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I accept that those who have lost livelihoods will be distraught clive and have every sympathy for them. But ‘opening fire’ won’t solve the underlying problems.
What we’ve seen is a manifestation of what happens when sections of society feel disenfranchised. There is more to it than criminality.
In addition to the societal problems there are also pyschological triggers which people fall prey to and which draw people into particpation in these events.
On the contrary, "opening fire" would solve many of todays problems at once;
– control the rioting
– reduce the benefits bill
– reduce the load on the NHS
– reduce future crime and therefore the policing, courts and prison bills
– relieve the stress on social housingRubber bullets the first night, to give people a chance to come to their senses. Live bullets after that. Anyone emerging from a store wearing a balaclava with a handful of goods deserves nothing from wider society.
We could have a cull of the countries pensioners too, that would really solve our countries economic problems. In fact, lets shoot every unemployed person as well..why stop there. Don’t know why I didn’t think of it myself.
I would ask why is this happening now, rather than last summer / year before that/ etc?
Times have been much tougher before without there being a dissolution of self-restraint to this degree.
I wonder if the looters – albeit on the fringe and with a crass, unthinking, non-solution to what they might be feeling inside – might nonetheless be a sign of a much more widespread and fundamental disillusionment eating away at the former cohesion of UK (and other) societies ?
So again, Why is this happening now? What can be done to address it rather than just put a temporary lid on it ?
Maybe part of the response has to be to restore social justice, with those in the position to do so (ie politicians) growing a pair and actually holding to account (alongside the looters) some rather more fundamental violators of the social order:
"…. the financial system, failed, and this failure was due to decisions made by the financial elite. This created a massive political problem centered not so much on confidence in any particular financial instrument but on the competence and honesty of the financial elite itself.
A sense emerged that the financial elite was either stupid or dishonest or both.
The idea was that the financial elite had violated all principles of fiduciary, social and moral responsibility in seeking its own personal gain at the expense of society as a whole.
Fair or not, this perception created a massive political crisis. This was the true systemic crisis, compared to which the crisis of the financial institutions was trivial.
The question was whether the political system was capable not merely of fixing the crisis but also of holding the perpetrators responsible.
Alternatively, if the financial crisis did not involve criminality, how could the political system not have created laws to render such actions criminal? Was the political elite in collusion with the financial elite?
There was a crisis of confidence in the financial system and a crisis of confidence in the political system.
…government actions in September 2008 were designed first to deal with the failures of the financial system.
Many expected this would be followed by dealing with the failures of the financial elite, but this is perceived not to have happened.
Indeed, the perception is that having spent large sums of money to stabilize the financial system, the political elite allowed the financial elite to manage the system to its benefit.
This generated the second crisis — the crisis of the political elite…..with critics …focusing on the measures taken to stabilize the system and arguing that it had created a new financial crisis, this time in excessive sovereign debt.
….the idea was that the political elite had solved the financial problem both by generating massive debt and by accumulating excessive state power.
..the argument was that the political elite used the financial crisis to dramatically increase the power of the state … while mismanaging the financial system through excessive sovereign debt.
…….It is vital to understand that this is not an ideological challenge. Left-wingers opposing globalization and right-wingers opposing immigration are engaged in the same process — challenging the legitimacy of the elites.
Nor is it simply a class issue. The challenge emanates from many areas. The challengers are not yet the majority, but they are not so far away from it as to be discounted.
The real problem is that, while the challenge to the elites goes on, the profound differences in the challengers make an alternative political elite difficult to imagine.
This, then, is the third crisis that can emerge: that the elites become delegitimized and all that there is to replace them is a deeply divided and hostile force, united in hostility to the elites but without any coherent ideology of its own.
…..we cannot understand what is going on without understanding two things.
The first is that the political economic crisis, if not global, is at least widespread, and uprisings elsewhere have their own roots but are linked in some ways to this crisis.
The second is that the crisis is an economic problem that has triggered a political problem, which in turn is making the economic problem worse."
http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20110808 … al-economy
Political elites in the UK and elsewhere have a way to go to reconnect with their publics, and unfortunately far worse than the last three nights is on the cards if they don’t.
We could have a cull of the countries pensioners too, that would really solve our countries economic problems. In fact, lets shoot every unemployed person as well..why stop there. Don’t know why I didn’t think of it myself.
Pensioners and most unemployed people are not looting. Those destroying already deprived communities for their own selfish gain do not deserve to live there.
Their has always been a nature in people to have a bit of a riot for the craic. I certainly wouldn’t mind roaming the streets smashing windows in my brain it sounds or feels like some sort of freedom from the daily mundane life of a person who is stuck in a rut.
However the complete inability of the Met to stop this has been laughable. Its like mobs going around all around london wrecking the place. Where are the water cannons to disperse the crowd and the riot police look very inaffective.
Think you need to get the PSNI in Lads
"Something for nothing and your chicks for free" as Dire Straits sang.
Just like gambling.
Its the world we live in.
So what do we do about it?
MP’s pontificate but avoid coming up with solutions. Why do we bother electing them?
We take people to court when they defend their property?
Make parents responsible? Maybe society should fine and imprison them for not controlling their "Ferrel Brats"
The cells are full today, where do we put the rest of the rioters?
We cut the policing budget by 20%
Death penalty? in Jamaica there are 4 murders a day and they have the death penalty?
I don’t the answers, I don’t even know what the real questions are anymore.
I am bewildered, I will fight for my owm blood, but I stuggle to understand how we have got to where we are now?
I think we have a group of people, a very large group of people around the country, whose sense of ‘society’ is disenfranchised from the society that most of us would feel we belong to.
As a result they do not feel any obligation towards ‘our’ society and what we think of as the normal thought processes that would perhaps stop people acting in the anti-social way they have do not come into play.
The kids (and it looks largely like young teenagers) involved didn’t start out life like that though. Our society created them. That is what needs to be addressed.
And, as economic conditions toughen then civil unrest will increase, history shows that time and again.
No easy anwers – calls to ‘bring in the army’ as though that will magically sort it all out are naive.
Well spoken, Cormack. This sociey is feral from top to bottom; and in that order. That arch guru of neoliberal capitalism, Milton Friedman, stated that maximising shareholders’ profits was the sole moral obligation incumbent on corporations; and we know that under this current, now utterly-discredited recrudescence of corporatism, it is the corporations that give governments their orders. It could hardly have been more emphatically illustrated than it was recently by Murdoch and his News International. Nor do they owe allegiance to any country or its people.
Clivexx is so enamoured of neoliberal economics, it seems that he himself recognises shareholder’s profits as the sole moral obligation of our neoliberal, corporate government.
Unfortunately, since there is a far greater urgency for street-level violence to be dealt with, on the spot, the neoliberals think their own, far greater villainy, which is set fair to destroy the global economy, should pass ‘under the radar’, unnoticed. Tough.
Clivexx knows full well I am a Zionist, though I realise that both the Palestinians and the Jews are in a virtually intractable situation, by reason of the very nature of cultural clashes; which is more than can be said for his allegiance to Zion.
If Clivexx respected Judaism, he would recognise that through Moses, Yahweh set up the first welfare state, it being the bounden duty on all to care for the orphan, the widow and the wayfarer; in short, the poor. The Jewish people were the Christ-bearers, and through them we obtained our Judaeo-Christian civilisation. Without Judaism, there is no Christianity. But don’t expect Clivexx to find any compassion in his heart any time soon.
This rampant anomie and anarchy from to bottom of our society has grown at the same pace as the marginalisation of Christianity as the state religion. And the less personal responsibility (as inculcated by religious faiths) on the part of the people, inevitably, the more costly it is to govern, while maintaining law and order, again at every level, not least that of the politicians themselves. I saw a breakdown of the convicted criminals and those with pending court cases against them, among the politicians, and it was staggering.
Couple that costliness to police the country properly, particularly given the conditions of lawlessness, together with the open-ended avarice of the leaders of our capitalist society, ‘red in tooth and claw’, and under-staffing of the police and other emergency services was inevitable. The leaders of such a society are incapable of recognising gradations of moral obligations.
The enormity of this country’s current moral dereliction was never more grotesquely illustrated – well, apart from primary-school rapes, etc – than by an account I read in the papers a while back of a drug-addled lout urinating on a woman as she lay dying in her doorway.
It wasn’t that there weren’t many, many people who were not believers, during the forties, fifties and sixties, at least formally; there were. But people were imbued with a certain Christian ethos subliminally, so that standards of egregiously execrable behaviour quite common now, simply could not have been imagined by people. My brother was an agnostic, and oddly enough a steeet-fighting kind of bloke, but I learnt more about true Christianity from him than anyone.
politicians and bankers in the West have created an immense new social norm where the reckless profit at the expense of the prudent.
so maybe its not the looters who are behind the curve on that change ?
The new gospel I fear is in Les Mis:
Beggar at the feast!
Master of the dance!
Life is easy pickings
If you grab your chance.Everywhere you go
Law-abiding folk
Doing what is decent
But they’re mostly broke!Singing to the Lord on Sundays
Praying for the gifts He’ll send.
But we’re the ones who take it
We’re the ones who
make it in the end!- Total Posts 17716
Great post, Grimes.
Not sure I agree with (or even understand) all of it, but he understaffing of the emergency services, for nothing more than greed, certainly strikes a chord.Canny societies make sure folk are too tired from having to work to live to have the energy, time or interest to go robbing their neighbourhood.
They also don’t have welfare states that build an underclass with time on its hands.
Or which give out the message that if you have a baby, you get given a house and benefits – leading to children begetting children that grow up with no discipline, guidance or work-ethic.
Are those your orphans, widows/single parents, and wayfarers, Grimes ?
You don’t think socialism has anything to do with it too ?
The trouble with some looters is that they have such painfully low expectations:
Mike
Surnames don’t come any cooler than this commentator’s, and for that reason alone she’s worth a read:
Yes it is, and the root of it is young and black
Whilst I abhor the scum doing this as much as anyone, I would absolutely contest this point. From the footage I’ve seen the participants are black and white. This is not about race but greed.
Good posts wit and grimes.
We live in a highly materialistic society. The clothes, the bling, the accessories, day in day out on TV, in mags and on the street. It’s been have it now, pay later – for many years.
And we’ve all witnessed the unedifying sight of looters in pin stripes having it large – not just bankers like Goodwin but captains of industry and fund managers. They think and tell us they’re worth it.
And so (albeit very wrongly) do these rioters.
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