Another night of rioting. More people made homeless and businesses destroyed. Twitter is awash with awful stories of mindless violence and looting. Facebook the same.
I watched Newsnight last night (something I never do) and they had a panel made up of the ex-mayor of London, a representative from the police, a pastor from Tottenham and Shaun Bailey who is involved with a kid’s charity. It was a very interesting discussion.
The ex-mayor tried to score political points by blaming the present incumbent and said it wouldn’t have happened in his day. It was the result of government cuts and a failure to provide for the lowest income families. He also blamed social networking!
The police representative said the police were doing everything they could against what were essentially 14-17 year old kids with no sense of social order or behaviour. He blamed the government as well because of the reduction in police resources.
The pastor blamed the government cuts that have closed down youth clubs in the Tottenham area. The interviewer asked: “Are you saying that these kids would have been in a youth club rather than looting and smashing things?” He had no answer and just sputtered.
Shaun Bailey was the only one who made sense. He said it was not about politics, the police or anything of the sort. These kids are not scared of the police, are unconcerned by their actions. It is a wider issue than just ‘electioneering’. It is an issue that our communities should be concerned with and should be fixing. He said, for the last 20 years we’ve been trying to replace families with welfare and help but we need to return to the family structure, to a belief in some sort of social, moral code.
By the end of the interview, all of them were agreeing with Shaun.
Interviews with ordinary people on the street keep insisting that blame needs to be apportioned everywhere except for the rioters. It’s ridiculous the amount of people blaming the police! Seriously? Even the rioters saying it’s everyone else’s fault.
In Hackney, a group of shop owners banded together and chased the looters off. Amazing footage of people running between buses and cars. It must have been extremely frightening for anyone out shopping or coming home from work. The street was where Mirinda used to go for food when she lived at the flat in Hackney. And tonight groups of men in London communities are patrolling the streets.
A couple of excellent suggestions from Twitter. My favourite is to put the arrested rioters in orange boiler suits, chain them together and have them clean up the mess. There’s also been a groundswell of help via Twitter (and Facebook I assume) for people to come and help with the clean up. I just read one tweet saying that people were leaving the train at Clapham Junction with brooms. This is what community and society really is. Pity the rioters have no idea.
It is a social problem. These kids have no idea how society works; they have no sense of value; they have been treated badly in both an economic and social sense.
If you want to know what it was like in the thick of it, this blog entry is excellent.
Now that I have that off my chest…I’m going to write another post about my day.
2021 UPDATE: The blog post above (http://www.hangbitching.com/2011/08/peckham-monday/) no longer exists, so I’ve removed the link.
