
The violence came as trouble spread across London for a third day and was replicated in cities across England.
A police spokesman said the force had been prepared for the possibility of disorder following events in other parts of the UK and vowed to bring those responsible to justice.
The disturbances were eventually brought to an end in the early hours.
Police said the Stokes Croft and St Werburghs areas of Bristol were also affected in what the force described as a "volatile situation".
Windows at the Tesco Express store in Stokes Croft, which was targeted during disturbances in April, were damaged but the store was open for business.
BBC reporter Neil Bennett, who witnessed some of the disturbances, said he had arrived in Gloucester Road about 01:30 BST.
"There were bottles being thrown at police who were controlling the situation very well," he said.
"It was quite scary and lively and there were lots of bottles and bricks being thrown but the police seemed to get it under control.
"There were lots of people with masks and shirts over their faces but they largely just disappeared into the darkness as the police arrived.
"We moved on to St Pauls where we saw a car on fire. It must have only been lit a few minutes ago so we called the police and fire brigade.
Disturbances 'wrong'
"People were starting to congregate and film it on their mobile phones when the police arrived and took control.
Mr Bennett said residents in St Pauls - who described the disturbances as "wrong - reacted to the fires in bins by moving them away from cars nearby.
Another eyewitness, Andy Valentine, from St Pauls said he saw police clashing with gangs.
"We could hear there were problems not too far from us and then suddenly came to where we lived," he said.
"After about half an hour, the police managed to get the rioters to move on.
"I didn't want to go to sleep until I was absolutely sure the violence had moved on from our area.
"I've never seen anything like this before in my life."
Ch Supt Jon Stratford said the violence was not on the same scale as had happened in London.
"There has been a series of sporadic and volatile incidents throughout the night with a small number of people intent on causing violence and criminal damage to property," he said.
"We will always respect the right of any individual or group to take part in a peaceful protest.
"But when disorder occurs, we have a duty to the wider community to do everything we can to calm the situation and restore order and prevent criminality."
All political parties on Liberal Democrat-controlled Bristol City Council condemned the disorder.
In a joint statement party leaders said they looked forward to the perpetrators being brought to justice.
It also paid tribute to the fire brigade and the police which it said struck a good balance between sensitive community policing and providing a firm highly-visible presence.
A football match between Bristol City and Swindon Town planned for Tuesday evening has been called off for safety reasons.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-bristol-14454726

I wondered where you had been ?

[Leefro]

At least the LA riots were over something (in the beginning). These riots don't even have a damn cause. Just a bunch of idiots running around causing problems.

A local lad from Tottenham got shot and killed

[redred]

I wondered where you had been ?

i've been hiding down in devon found out about this crap on the radio in the car on the way back

[FBD]

http://www.spiked-online.com/index.p...article/10970/

Many commentators are on a mission to contextualise the riots that have swept parts of urban London and other British cities. ‘It’s very naive to look at these riots without the context’, says one journalist, who says the reason the violence kicked off in the London suburb of Tottenham is because ‘that area is getting 75% cuts [in public services]’. Others have said that the political context for the rioting is youth unemployment or working-class anger at David Cameron’s cuts agenda. ‘There is a context to London’s riots that can’t be ignored’, said a writer for the Guardian, and it is the ‘backdrop of brutal cuts and enforced austerity measures’. The ‘mass unrest’ is a protest against unhinged capitalism, apparently.

These observers are right that there is a political context to the riots. They are right to argue that while the police shooting of young black man Mark Duggan may ostensibly have been the trigger for the street violence, there is a broader context to the disturbances. But they are wrong about what the political context is. Painting these riots as some kind of action replay of historic political streetfights against capitalist bosses or racist cops might allow armchair radicals to get their intellectual rocks off, as they lift their noses from dusty tomes about the Levellers or the Suffragettes and fantasise that a political upheaval of equal worth is now occurring outside their windows. But such shameless projection misses what is new and peculiar and deeply worrying about these riots. The political context is not the cuts agenda or racist policing – it is the welfare state, which, it is now clear, has nurtured a new generation that has absolutely no sense of community spirit or social solidarity.

What we have on the streets of London and elsewhere are welfare-state mobs. The youth who are ‘rising up’ – actually they are simply shattering their own communities – represent a generation that has been more suckled by the state than any generation before it. They live in those urban territories where the sharp-elbowed intrusion of the welfare state over the past 30 years has pushed aside older ideals of self-reliance and community spirit. The march of the welfare state into every aspect of less well-off urban people’s existences, from their financial wellbeing to their childrearing habits and even into their emotional lives, with the rise of therapeutic welfarism designed to ensure that the poor remain ‘mentally fit’, has helped to undermine such things as individual resourcefulness and social bonding. The anti-social youthful rioters look to me like the end product of such an anti-social system of state intervention.


The most striking thing about the rioters is how little they seem to care for their own communities. You don’t have to be a right-winger with helmet hair and a niggling discomfort with black or chavvy yoof (I am the opposite of that) to recognise that this violence is not political, just criminal. It is entertaining to watch the political contortionism of those commentators who claim that the riots are an uprising against the evils of capitalism, as they struggle to explain why the targets thus far have been Foot Locker sports shops, electrical goods shops, takeaway joints and bus-stops, and why the only ‘gains’ made by the rioters have been to get a new pair of trainers or an Apple laptop. In past episodes of rioting, for example during the Brixton race riots of 1981, looting and the destruction of local infrastructure were largely incidental to the broader expression of political anger, byproducts of the main show, which was a clash between a community and the forces of the state. But in these new riots, smashing stuff up is all there is. It is childish nihilism.

Many older members of the urban communities rocked by violence have been shocked by the level of self-destruction exhibited by the rioters. Some shop-owners have got together to defend their property, even beating up rioters who have turned up with iron bars. In one video doing the rounds on social-networking sites, a West Indian woman in her fifties braves the rubble-strewn streets to lecture the rioters: ‘These people worked hard to make their businesses work and you lot wanna go and burn it up. For what?’ On Twitter, the hashtag #riotcleanup is being used by community members to coordinate some post-riot street-cleaning, to make amends for what one elderly Tottenham resident described as ‘the stupid behaviour of the young’.

But it’s more than childish destructiveness motivating the rioters. At a more fundamental level, these are youngsters who are uniquely alienated from the communities they grew up in. Nurtured in large part by the welfare state, financially, physically and educationally, socialised more by the agents of welfarism than by their own neighbours or community representatives, these youth have little moral or emotional attachment to the areas they grew up in. Their rioting reveals, not that Britain is in a time warp back to 1981 or 1985 when there were politically motivated, anti-racist riots against the police, but rather that the tentacle-like spread of the welfare state into every area of people’s lives has utterly zapped old social bonds, the relationship of sharing and solidarity that once existed in working-class communities. In communities that are made dependent upon the state, people are less inclined to depend on each other or on their own social wherewithal. We have a saying in Britain for people who undermine their own living quarters – we call it ‘shitting on your own doorstep’. And this rioting suggests that the welfare state has given rise to a generation perfectly happy to do that.

This is not a political rebellion; it is a mollycoddled mob, a riotous expression of carelessness for one’s own community. And as a left-winger, I refuse to celebrate nihilistic behaviour that has a profoundly negative impact on working people’s lives. Far from being an instance of working-class action, the welfare-state mob has more in common with what Marx described as the lumpenproletariat. Indeed, it is worth recalling Marx’s colourful description in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon of how that French ruler cynically built his power base amongst parts of the bourgeoisie and sections of the lumpenproletariat, so that ‘ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie rubbed shoulders with vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, swindlers, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, brothel-keepers, organ-grinders, ragpickers, knife-grinders, tinkers, beggars… and from this kindred element Boneparte formed the core of his [constituency], where all its members felt the need to benefit themselves at the expense of the labouring nation.’ In very different circumstances, we have something similar today – where the decadent commentariat’s siding with lumpen rioters represents a weird coming together of sections of the bourgeoisie with sections of the underworked and the over-flattered, as the rest of us, ‘the labouring nation’, look on with disdain.

There is one more important part to this story: the reaction of the cops. Their inability to handle the riots effectively reveals the extent to which the British police are far better adapted to consensual policing than conflictual policing. It also demonstrates how far they have been paralysed in our era of the politics of victimhood, where virtually no police activity fails to get followed up by a complaint or a legal case. Their kid-glove approach to the rioters of course only fuels the riots, because as one observer put it, when the rioters ‘see that the police cannot control the situation, [that] leads to a sort of adrenalin-fuelled euphoria’. So this street violence was largely ignited by the excesses of the welfare state and was then intensified by the discombobulation of the police state. In this sense, it reveals something very telling, and quite depressing, about modern Britain.

Brendan O’Neill is editor of spiked.

[Hugh_Janus]

awesome....

[minz]

I’ve just taken the staff home, I didn’t want them going into the city centre, we've not had any riots as such here but there is a fair bit of unrest and the potential is there, wasn’t prepared to take any chances with their safety.

[minz]

Here's a notice in the subway shop in Manchester city centre, someone has a sence of humour.

[Griffin]

awesome....

[Leefro]

Sangat TV

[SmoothBob]

Is a friggin joke..

We been talkin about it in work the day, were all o the same conviction, give the army carte blanc (is that an icecream??) and tell them restore order, there will be no repurcutions, do what u need to do..

I mean ffs, people's businesses, their homes, their livleyhoods being destroyed by a bunch o wee bastards..

A 16 year old in Glasgow posted on facebook 'if you want to start a riot then meet me in George Square at 6pm (today). Police traced him pretty much immediately and went round his house and arrested him.. They'll be none o yer pish laddie!

[Tank]

back in the days of the empire they had a patent solution for this kind of problem. They'd simply ship the worst misfits off to australia and draft the rest into the army to die or grow up while conquering some other country in Asia or Africa. those were the days...

yep they were the days! think this country needs to bring in compulsory military service like others do, teach these little scumbags about authority and respect!

A local lad from Tottenham got shot and killed

didnt he *allegedly* pull a gun on the police so they capped him. news report said no evidence of the pistol found at the scene had been fired, but i dont imagine any old pistol was just laying around.
as far as im concerned, dude pulled a pistol on the police, whether he was going to use it or not, the police did what was nesesary.

i've also heard that family and friends protesting against his shooting were doing it peacfully and once violence broke out, unrelated to their protest, they up and left so as not to be asosciated with this crap.

awesome....

just shows how bright these rioters really are ffs

Is a friggin joke..

We been talkin about it in work the day, were all o the same conviction, give the army carte blanc (is that an icecream??) and tell them restore order, there will be no repurcutions, do what u need to do..

I mean ffs, people's businesses, their homes, their livleyhoods being destroyed by a bunch o wee bastards..

A 16 year old in Glasgow posted on facebook 'if you want to start a riot then meet me in George Square at 6pm (today). Police traced him pretty much immediately and went round his house and arrested him.. They'll be none o yer pish laddie!

Army boys will give these pricks one warning. they choose not to listen then Sgt Bustyourchavvy facein aint gonna ask with words again.

Soldiers dont get bored of dishing out beatings!

[SmoothBob]

Exactly Tank, national service should huv been brought in years ago..

[SmoothBob]

Im watchin the news wishin we had Judge Dredd..

[minz]

The real problem here is that for the past 20-30 years, children have had NO discipline in their lives, parents don’t give it, schools are not allowed to anymore, so we now have a generation of unruly delinquents on our hands, these kids think they can do what they want when they want because nobody has bothered to teach them otherwise!

[Tank]

Im watchin the news wishin we had Judge Dredd..

[stalone voice] I AM THE LAW!!!!

The real problem here is that for the past 20-30 years, children have had NO discipline in their lives, parents don’t give it, schools are not allowed to anymore, so we now have a generation of unruly delinquents on our hands, these kids think they can do what they want when they want because nobody has bothered to teach them otherwise!

when i have kids, anyone who tries to tell me i'm not alowed to disipline my child with a smack is sure as hell gonna get one themselves!!

i learnt by hand of my parents, if i did something stupid/wrong i was in for a good old slap on the head or the back of the thighs. i quickly knew to NEVER EVER do that again . . . . or at least not be so stupid as to get caught.