The phoney "fightback" - by Richard... Monday, August 15, 2011

The phoney "fightback" - by Richard... Monday, August 15, 2011

Big Brave Cameron, safe behind his concrete barricades, protected by phalanxes of armed guards and conveyed by armoured limousine in the style of the best of the African dictators, is going to reach down to us mere plebs today and launch his "fightback" against what he calls the "slow-motion moral collapse of Britain".

The stench of hypocrisy clearly does not permeate the hallowed halls of Westminster, or the portals of Downing Street, or offend the delicate nostrils of the plump Old Etonian and his gilded pals.

But, as we navigate our way past the rotting corpse of public policy, we cannot help but offer a wry smile at "the plans for a crackdown on the criminal gangs behind the riots". Their members, it would appear, will be subjected to "an orchestrated campaign of harassment by officials from all government agencies" to drive them from the grip of the gunmen.

In a land of "equal opportunity", it seems that the gangs are now to be subjected to the same treatment as the rest of us.

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Looters escaping justice - by Richard...

Raedwald has the story. I really am getting sick and tired of this ... one rule for "them" and one for "us". Apart from anything else, this, the previous story, and many others, make a mockery of the idea that Britain is a democracy with the people exerting any serious control over the government, its politicians and servants.

Time after time though, when such stories are published, they do nothing but raise the blood pressure and reinforce our sense of frustration at our own impotence. The impulse is to smash up the system, sentiments not a million miles from the rioters so many people deplore.

If the system will not correct itself, though, what is to be done? How much longer can we continue to tolerate this wholesale looting of the public purse – officials and politicians alike making a complete mockery of the very idea of good governance?

These are serious questions, and we need serious answers. Without them, and the action that should naturally follow, they only answer is violence. History does tell us that – when the limits of tolerance are reached, people start to get killed.

To point this out is not to incite violence, or to condone it ... or even to wish it. But the politicians and their officials must realise that the broad sweep of history is against them. They cannot continue in this vein, or the consequences will be grievous.

That is not a threat, not a promise, but simply fact. It is their call, not ours. Theirs is the responsibility, the duty, to solve this problem, or we will have to - and the last time that happened (illustrated) it was not pretty.

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This is wrong - by Richard... Sunday, August 14, 2011

There can be no possible excuse for this. It is an obscene waste of public money and an affront to all decent, hard-working taxpayers who have to pay their own way. The officials who did this, and the councillors who permitted it, should be brought to book. But, of course, they will not be – they are laughing at us.

More and more, we must ask ourselves why we tolerate this, what we can do about it and what weshould do about it. This really cannot and must not continue. And if a mob ransacked the house and burnt it to the ground, would that be wrong?

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Someone is going to get killed - by Richard...

With all this bellicose talk, and the Big Brave Cameron ramping it up, it is only a matter of time before trigger-happy plod kills someone (again). And if this stupidity continues, the next set of riots will put these to shame. The authorities are acting like wuzzies ... instead calming the situation and returning it to normality, they are inflaming it.

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Other pieces of the jigsaw - by Richard...

It is not only that the police are inadequate but that the supporting "justice" system has also fallen apart. Peter Hitchens takes a look at it, arguing that, "It is not prison that is an expensive way of making bad people worse. It is this joke justice, defeatist and defeated, which ensures that almost nobody arrives in prison until he already has a higher degree in crime".

On the general issue of the riots, Hitchens then takes the high moral ground, writing in a separate piece:

Bitter laughter is my main response to the events of the past week. You are surprised by what has happened? Why? I have been saying for years that it was coming, and why it was coming, and what could be done to stop it. I have said it in books, in articles, over lunch and dinner tables with politicians whose lips curled with lofty contempt.

The mass criminality in the big cities, he says, is merely a speeded-up and concentrated version of life on most large estates – fear, intimidation, cruelty, injustice, savagery towards the vulnerable and the different, a cold sneer turned towards any plea for pity, the awful realisation that when you call for help from the authorities, none will come.

We, of course, have also been predicting trouble for years – with exactly the same response from politicians, so much so I cannot be bothered to talk to them any more. They are a waste of time and space. That leaves us the blog … not as great or as grand as Hitchens's rag, but it is at least a platform.

That is just as well, for – much as I admire him - I don't think that Hitchens has completely got it. It is not only that the authorities give us no help when it is needed but also that they have become our enemy … no help at all when my house is burgled, but turn up mob-handed to arrest me and put me in prison when I refuse to pay for the service I am not given.

However, Hitchens is spot on about Cameron, observing that he is "once again defrauding far too many people. He uses his expensive voice, his expensive clothes, his well-learned tone of public-school command, to give the impression of being an effective and decisive person. But it is all false. He has no real idea of what to do".

That really does make The Boy's posturing about a "zero-tolerance approach to street crime" all the more fatuous and dishonest. Without acknowledging the already serious flaws in the way that the police operate, the result will only be to give license for still more of the same inadequate policing that we have all experienced. Does the fool really think that a police force that misuses its existing powers is not going to misuse additional powers?

And what a contrast we see between Hitchens and the fawning sycophant Tim Montgomerie, who is fast developing a second career as a media tart. "Mr Cameron has been handed a chance to mend this broken society … The Tories have strong ideas about social justice; the time is ripe to put them into practice", he bleats.

The vomitus-inducing prose delivered is not something to which I would wish to expose my readers, but is useful in illustrating the woolly-minded, feminisation of the Tory Party. That is another piece of the jigsaw. Unfashionable as he is, Booker is dead right. It is about manliness. The ruling classes have lost their balls.

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That Blitz spirit - by Richard...

For his column this week, Booker draws heavily on our piece about Leighton-Morris and his bomb. Booker also calls in aid the piece by Frank Miniter, to whom we also refer, noting that his theme was that the English seem to have lost all their old manliness and self-reliance, allowing themselves to be ruled by an all-pervading politically correct state.

This then allows Booker to contrasting the England of 70 years ago with today, Miniter's observations. He then notes the attitude voiced by the 1940 magistrate, with his lecture on how it was "intolerable that private individuals" should act as Leighton-Morris had done and that such matters must be left to "those in authority".

This, says Booker, "was much the attitude exemplified by our politicians last week, as they called for ever more powers for a police force which had so signally failed to protect the people of London, Manchester and elsewhere from anarchy".

Attention is focused on the idiot Boris, who stumbled through embarrassing platitudes to a crowd who had seen their businesses destroyed the night before. This man, in particular, exemplified a political class that has lost any ability to engage in human terms with the people it is meant to serve.

When he promised, like David Cameron, that the culprits "will be caught and they will face punishments that they will deeply regret", it was clear his listeners regarded these as simply empty words.

What Booker then does is make some further links, the nature of which so few of the commentariatseem to understand. A similar gulf, he says, has opened up between the police and the rest of us.

It has become a cliché of modern Britain that, when we face a genuine affront to law and order – such as having our house burgled – the police seem powerless or are nowhere to be seen. Yet when it comes to helping social workers take a new-born baby from the arms of its mother on a hospital bed, it seems they have the time and resources to arrive mob-handed.

The police are happy to hit peaceful, pro-hunting demonstrators of the Countryside Alliance over the head with riot sticks. Yet when looters rage for an hour and a half through Clapham, our constabulary simply look on. Thus, Booker continues:

The police, withdrawn from their proper involvement with the community, shut away behind the walls of their concrete bunkers and the electronic barriers of recorded-voice telephone systems, reflect the stance of the politicians and officials who rule over us.

It was apt that last week, as havoc engulfed our cities, The Daily Telegraphreported that 20,000 public officials who last year lost their jobs in "cuts" received a total of £1 billion in compensation. One of the foremost was a senior official of the National Policing Improvement Agency, intended “to boost police efficiency”, whose pay-off was £500,000.

On one hand, we are told that we taxpayers must pay £200 million to provide compensation for the damage caused by the rioting hooligans. On the other, to compensate those 20,000 officials who have lost their jobs, we must foot a bill for five times that sum. Yet in important ways these are different sides of the same coin.

Booker then concludes that it is an ancient truth of human affairs that, if power is not exercised properly and responsibly, it doesn’t just vanish. It re-emerges in what the psychologists call "inferior" forms, to be abused, in ways which are anti-social.

The power now enjoyed by our political class and the system they represent does not ultimately belong to them. It belongs to the British people. Only by collectively recovering some of that manly independence of spirit personified by Mr Leighton-Morris can we hope ever to get it.

Interestingly, though, Booker is by no means the only writer this week to refer to the Blitz, with many newspapers having mentions of the "Blitz spirit", mostly in the context of Londoners reacting to the rioters and looters. However, one writer makes the point that looting was very much part of the Blitz, making it part of that self-same "Blitz spirit".

The writer is Gavin Mortimer, but he also misses a trick, as there is evidence that there were a number of riots during the Blitz. One such was so serious that it was reported directly to the War Cabinet – on 21 October 1940.

It arose in respect of the then notorious Stepney shelter, where work had been going on to make much-needed structural improvements. But when an air raid warning had sounded, the shelter had not been opened quickly. Fighting had broken out and a breakaway group had attempted to rush the ARP Control Office in Stepney.

The Police had drawn their truncheons, and a number of [men] people had been arrested, leading to strident complaints from the Daily Worker.

The incident was latterly reported by theSunday Express (pictured - click to enlarge) on 10 November 1940, after a hearing at Old Street Police Court, when the ring leaders of "riot", comprising 200 people, had been up before the magistrates. Then, it was reported that the riot had been led by a 21-year-old girl, by the name of Alice Kirson.

Given also that the Blitz was celebrated by a massive outbreak of civil disobedience as people ignored the government's prohibition on the use of Underground stations as air raid shelters, the rioters and looters of last week, alongside Mr Leighton-Morris, perhaps better embody the Blitz spirit than the examples cited – all having in common a rejection of authority.

Invariably, though, government tends to resent any challenge to its authority, even where the intent is benign and the deed heroic. If the Blitz spirit is to be invoked, therefore, its best manifestation would be the Leighton-Morris model, where two fingers were politely raised, all in the greater interest of the public good.

With as much charm and firmness, we need to re-acquire the fortitude to do the same.

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