After three nights of rioting, London was relatively quiet last night — I’d like to think that the sight of Prime Minister David Cameron returning early from his villa in Tuscany has struck fear into the hearts of the rioters, but I’m guessing it has more to do with the deployment of an extra 10,000 police.
There was, however, violence and looting in several other cities, notably Manchester and Birmingham. In Birmingham, three Asian men who were on the streets to protect homes and shops were killed when they were hit by a car in an apparently deliberate attack.
As I wrote on the front page yesterday, the riots could take on a whole new dimension if a particular ethnic community feels it’s under attack from another group. There are reports of Turkish, Kurdish and Asian communities organizing patrols in London, and baseball bats and truncheons are selling like hot cakes on Amazon.
Police are now busy rounding up those rioters who were stupid enough to allow themselves to be filmed by security cameras or news crews. Channelling Colonel Gaddafi, a police chief in Manchester warned rioters that his men are “coming for you.”
On a more positive note, thousands of people in London and elsewhere have turned out to clean up their streets – there’s a great photo here. Elsewhere, the Malaysian student who became an unwitting YouTube star after he was filmed being robbed by rioters after he’d been beaten up is recovering in hospital.
A couple of videos for you. Here’s Conservative Education Minister Michael Gove tearing into Labour’s Harriet Harman for trying to blame the riots on government cuts. As Gove points out, Labour was in power for the formative years of most of those doing the burning and looting.
And by way of light relief, here’s a rioter called Alexis Bailey leaving court today. Bailey (who, Heaven help us, works in an infants’ school) was understandably not keen on being filmed, so he covered his face with a newspaper. The trouble with covering your face, though, is that you can’t see where you’re going…
Ultimately, what we’re watching in America, England, and the rest of Europe is downfall of the liberal paradigm. It could only cheat the rules of sociology, economics, and human frailty for so long before the whole thing imploded. Hopefully, we’ll get some grown-ups in charge soon, but I highly doubt it. I’m beginning to think we may be looking at a second dark ages.
See if this clip sounds very familiar to what the big government party of the left,”Democrats” say here. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjdhEvosC3I&fe…
“Happiness and moral duty are inseparably connected.” George Washington
I just looked at the link. Where do you suppose that they got the idea to blame the rich for all of their problems? Could it be the liberal MSM perhaps? Ergo, the blathering idiots of the MSM could be the root cause of the problem.
Yes, those blathering media idiots are the biggest part of the problem. Their slavish adherence to PC and its avoidance of calling things and events by their real names has given us a public wholly unprepared to deal with real situations that can’t be solved by a hug and a good cry. No one is held accountable, no one resigns or is fired, and the problems – particularly the bankrupting of the body politic – are not addressed as long as there’s a tiny hope that the liberals and lefties can be re-elected just one more time for just one more round of deficit vote-buying.
The UK Telegraph reports that the 3 young devout Muslims who were watching their Mosque and business were brutally murdered by a gang of African-Caribbean looters.
They have one of the murderers in custody plus lots of CCTV evidence and witnesses.
These murders could turn the situation in the UK very violent and very ugly very fast.
Both the Pakistani-UK Muslims and the African-Caribbeans have a very strong culture of honor and revenge–and long memories
–they do not forgive and they certainly do not forget.
The best thing is to stay out of Birmingham and stay out of the cross fire for the foreseeable future.
Of course the vendettas will spread to London, Manchester, Bristol, Glasgow, Bolton etc.
The UK will have to bring in combat hardened troops with high caliber machine guns and attack helicopters.
This is going to go on for many years-unfortunately-and the blood bath will be huge
- a lot of people are going to die and many of them will be innocent bystanders.
We see what ethic war means in Africa and MENA/AfPak–now it has come to the the UK.
That once Green and Pleasant Land will now be Red in Tooth and Claw.
Look up the term “skin head a bash them” it’s not what you would think at first blush. Rude Boys and pakis have been mixing it up for decades.
Rioters run wild.
Home/business owners can’t defend themselves or they go to jail.
Police nowhere to be found.
Day 4.
This is why you NEVER let your government disarm you!
We’ve never been armed in the UK so there’s no one to disarm. Not even our police.
To say that we have never been armed in Britain is not strictly true. The police forces of Great Britain (as opposed to that of Northern Ireland), has always been unarmed in principle, but the expansion of the police armoury has been in striking inverse proportion to the steady restriction on the possession of weapons by civilians. In the last years of the nineteenth century, readers of the Sherlock Holmes stories could happily accept the idea that Holmes and Watson regularly carried revolvers – something that would get them a prison sentence today, unless they wore baggy trousers and hoodies and ended every disjointed sentence in “innit”. Holmes even advises Watson always to carry a firearm in the East End of London.
By contrast to the fictional Holmes, the historical Metropolitan Police found itself outgunned by Latvian Bolshevik terrorists at the Sidney Street Siege of one hundred years ago, when the Home Secretary of the day, one Winston Churchill, called in the Regular Army.
After WWII, the Met starred in a film called “The Blue Lamp”, referring to the illuminated “Police” signs then familiar outside police stations. Dirk Bogarde played a young hoodlum, of no consequence, apart from the fact that he had a gun; as a result of the war, there were plenty of them around. Actor Jack Warner played the heroic, unarmed policeman character called Sergeant Dixon, who confronted the villain and was shot dead. Although the film is no masterpiece, by a long chalk, it had quite an impact in Britain, where it spawned a long-running television series, starring the resurrected Sergeant Dixon, called “Dixon of Dock Green”.
By the time that series ended, after twenty years, policing had already changed and viewers were switching over to “The Sweeney” (rhyming slang: “Sweeney Todd’ = “Flying Squad”), in which firearms were displayed much more widely, I am sure, than they were used in real life operations – something echoed by the popular series of just a few years back, “Life on Mars”, which was partly a parody of “The Sweeney”). Even so, the arming of the Metropolitan Police and of other British forces had genuinely advanced by strides since the immediate post-war period and this tendency has accelerated in the last few decades.
The increased readiness of the mainland forces to carry firearms has been accompanied by a crackdown both by the judiciary and the legislature on the use of weapons in self-defence, or defence of property, by civilians. Two murderous sprees in particular prompted knee-jerk law-making from the government: the massacre by a Michael Ryan in a tiny Berkshire town called Hungerford, in 1987, and the Dunblane killings of 1996, by somebody called Thomas Hamilton.
While the revulsion to these atrocities was in every sense the proper reaction (consider that most of Hamilton’s victims were primary school children), the reaction of the authorities was to exploit popular feeling, to take guns out of the hands of all members of the public, in the name of making everybody safer, while achieving nothing of the sort. While it is unlikely that anyone could have interrupted Hamilton’s crime in time to reduce the number of his victims, that isn’t true in the case of Ryan, one of whose victims was a brave, but unarmed, police officer. Furthermore, analysis of both cases revealed clearly that both Ryan and Hamilton had been demonstrably unfit men to be allowed anywhere near guns, according to the then existing legislation. Ranking police officers who demanded, in both cases, a tightening of the legislation covering firearms ownership, were simply covering up for the failings of their own constabularies.
Since Dunblane, the amount of gun-crime in Britain has only increased. Far fewer members of the public legally possess firearms; even members of the Olympic shooting-teams are not permitted to own handguns on UK territory. Nobody doubts, however, that the numbers of guns on the streets has risen inexorably, as gangs in London and Manchester settle their postal code differences (I am not making that up) with 9mm ammo.
These developments have been exacerbated by the reluctance of the police forces in British cities to confront the problem. The law-abiding public has been disarmed, with measures that have done nothing to stem the flow of weapons to the criminal gangs. The police, conversely, have access to pretty effective Heckler & Koch guns, but they are virtually apologetic about using them. Any fatal shooting by the police will be examined by a commission and I don’t see a problem with that, as long as the commission adopts a realistic approach. Right now, however, the police seem to be keen to avoid those commissions by allowing the general public to take the gangsters’ bullets, instead. This mentality has to change.
British police “forces” don’t call themselves “forces”, any more. They are “services”, now, you see. They are commanded by graduates in sociology, men and women who have never arrested felons in their lives. They have been cowed by the relentless barrage of political correctness through the labour years, ’97-’10, which certainly didn’t entirely stop last year, when Gordon Brown’s bloodied fingertips were finally prised from the door-jambs of Number 10. I just hope that the experiences of the last days will prevent a return to the insane policing tactics of recent decades.
Sorry for the long post, but I do feel rather strongly about these matters.
“baseball bats and truncheons are selling like hot cakes on Amazon.”
Wait for new laws from the freaks, loons and commies outlawing these “weapons”. Then next…. it will be screw drivers, forks and dinner knives from the tables of England.
England…look at what you’ve wrought! You morons…you multicultural idiots and idiots.
Now…you’re a 3rd world hell hole without the ability to defend yourselves. Bet the survivors of the blitz are proud now?
Victor, you are pathetic. You are trying to depict this as MENA and the ME replacing Muslim with Blacks. If I posted your comments at Totten’s you would be permanently laughed off his blog.
“The UK will have to bring in combat hardened troops with high caliber machine guns and attack helicopters.”
You’re lovin it imagining the Brits conducting AFPAK operations in England as the West retreats from the ME. You have shown more alarmist concern over the rioters in England than you ever did AQ or the Taliban. Your interest however is simply seeing the US out of the ME and watching Israel and any nascent Muslim liberality swept clean from the Levant.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/8694401/London-riots-water-cannons-to-be-used-on-sick-society.html Water cannons Victor, not 50 caliber guns. Your attempt to fuel a race war in England and divert attention from radical Muslims won’t work at PJ. We all note your refraining from mentioning the leftists that support the rioters. That’s not a very bright strategy either, but then who said you’re bright?
Carol Herman is Maxtrue in drag–depending upon where he/it/she is in and out of the closet.The same person–trivial.
In reality Birmingham home owners and businesses are very worried about the coming war between the African- Caribbeans ( the UK Telegraph term ) and the UK-Pakistani Muslims.
UK intelligence is also very concerned about this coming long war.
Ethnic tribal groups do not forgive and they do not forget–they live on honor and vengeance.
The British Empire solved this culture of vengeance virus by spreading Christianity–it worked in the Empire for centuries.
The current Archbishop of Canterbury –Williams–is not up to that challenge.
The Birmingham crisis is a very big deal, 5% chance of reconciliation–95 % chance of a much worse outcomes–some of them very, very bad indeed.
Get a grip folks!
I’m a Brit and I’m seeing this first-hand. There will be no machine guns much less attack helicopters. Amazon is not running out of baseball bats, the police are not abandoning ship, the men killed in the hit and run were not guarding a mosque and frankly, the ‘three more dead’ bit of this article’s headline would only be accurate if it read ‘three more than zero’ since the death toll is precisely three (you can’t count the lad whose death triggered this because he didn’t die in any riot) And as yet, we have no idea whether the hit and run was murder or manslaughter.
The police were caught short. This crisis exploded out of nowhere, there were too few police to safely cope with hundreds of feral kids appearing with no warning and as yet, no one in the UK is in favour of gunning down children as young as 13. Last night extra police forces were drafted in and that’s it – the show is over. The streets of London are now quiet and order restored without a single shot being fired. True, trouble erupted in a few other cities last night but at the time of writing (3am GMT Thursday) there has been no further trouble anywhere in the UK.
I’m no fan of multi-culturalism. It’s a flawed and divisive policy, but it is not the whole cause of these riots where, incidentally, both black kids and white kids were involved. There will be a range of opinions and I suspect the word ‘deprivation’ to crop up – and with good reason – but in my view one of the root causes is lack of discipline in the home and in school.
We’ve had crazy social and education policies dumped on us by a minority of liberal elites which have resulted in some kids leading lives without the boundaries they need. The policies have focused on their ‘rights’ without any mention of their ‘responsibilities’. Thus, they feel constantly aggrieved, victimised and powerless.
Many of us haven’t been saying ‘where are the police!!’, because the real question is ‘where the hell are the parents?!’ Those who see this as solely an issue for the police have, in my view at least, fallen prey to the belief that responsibility lies beyond them and in the hands of external authorities.
If these riots are to teach us anything it has to be that liberal policies have gone too far. It’s time to reinstate discipline, competition and consequences for ones actions.
Yes, indeed. Just read Victor’s post and my last response. Note Victor didn’t offer any cause and look at his prognostication. Quite inflammatory, wouldn’t you agree?
Off the wall would be a better description. Or perhaps ‘hopeful’?
I’m sorry Victor but this sounds more like wishful thinking than reality. You’ve got more chance of being bitten on the bum by a cabbage than having these fantasies of a violent race war in Britain coming true.
Post-riot action has been swift. The courts have been running at high speed and those parents who are tenants have been warned that if they do not control their children, they face eviction.
Good try but no cigar.
Anyone visiting a UK city on a Friday or Saturday night has experienced the drunken mob violence
The African-Caribbeans murdered 3 Muslims in cold blood.
The UK police did the right thing in firing a double tap to the London African -Caribbean drug dealing thug–good shooting
Next time double tap to the body mass– then one to the head.
That London police officer deserves a medal.
Arsonist should be shot in the head, looters should be shot in the legs, rioters should be shot with bird shot at close range from riot shot guns.
Zero tolerance of homicidal, criminal looters and arsonists.
Peaceful non violent demonstrations are a very different matter
Yes Victor, you’re English is still stiff and your use of slang more so. Someone from England just said your comments defy reality. Did you hear that? I guess their opinion LIVING IN ENGLAND is less valid as yours. Today you made assertions about California where Michael says you post from. They were dismissed as off target too. I repeat, your comments were trashed by someone from England and has verified what the BBC has also reported.
Do you think I am not bright enough to see you amplifying the tactics of Assad and Ahmadinejad? They also exaggerate the situation in England today saying its just like “some problems” that have occurred in Iran and Syria. When Micheal posted on iran’s comments you showed up and tried to divert attention to another topic. You refused to condemn Syrian soldiers shooting protestors outside of the Syrian embassy in LEBANON but you jump at the absurd comparison of England and MENA.
I have made my point at Tatler. I think they’re on to you by now. They know you told Barry Rubin today he’s on the wrong side of history. I know why you’re here.
Victor – for heaven’s sake. I’m a Brit. Stop trying to tell me what’s going on 50 miles away from me from the depths of your armchair in America.
There is no mob violence in British cities on Friday/Saturday nights. There are young people who get drunk and sometimes – only sometimes – they fight each other. That’s not mob violence Victor. They make total arses of themselves, true, but that’s not quite the same thing.
As for shooting them here, shooting them there, shooting arsonists everywhere; these are kids, Victor. Some no more than 13yrs old. Our police are not routinely armed and even if they were, there is no way on this earth that they’d shoot unarmed children.
This is not a race war, Victor. It’s out-of-control kids who, as I’ve already said, can tell you all about their ‘rights’, but have no concept of their responsibilities. Once we address that – and I suspect these riots will see that they are – our society will improve.
England has come back from these weaknesses before–like
” peace in out time”
The facts are that arsonist are a real and present danger to life and limb–they should be shot in the head.
The SAS should be mobilized–as they were in N Ireland.
Peaceful protest is one thing.
Murder and arson–which is going on –is a very different matter and requires lethal force to end it.
I hope we can agree on that.
The public drunkenness in all UK cities on Fridays and Saturday nights is appalling.
If you want tourists and people to attend the 2012 Olympics then the UK needs to put a stop to it.
Last year our family visited London, the streets were full of vomiting drunks on Saturday night–it is revolting and unacceptable.
You do not see such behavior in NYC, LA or SF.
How can you tolerate this mayhem?
How can I be expected to tolerate a mahem when it exists only in your mind, Victor?
Humour me….if there are no riots, quite where should we deploy the SAS? How do we shoot arsonists who aren’t setting anything on fire? How do police, armed only with batons, shoot anything, anyway?
Victor – we have calm now. Achieved with police clutching their riot shields and their little wooden batons. Not a single shot fired. Yet you think we need the SAS and a jolly good massacre of our children? They’re feral, but that’s no reason to kill them. Although I grant that such action is all in a day’s work for al-Bashar or al-Bashir. Not forgetting the mullahs who send their kids on trips across mine fields.
I don’t know how you do it Victor, but apparently you’ve been a fly on the wall in Birmingham’s police station. You are the only person outside of the police force in possession of the fact that the three young men killed in the hit and run were murdered. That’s quite an achievment for someone living in America. Especially as, until the case comes to court I doubt anyone else will have such information. I’m intrigued though – perhaps you can fill me in on a detail you mentioned earlier? How was it possible for a hit and run driver to simultaneously loot shops?
Still, at least you’ve down-graded ‘mob violence’ in our cities to ‘drunkeness’. What changed your mind?
Sadly, unlike some of our European cousins – and Israel come to that – we cannot make claim to a cafe culture. Some of our young people drink far too much. Most outgrow it, though.
Don’t you worry about the 2012 games. We’ll cope.
Whoops! Hit that ‘submit’ button too swiftly. Clearly, I’m not ‘anonymous’.
Just a closing thought before I go to sleep (it’s 5.30am here!)
This comment of yours, Victor:
“Last year our family visited London, the streets were full of vomiting drunks on Saturday night–it is revolting and unacceptable”
Firstly, the streets are not ‘full’ of vomiting drunks. If you’d visited London you’d know that. You’ve been reading the Sun online again, haven’t you?
Secondly – to whom is this ‘unacceptable’ Victor? You?
Christ on a bike, Victor, you really do take the biscuit with your delusions of grandeur.
Bravo!
Bravo indeed….
I will remember this Victor and save it for a rainy day. You are a complete idiot.
What were the English thinking? Why did they open their doors to huge numbers of Turks, Africans, Kurds, and Asians? The UK isn’t an immigrant nation (since the Normans sailed over at least). The immigrants seem to have no desire to intergrate into British society (if that’s even possible).
Oh good grief….now Victor states that I am Carol Herman though he knows I have debated her posts at Totten’s blog and post completely different views in a completely different writing style. He also implies something homosexual which may very well be projection (not that I care). This must be revenge for Victor having been directed himself to start dating a fellow comrade-commentator named anon -another apologist for the horrors of the ME. Victor complained that I should be banned for calling him Vickie, but Michael refused. Eventually, Victor finding no support among the readership said he wouldn’t come back to Michael Totten’s blog, but he can’t help himself.
Today he claimed that the US had 12 carriers. He claimed our generals declare only China represents an existential threat to the US (in deflecting a discussion on Iran). He has deflected every article he finds at PJ concerned with Islamist threats into an attack on Israel. He warned that the riots in England will soon spread to the US. This dude has no bone to pick with Leftists or dangerous Muslim regimes. He thinks Erdogan is a towering statesman. His aim is to see the West retreat so Iran and Turkey can carve up the spoils. Now he sees many conservative here snickering about the problems in the UK and smells opportunity. Well Brits do have problems:
“London mayor Boris Johnson urged the government to reconsider its “pretty frail” plans to cut police numbers, saying the argument had been “substantially weakened” by the riots.
And Labour shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper said agreed, adding the plans needed to be reconsidered.
“It is staggering and utterly shameful if it has taken these appalling events for ministers to start waking up to what everyone else has known all along,” she said.
“Cutting 16,000 officers – the equivalent of every officer on the streets of London last night – at a time like this is deeply irresponsible.”
But the Home Office said the reductions in the police budget were manageable.” BBC
But Vickster won’t say England’s problem is their declining military strength, the rule of law or their entitlement programs. he seeks to make Muslims the victims in England and now the blacks the enemy. He seeks to direct the snickering here towards the black community in England and compares England to MENA and the ME. Just listen to yourself Victor. Don’t you ever find your comments embarrassing?
Well I guess that is to be expected as he has insufficient synaptic activity for critical thinking. You do know what that means Victor. You did say you review medical literature for publication when not driveling here.
I expect the more he is driven off MJT, the more he’ll spew his talking points here. You will find them repetitive, incorrect and resembling a broken answer machine. News flash: there’s no one home.
P.S. PJ has your history Victor and can decide who is telling it like it is. And they know that Carol’s IPS is far from NYC where I live. I hope immigration revokes your visa and you go back from where you came from. Or is that too dangerous?
Immigration per se isn’t really the problem, Old Soldier. It’s the speed of it coupled with the flawed multi-cultural idealism.
We’ve seen mass immigration in too short a space of time. We’re a tiny island and we can’t cope. Some immigrants from Europe assimilate easily because the cultures are similar, but some from very different parts of the world – not so much.
A multi-racial society would dictate that all are equal under the law; a multi-cultural society is one in which no one culture is deemed superior to another. Integration is not the driving force in a multi-cultural society, instead the ‘dream’ is that very diverse cultures will all sit nicely together and hold each other in mutual esteem. The reality is somewhat different.
Some of our immigrants have cultural values that are very different to ours so we’re caught up in endless dilemmas. For example, UK law states that women’s rights are equal to those of men. This is not the case in some Asian cultures, yet if cultural mores are to be respected and no single culture is superior to another, whose ‘law’ prevails?
We’ve driven ourselves to the point of exasperation with this type of dilemma. It’s less the fault of the immigrants and more the fault of those who really didn’t think through the whole multi-cultural agenda.
Ok, kids…the world is broken.
We’re all human beings living on this world, so the inference is that we, collectively, broke it.
So…
How are ya gonna fix it and pick up the pieces?
People keep identifying problems and railing about those problems, blaming everyone but themselves ( a trait they claim to despise in others), but no one gets on with fixing anything…
Cash payments to discontents has been successful at cooling off anger and preventing riots. Palestinians stopped throwing rocks as soon as billions of dollars was distributed. No nation is as kind to it`s underclass as the US, the UK must follow that example.