Interesting article on the UK riots

Years of liberal dogma have spawned a generation of amoral, uneducated, welfare dependent, brutalised youngsters

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2024284/UK-riots-2011-Liberal-dogma-spawned-generation-brutalised-youths.html#ixzz1UnOqx2Bn

Here are some pictures of the suspected looters;

http://www.flickr.com/photos/gmpwanted

wow....

They just want something for free. It's the Holy Grail of shopping!

I guess it just depends on how you see it - from the street, or an ivory tower.

FDR didn't like his programs being called "socialist" so he called his programs "liberal", but it isn't the original meaning.

The neoliberal labor policies of the EU have seen the UK flooded with workers from Eastern Europe who are willing to work for less money than native born UK citizens, and even sleep out on the streets. These looters feel justified in looting these places because they are hiring foreigners while Brits are unemployed. The same rationalization could occur here when we see foreign workers brought in to work in fast food restaurants, and summer resorts.

The phrase 'economic liberalism' is sometimes used in the UK in a way that means just the opposite from an American perspective. But here 'liberal' is being used in precisely the same sense that it would be used in America. The author is saying that rioting and other undesirable behaviour by young people is caused by overpermissiveness, insufficiently severe punishment for misbehaviour at home and school, breakdown in traditional social and sexual morals, and the welfare state supposedly letting people get away with laziness without fear of consequences.

Than minimum wage?

These are the kinds of jobs that we did as teenagers and into university.

Why doesn't the President put an end to it?

To get these visas, the employers need to show that no American will do the job.
That is total nonsense, but Dems here at DU tolerate that excuse. The Obama administration has continued to issue these visas which drives up the unemployment rate. Obviously, Obama doesn't care about the unemployed, because he hasn't taken the easiest of executive action to help Americans get jobs here in America.

I don't know when that became synonymous with "Liberal" here in the US. As late as Wilson's presidency "Liberal" still had the old meaning of pro-lassez-fair and pro-free-trade.

There is some truth in bits of it: yes, many of the people involved were opportunistic criminals, both bored and greedy, who took advantage of the existing chaos to create more chaos to grab a lot of good stuff for free. They were not in the category of 'protesters'. And while some were desperate, frustrated, unemployed people, many others were fairly ordinary criminals.

Yes, English culture has a certain lack of respect for education and education is not all it could be, especially for those youngsters who are not academic. But then it never was. The difference between now and a century ago is that the more unacademic teenagers (along with many potentially academic ones, who didn't have money) had already left school. In any case, if you read 19th century school stories such as 'Tom Brown' and 'Eric', you will quickly see the tendency for many public-school boys of that time to drink, bully, cause trouble in the neighbourhood, and yes, though the authors could not record it in detail at that time, to use obscene language. Read Dickens, and you'll soon see the level of bad behaviour of 19th century youngsters, from the private school boys who ruthlessly torment and disrespect their teacher Mr. Mell in 'David Copperfield' to the criminal gangs of 'Oliver Twist'. More recently, Edward Blishen's 'Roaring Boys' and 'This Right Soft Lot', published in the 1950s, deal with the experiences of a teacher in a tough inner city secondary modern school shortly after WW2, where educational standards are poor, many pupils violent and disruptive, and delinquency common.

Young people, especially young males, have always tended to be more impulsive, aggressive and generally troublesome than older adults, or younger children. There is actual evidence that the frontal lobes of the brain (which are involved in inhibition and self-control among other things) are less dominant in this age group. Many people at this age act in all sorts of undesirable ways, often without consequences (e.g. I can immediately think of two young men in the 80s, who belonged to a society regularly involved in drunkenness and vandalism in their neighbourhood, escaped punishment, and are now Prime Minister and Mayor of London respectively!)

I do think that current society is more materialistic than it has been at certain times in the past, and that this increases temptation to thieve at all levels.


But anyone who blames social problems on 'liberal dogma'; who complains about the welfare state; who blames idleness among youth not on unemployment but on people *choosing* to live on benefits; who states that 'the dependency culture is a tragedy for those who receive something for nothing' while not criticizing government policies that lead to unemployment, is a monster of pure right-wing evil, well suited to the Daily Mail! The current right wing have two attitudes which might be somewhat defensible individually, but are horrific when put together: (1) The unemployed are mostly 'workshy' and should be deprived of benefits to force them to work and stop being 'dependent' (possibly defensible in a full-employment state); and (2) jobs are not a right, and people should have to compete for them, and then live in fear of losing their jobs, as a means of increasing 'productivity' (possibly defensible if adequate provision is made for those who cannot compete). Together they amount to punishing poor people for poverty, and keeping everyone in a constant state of insecurity and fear. N.b. I do realize that not all the rioters were poor; I am talking here about the sort of culture that Hastings and the Daily Mail are recommending, currently in response to the riots, but in fact as a kneejerk response to just about everything.


Yes, lack of discipline and danger of consequences had something to do with the riots - in the sense that there were nothing like enough POLICE about to deal with the situation. And I would have thought that left and right could at least agree on one of the main causes of the trouble: massive cuts in frontline policing.

--quoting LeftishBrit:

"(1) The unemployed are mostly 'workshy' and should be deprived of benefits to force them to work and stop being 'dependent' (possibly defensible in a full-employment state); and (2) jobs are not a right, and people should have to compete for them, and then live in fear of losing their jobs, as a means of increasing 'productivity' (possibly defensible if adequate provision is made for those who cannot compete). Together they amount to punishing poor people for poverty, and keeping everyone in a constant state of insecurity and fear."

thanks for post

Do you see any major differences between US right wing social attitudes and those of the British?

Daily Mail!!!!
:puke:

and the corruption of the amoral politicians, police and press barons?

The smash-and-grab rioters are just following the example of the unaccountable elites.

.

What about the Murdoch propaganda that backs Cameron's austerity measures? What about the elites who protect the bankers who brought down the global economy?

I don't condone the rioters but Cameron has no moral authority, nor has anyone corrupted by the Murdoch media and the unaccountable bankers.

The rioters should pay the price for their crimes and so should those at the top who set the lawless agenda.

And an unknown but large number who have died prematurely as a result of poverty and/or lack of public services in many places.

Not that the existence of one sort of criminal excuses any other sort of criminal.

Requires the unlawful killing of another human being with "malice aforethought"

The main point is the lawless behavior of the elites that has given the green light for others to think they deserve to grab whatever they can.

Do the bankers deserve their million dollar and million pound bonuses? Why didn't the banks pay the price for their mistakes and corrupt behavior?

Thus, there is some truth to your underlying point.

Ironically, probably the same two groups many of the rioters would blame for the problems.

But for different reasons.

Maybe they were looking for a better wardrobe....

Americans are pretty ignorant about what has gone wrong in England. Most of you are getting it completely wrong.

and feed their children.

No they are not working two jobs. Normally it's one parent and she has been on benefits since she started breeding. Soon as her children are of breedable age they start knocking out kids and go on welfare as well. More and more people are calling these kids 'feral'. They are the result of very bad parenting.

The social programs in the UK have become too good and has encouraged this. I'm a liberal and believe strongly in helping those who need help, but these people need a kick in the arse.

I'm 57 and grew up 50 miles outside of London and I never witnessed the rudeness and laziness that is going on now when I was a 'rowdy' teenager. I'm not talking about the riots, I'm talking about everyday. I know women who have been on benefits since they were teenagers. Funny thing..on face book you can see their children have all the latest electronics..cell phones, lap tops, games etc and also they have regular vacations to the Costa del Sol. And the mother has never worked and the dads are unknown as far as I can tell. When was the last time any of you lot went to Spain?

Like I said, I am a liberal and I have put everything I own on the line, here in the US, to fight for better social programs and especially decent healthcare (like the NHS in the UK). But there is such a thing as too much of a good thing.

There can be a good thing misused, or used as a stopgap for something else.

The social programmes have *not* become too good; they have become a substitute for what we really need: a full-employment state.

Until the onset of Thatcherism, we more-or-less had one. Benefits were for people very temporarily out of work, or for those who could not work. Then Thatcher changed the whole culture into one where jobs were a privilege, not a right. And destroyed much of the industrial base of our country, thus also making us too dependent on the banking/financial sector.

People were thrown onto the scrapheap, and the country has never recovered.

Although unemployment was better under Blair et al, they too never really addressed the problem and to some extent aggravated it by putting their emphasis on 50% of people going to university (what about the rest of the population?)

It's pure revisionism by the Right to imply that current levels of chronic unemployment are caused by welfare programmes getting so good that people prefer them to jobs; they are caused by *no jobs*, especially for those who are not academic to start with.

Not all the rioters were poor or unemployed or on benefits anyway. It always looked as though quite a few were just plain ordinary criminals taking advantage of chaos and police shortages, and now it's getting to look as though those were the majority. But there have always been criminals and that's one main reason why we need police on the beat, and if the government gets tough on welfare, without increasing employment, the chronic criminals will be the ones who know how to 'help themselves' in more senses than one, and the poor, vulnerable, sick and disabled, most of whom were *not* rioting, will be ground down even more than they are already.

...yeah, you sound like a real liberal all right.

In Europe "Libertarianism" is an older term for Anarchism, it has a Left-Wing meaning in Europe.

It is sometimes used in this way, usually with another term added, as in 'market liberals' or 'economic liberals' or 'classical liberals'. (The LibDem party here is informally divided into 'social liberals' who tend to be centre-left on most issues, and 'market liberals', more numerous at the moment, who are economically right-wing.) But when the RW tabloids use the term, they use it in exactly the same way that Americans do.

nt

UK riots: in courtrooms across country, there was little room for leniency

It was a day of similar frenzied activity in magistrates courts across the country, as the long riot cleanup entered its judicial phase. More than 460 people have been charged in London alone in relation to the riots from 1,009 arrests, the Metropolitan police said; nationally more than 1,500 have been arrested. There are certain to be more, however. Scotland Yard detectives are dealing with 550 different crime scenes, of which 140 are still cordoned off; 127 people were arrested in London overnight on Wednesday. Roughly half of those who appeared in court in London were under 18, the Met said.

Thursday saw a relentless conveyer-belt of charges, some of them shocking in their alleged violence and brutality, others strikingly banal. Youssuf Addow, 25, charged with burglary of Phones 4 U in Putney, south-west London, carrying "a mallet, a weight and umbrellas". Peter Morgan, 20, accused of stealing "four cans of spray paint, to the value of £28.92" from B&Q in Hornchurch, Essex. Kaine Thorpe, 24, appearing on a charge of handling stolen goods, "namely Footlocker trainers and a mobile phone".

Again and again, the judges repeated the refrain "jurisdiction is declined". They considered the maximum powers of sentencing available to magistrates – six months in prison, or a £5,000 fine – to be insufficient, and so referred the case to the crown courts, where the cases will be heard before a jury. Very few of the accused were granted bail. At least one solicitor outside court six expressed concern at some of the courts' decisions, on a day when David Cameron had vowed that anyone charged with rioting should be remanded in custody and anyone convicted should expect to go to jail.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/aug/11/uk-riots-courtrooms-country

Dunno what the situation is elsewhere but in the UK the crime of theft for example and associated crimes of handling , recent possession whatever do not account in anyway for value of goods. A bottle of water is treated same as a gold watch. Not sure what the max penalty is currently for handling but it was 14 years.

nt

The Daily Mail is middle-class, but racist?

From 2007, but still valid.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=389&topic_id=2174684

Though some of the links no longer work.

To update, here is just a bit about their more recent nastiness:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/oct/16/stephen-gately-jan-moir

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2008/feb/19/howthedailymailhuntsfori

http://enemiesofreason.co.uk/a-day-with-the-daily-mail/

http://www.mailwatch.co.uk/

I guess I hadn't been aware she was a staffer at The Daily Mail.

...you know, the high-class chaps who work in The City who have been looting the public treasury going on 30 years now, or more; or David Cameron and his fraternity brothers, who routinely would go and trash local restaurants but of course that was all okay because they were well-heeled enough to pay for it, and too well-connected for the owners to seriously consider pressing charges as would happen to normal people whether or not they agreed to pay for damages.

Criminals, looters, cads. Yep, a perfect description of today's ruling elites there and here.

(again: not condoning it, just making an observation that the same actions by the upper classes are viewed benignly)

liberal my ass.... alerted

The right wing along with their version of fascism is responsible for the poverty in the UK which triggered the goddamn riots. This OP is disgusting.

There is no evidence for any of claims.