The Riots, Summarised
“A disorientated and bleeding teenager on the streets of London. A gang pretend to help him, and then mug him.”
Captures the ethos, I think.
Meanwhile, our pocket-size revolutionary Laurie Penny – who of course has “no problem with principled, thought-through political ‘violence’” – is telling her readers: “Violence is rarely mindless. The politics of a burning building, a smashed-in shop or a young man shot by police may be obscured even to those who lit the rags or fired the gun, but the politics are there.” Doubtless Laurie will soon tell us exactly what those politics are and how closely they match her own. She is, after all, keen to see the emergence of a “radical youth movement” – “a movement not just for reform but for revolution” – one that “requires direct action” and “upsetting… our parents, our future employers… and quite possibly the police.” Ms Penny also thinks that spitting on women she doesn’t know is pretty rad too.
Elsewhere, while Mothercare burned to the ground and female fire-fighters were dragged from their vehicles and punched insensible, a number of leftist anti-cuts groups announced their “solidarity” with the thugs, thieves and predators. “London,” we learn, “is the world’s biggest Black Bloc.” While student “activist,” chronic liar and Independent blogger Jody McIntyre was busy using his new media profile to urge further rioting and arson. No doubt the Indie, the Guardian and the New Statesman will be swollen with pride at the doings of their latest protégé. But remember, people. As the Guardian’s Priyamvada Gopal told us recently, setting fire to occupied buildings – resulting in this – isn’t “real” violence. Not when compared to “hypocritical language.”
Update, via the comments:
Outside of the delinquent left, it’s hard to see gangs of predatory vermin – robbing passers-by, setting people’s homes on fire and assaulting the people trying to put those fires out – as particularly sympathetic or deserving of indulgence. (It will, I think, be interesting to see how many of the rioters have records for previous convictions.) Conceivably, though, one might argue that those predators are products of socialist indulgence – and a cultivated belief that the world owes them whatever it is they want. And thus their neighbours’ homes and businesses are just a flammable backdrop for their own thrilling psychodrama.
Nevertheless, readers may have noticed just how readily and persistently many of our leftist commentators have tried to hammer their default narrative onto events, regardless of the fit. Our glorious state broadcaster spent three days referring to muggers and arsonists as “protestors,” until finally embarrassed out of doing so. I heard one reporter asking a besieged resident, “Is this about the cuts? It’s about the cuts, isn’t it?” When the resident disagreed, the disappointment was audible.
Those actually doing the thieving offered more revealing explanations. As one pair of female looters put it while drinking stolen wine: “Chucking bottles, breaking into stuff, it was madness… good though. Good fun. Free alcohol.” Obligingly, with prompting, the duo added a political dimension, of a sort: “It’s the government’s fault. I dunno… the Conservatives… yeah, whatever, whoever it is. We’re showing the police we can do what we want.”
In the Guardian, the comical Nina Power – yes, her – once again wheeled out her rickety Marxist boilerplate. For our academic radical, the causes of the riots are “clear.” And they just happen to correspond with her own doctrinaire outlook. And so, eagerly, she casts the muggers, thieves and arsonists as the “dispossessed” fighting against “entitlement” and therefore deserving of our “understanding,” which in her case means projection, excuses and flattery. Yet these “dispossessed” souls seemed for the most part quite well kitted out and intent on possessing more. Say, by beating up pensioners, punching women and robbing children of their clothes. The muggers’ own rather prodigious sense of entitlement – which you’d think was hard to miss – somehow escaped Dr Power’s notice. Must be all that “critical thinking” she does.
And, as Tim notes,
We are told, endlessly, that only the rapist is to blame for rape. Nothing that the victim does, has done, where they go, how they’re dressed, nothing at all changes the fact that the rapist is solely and completely responsible, in and of themselves, for the crime. So why isn’t this true for rioters?
Maybe the socialist maths, premised as it is on Designated Victim Groups, doesn’t quite add up.
Update 2:
Causes, more causes and the politics of trainers.
Update 3:
I suggested it might be interesting to see how many of the rioters had records for previous convictions. And goodness, lookee here. 
I must admit that I’ve been somewhat encouraged by the response of the media to the riots. I’ve been expecting a parade of hand-wringers attributing the violence to public sector cuts or racism or an illegitimate and insufficiently left wing government or military interventions of which they disapprove or … in short, blaming the latest modish preoccupation of the chattering classes.
In fact, though, there’s been none of that. Most of the evidence so far suggests that what we have here are mobs of vicious opportunistic thugs, and even the BBC is reporting to that effect. No doubt weirdo lefty stalwarts like Tariq Ali and silly little girls like Laurie Penny are waving their arms about in a rage somewhere, but meanwhile the mainstream media seems to be having an attack of good sense.
Or have I missed something?
The BBC is still referring to the looters as ‘demonstrators’.
Peter,
Quite. Presumably, they’re referring to “protestors” who’ve taken grave exception to passing female fire-fighters, the existence of local ethnic restaurants and the evil conglomerate Mothercare.
In fairness to the Independent they do seem to have sacked McIntyre now.
Although it was obvious before this that he was a thug but he got a free pass because of his disability.
Following his recent tweets and statements on the London riots, The Independent will no longer be taking blogs from Jody McIntyre.
http://order-order.com/2011/08/08/indy-shuts-down-jody-macintyres-indy-blog-for-inciting-riot/
One down…
Horace, you spoke too soon. Here’s our old favourite ‘Dr’ Nina Power:
“Combine understandable suspicion of and resentment towards the police based on experience and memory with high poverty and large unemployment and the reasons why people are taking to the streets become clear.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/08/context-london-riots?commentpage=2#start-of-comments
Sadly, even Sky tv was unbearable last night, with every interviewee asked ‘Is this because of Duggan/excessive policing/poverty/Tory cuts?’…
“One down…”
Mr McIntyre’s choice of words – an “uprising” to “beat the feds” – is interesting too. As Ross noted in the comments over at Harry’s Place,
And that would cover quite a few of the “activists” highlighted here over the years. A capacity for grandiose unrealism seems a prerequisite, along with a gift for dishonesty, self-flattery and denial. As when McIntyre claimed that, being evil, the police “want to portray us as violent people… They want to portray this as mindless violence.”
Well, readers can find hours of footage online and decide for themselves.
A disorientated and bleeding teenager on the streets of London. A gang pretend to help him, and then mug him.
God, that’s the most depressing thing I’ve seen since it started.
Doubtless Laurie will soon tell us exactly what those politics are and how closely they match her own.
She starts off saying it’s complicated and we mustn’t rush to conclusions… then does exactly that.
God, that’s the most depressing thing I’ve seen since it started.
I disagree. This mugging typifies the entire riot. It captures the true essence of the “protest”. The riot itself is depressing. In contrast this video exposes the shoddy attempts by the likes of Livingstone, Penny and McIntyre to reframe the events into a progressive narrative.
Laurie Penny is basically the female Johann Hari. It takes a special kind of self-absorption to watch footage of a masked teenager walking down the street with a plasma screen TV over his shoulder and think, “yes, but what does it mean?“.
It takes a special kind of self-absorption to watch footage of a masked teenager walking down the street with a plasma screen TV over his shoulder and think, “yes, but what does it mean?”.
But not having a plasma screen TV is oppression, innit?
But not having a plasma screen TV is oppression, innit?
And Sunny Hundal is comparing legal tax avoidance with looting and rioting. It’s exactly the same apparently.
The left’s brains trust is out in force today.
Combine understandable suspicion of and resentment towards the police based on experience and memory with high poverty and large unemployment
Doesn’t sound that far different than how the white working classes seem to feel about the “multiculturalism” that’s been foisted upon them. But even when that sentiment leads to something nonviolent like the minaret vote in Switzerland, there’s never any attempt to look at the so-called root causes.
Any Londoners want to play catch a looter?
http://catchalooter.tumblr.com/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/metropolitanpolice/sets/72157627267892973/
I note that he doesn’t call for everyone to rise up. He understands the fragility of civil society and calls for 100 people who would be enough to instill hesitancy in the police and intimidate & bully the rest of the unorganized neighborhood. What could go wrong?
Anyways, the standard has been set. Obviously, David needs to put on his tracksuit and a hoody and start his own mob to riot for his cause(s). Don’t forget your tea kettle.
“The left’s brains trust is out in force today.”
Yes, it’s strange how readily masked youths – often carrying Blackberrys along with clubs and other weapons – are assumed to be “oppressed” by some terrible injustice – say, a £20,000 ceiling on housing benefit – and are therefore merely retaliating and making themselves heard. (Hm. Sound familiar?) Outside of the delinquent left, it’s hard to see gangs of predatory vermin – robbing passers-by, setting people’s homes on fire and assaulting the people trying to put those fires out – as particularly sympathetic or deserving of indulgence.
Conceivably, though, one might argue that those predators are products of socialist indulgence – and a cultivated belief that the world owes them whatever it is they want.
“Laurie Penny is basically the female Johann Hari.”
Well, Like Johann, she’s a fantasist and confabulator, a player of the role. I suspect that Laurie imagines her idealised, “revolutionary,” terribly radical violence would – somehow – look very different. I can’t say I share that assumption.
Over here in Australia, the ABC, the equivalent of the BBC, did an interview with a British-African who was a former advisor to the Labor Govt – he droned on and on about the disenfranchisement of the youth etc.. when the ABC journalist surprisingly cut in and, using a quote, basically told him he was full of crap and that the rioters needed to get a life, work hard etc..
setting fire to occupied buildings – resulting in this
And it’s not the BBC’s so-called ‘protestors’ catching that woman.
On a more upbeat note, another group of inconvenienced people are making themselves useful.
I think that the scales are going to fall from a lot of left-wing eyes after this, because any attempt to shoehorn these riots into a narrative of oppression is so obviously, painfully false that only the stupidest of lefties will believe it. Your average socially-conscious, well-meaning Guardian reader will finally have to admit that there is little connection between, say, systematic racism … and men arriving in BMWs to do a bit of ‘late-night shopping.’
Aside from the opportunism and the nihilistic thrill of smashing someone else’s stuff, we shouldn’t overlook the role-play and political pretension:
Yes, I know. The comparison is cretinous. So far as I’m aware, Tea Partiers haven’t been trashing local businesses and burning out their neighbours just because they can. I seem to recall they even make a point of tidying up after themselves.
But hey, it’s leftwing psychodrama.
Doubtless Laurie will soon tell us exactly what those politics are and how closely they match her own.
I can’t wait for Posh Riot Girl to mention ‘social justice’…
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2024001/Forced-strip-naked-street-Shocking-scenes-rioters-steal-clothes-rifle-bags-people-make-way-home.html
A “whiff of the grape” will cut down on that nonsense.
On twitter – ‘Things to Blame for London Riots’
http://twitter.com/#!/search?q=%23thingstoblameforlondonriots
Favourite so far: “Unfair mobile phone contracts.”
“On twitter – ‘Things to Blame for London Riots’.”
I quite like this one: “When you get down to it, it’s always Thatcher. Everything else is just phrasing.”
Though the ludicrous Polly Toynbee (of whom more here) is once again trying to have it both ways:
Yes, “no excuse, but…” And the alleged causes of the robbery, beatings, arson – and now apparently public stripping – just happen to coincide with Polly’s own pet grievances. And a modest cap on housing benefit is obviously what these people are fretting about.
http://yfrog.com/h2u43lhj
“Looting rules”?! Who said there was no honour among thieves?
I am heartened by the quality of the TV fittings in betting shops. On Sky I saw footage of a trashed Ladbrokes (IIRC) where a low-IQ kid trying to wrest a wall-mounted TV off its brackets. Despite help from another waste of oxygen, he abandoned the attempt and fled. I guess he will just have to carry on playing Grand Theft Auto on a smaller plasma at home, poor thing.
Still, perhaps he was a socially-deprived lefty redistributing wealth to himself, so that’s okay then.
Guido is reporting that the Beeb and Guardian offices are closing early today. Looks like it’s getting a little too close to home…
“setting fire to occupied buildings…isn’t ‘real’ violence. Not when compared to “hypocritical language.”
Would it change their minds if the “demonstrators” tossed a few dozen Molotov cocktails into the Guardian offices? 🙂
I was pleased watching ‘North West Tonight’, when in a piece about last nights violence in Liverpool, presenter Gordon Burns asked Labour Council leader Joe Anderson whether it was due to Government cuts. He said ” Absolutely not”. The BBC have been trying to push this for the last 2 or 3 days, they must now realise that if even Tory-hating Labour councils aren’t blaming the ConDems that the jig is up.
Julia,
“Looks like it’s getting a little too close to home…”
Back to the doorstep of those who repeatedly excuse animal behaviour. As noted here several times, a sizeable chunk of the leftist commentariat is overtly titillated by mob violence and physical intimidation, which they frame as retaliation and payback for “injustice,” generally of a tendentious or question-begging kind. One after another, Guardian contributors and leftist academics have claimed to be “angry” and “oppressed” (though by what isn’t always clear or credible). Violence, they tell us, is a result of not being heard – and being heard, rather conveniently, means being obeyed.
Leah Borromeo imagines she’s being “oppressed” by modest cuts in the growth of public spending, which apparently entitles her, and her peers, to smash windows, trash cash machines and throw projectiles at the police. Ms Borromeo told Guardian readers that “to try to make distinctions between a ‘peaceful’ and a ‘violent’ protester is inherently flawed.” She is, needless to say, all in favour of “people who choose to vent their anger in more visceral ways.”
Laurie Penny also wants us to believe that hurling bricks and large metal objects through someone else’s windows (regardless of whether anyone is likely to be inside) is something other than violence. Ditto Priya Gopal and ditto David Graeber, who redefines “civilisation” to include mob thuggery and menaces, and ditto Alexander Vasudevan, who regards the “seizure and reclamation” of other people’s belongings as a “potent symbol of protest.”
Given sufficient exposure to this stream of delusion, it’s not hugely surprising that some may come to feel entitled to act out those fantasies. Or use them as an excuse.
The behaviour you see on the TV now has been actively encouraged in multiple ways for long enough that three or possibly four generations have known nothing but a life of subsidised idleness punctuated with random acts of sex, violence, substance abuse, and criminality. How is any surprised by any of this, and struggling for explanations?
Great news comrades! Ordinary working class Londoners come out en masse in solidarity with the demonstrators in their struggle against this nation’s racist sexist capitalist hegemony and – oh wait…
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/8691761/London-riots-residents-fight-back.html
And in good more news from the front line: an elderly man has heroically been given life threatening injuries by the Revolutionary Vanguard after he tried to oppress them by putting out a fire in a bin:
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories/2011/08/09/london-riots-elderly-man-fights-for-life-after-being-attacked-by-yobs-115875-23332647/
Where I live, Anchorage, AK, everyone has a gun.
What has been going on for three days in the UK wouldn’t last for three minutes here.
You Brits need the Second Amendment in the worst kind of way.
“When seconds count, the police are just minutes away.” Or in some cases, hours.
No doubt you have heard that we are having precursors to this sort of social justice festival in the U.S. Flash mobs rush through comfortable parts of town beating and robbing the melanin-deficient, and of course the people of the chattering classes who make excuses for them, when the events are officially acknowledged at all. General riots on the scale of the Rodney King affair are to be considered a reasonable possibility in the near future, as the entitlement payments dry up and Teleprompter Jesus is given his pink slip in the general rout of November 2012.
I must confess all this progressive talk about the voiceless and oppressed salt of the earth making themselves heard has me confused. I ruminate upon it. What does it all mean? Should I buy a Saiga 7.62×39 mm, or a Ruger Mini-14 5.56×45 mm? If we are to have this conversation I want to be certain they can hear me.
I do so love Twitter for its ability to instantly puncture the preening egos of the Righteous. Referring to this article, I got this reTweeted to me yesterday:
“Camila Batmanghelidjh says these youths don’t have money… no hopes.. no food on the table. Did they BBM that to her via their Blackberry?”
LOL!
Outside of the delinquent left, it’s hard to see gangs of predatory vermin – robbing passers-by, setting people’s homes on fire and assaulting the people trying to put those fires out – as particularly sympathetic or deserving of indulgence. Conceivably, though, one might argue that those predators are products of socialist indulgence – and a cultivated belief that the world owes them whatever it is they want.
Spot on, David. Watching the left (including the BBC) try to turn this into a ‘social justice’ issue is grotesque.
Perry de Havilland gets it too:
“All it takes is a look at the footage or a walk down the right street if you live in London, to see that the thugs in question, with a Blackberry in one hand and wearing expensive trainers, are not doing this because “Haringey Council has lost £41m from its budget”. Does anyone seriously think these rioters are doing what they are doing because their ‘Youth Services’ Danegeld was cut back? These are the bastard children of Diane Abbott and David Cameron… and their lineage goes all the way back to Clement Attlee…and all the other members of the political class who created them as the Welfare State progressively hollowed out civil society. These are the product of the demon seed that was planted in 1945 and progressively watered ever more lavishly each year. So yes, the largely fictitious ‘cuts’ are indeed to blame. Far far far too little and 20 years too late.”
http://www.samizdata.net/blog/archives/2011/08/the_rioters_do.html
rjmadden,
Well, it’s interesting how readily and persistently many of our leftist commentators have tried to hammer their default narrative onto events, regardless of the fit. Our glorious state broadcaster spent three days referring to muggers and arsonists as “protestors,” until finally embarrassed out of doing so. I heard one reporter asking a local resident, “Is this about the cuts? It’s about the cuts, isn’t it?” When the resident disagreed, the disappointment was audible.
The comical Nina Power – yes, her – once again rolled out her cretinous Marxist boilerplate. For her, the causes of the riots are “clear.” And they just happen to correspond to her own doctrinaire outlook. And so, eagerly, she cast the muggers and arsonists as the “dispossessed” fighting against “entitlement” and therefore deserving of our “understanding,” which in her case means projection, excuses and flattery. Yet these “dispossessed” souls seemed for the most part quite well kitted out and intent on possessing more. Say, by beating up pensioners, punching women and robbing children of their clothes. The muggers’ sense of entitlement – which you’d think was hard to miss – somehow escaped her notice. Must be all that “critical thinking” she does.
And, as Tim notes,
Maybe the maths of designated victimhood doesn’t quite add up.
readers may have noticed just how readily and persistently many of our leftist commentators have tried to hammer their default narrative onto events, regardless of the fit.
Just don’t mention those absent fathers…
http://order-order.com/2011/08/10/fatherless-feral-youths/
Look, not to be rude (but why change now), I recall working in Bristol the week that riots took place in the UK (London, I think) and Seattle, WA in response to an IMF or G7 or some sort of economic meeting that was going on at the time. This would have been Nov/Dec 1999. There was a picture on whatever tabloid I picked up that day of a young man standing on or near a burning police car in the UK. There was significant commentary about how “well” UK police “handled” the situation relative to the nasty thug Seattle cops (“nasty thug Seattle cops” would be read as sarcasm in the US, for the uninformed). You didn’t see any Seattle police cars on fire however. But the UK cops handled it well. Sorry, but while I have sympathy for the truly innocent, I have little for the majority of you folks. And that includes the silent ones.
In a Newsmight interview Labour’s deputy leader and harpy-in-chief, Harriet Harman, echoed the equally disingenuous Polly Toynbee. Ms Harman wants us to believe that the riots and muggings were due to cuts in the Educational Maintenance Allowance and the underfunding of social workers. She then claims the causes are too “complex” for non-leftists to grasp and yet she – intellectual titan that she is – knows exactly and immediately what they happen to be. And again, as with Polly and Nina, they just happen to coincide with her own pet causes and rapacious socialism. Note also Harman’s now-familiar tactics. She continually interrupts Michael Gove, she claims one thing and its opposite, and she refuses to answer direct questions about her own claims. (Clip here, jump to around 2 minutes in.)
If these people weren’t so pathologically dishonest, they’d almost be funny.
David,
The Guardian’s account of the Newsnight exchange is hilariously biased. It’s headed ‘Michael Gove comes close to losing his cool’ and the caption to a picture of Gove states ‘Michael Gove repeatedly interrupted Harriet Harman’.
Further nuggets:
‘Harman, 61, who is something of a veteran of Newsnight bust ups, kept her cool. But Gove, 43, who was still at school when Harman was first elected as an MP in 1982, came close to losing his temper.’
‘At this point Gove raised his voice…’
‘Gove then adopted the tone of a school master…’
‘Gove… then spat out his words…’
‘Gove raised his voice again…’
Love that sly little, ‘who was still at school when Harman was first elected’.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/wintour-and-watt/2011/aug/10/michaelgove-harrietharman
Tom,
That’s why they make this T-shirt.
“As noted here several times, a sizeable chunk of the leftist commentariat is overtly titillated by mob violence and physical intimidation…”
The light seems to be dawning on a lot of the left (and the enablers of the sort of behaviour we are seeing now) that the great British public doesn’t share their belief that all thugs need are more hugs.
Their bitter tears of realisation and impotent rage are sweet as wine to me:
“I feel utterly sickened at the attitude of large numbers of people who are suddenly supporting the police, who support the army being brought in, who want to see water canon and plastic bullets used on the streets.
I am livid with rage at people who have never experienced police harassment not even attempting to understand the brutalisation this causes.”
When he got to the bit about a need to look at the root causes (violent repressive policing, social deprivation and capitalism, in case you were wondering. Presumably in that order.), I swear a bit of wee came out… 😉
A woman having to jump for her life when her flat was torched in Croydon.
Three men in Birmingham – who were trying to protect their neighbourhood – getting run over by some chav in a car.
People in cities across the country seeing their shops get stripped and their homes going up in smoke.
The gulf between the public and the cretinerati on Planet Beeb/Graun grows even wider.
Sackcloth,
At risk of sounding overly optimistic, maybe recent events have made that mismatch obvious to a few more people. Ideally, people who vote.
“I feel utterly sickened at the attitude of large numbers of people who are suddenly supporting the police, who support the army being brought in, who want to see water canon and plastic bullets used on the streets.”
I’m confused by this attitude too. It’s almost like the majority of the British public don’t like hordes of criminal parasites looting and setting fire to their neighbourhoods.