London calling

[Cain]

They deserve a single mitten, I think, for comic timing.

So London was pretty quiet last night, then?  Not that it matters now, the rest of the country seems to have caught on.

[Cain]

Canning Circus police station in central Nottingham was firebombed by a male gang on Tuesday evening. Nottinghamshire Police said 90 people had been arrested

In Liverpool, Merseyside Police have arrested 50 people in relation to disorder in the city

Nine people have been arrested in Gloucester after police officers came under attack from youths throwing stones and bottles from 23:00 BST

In Leicester, a group of up to 100 youths attacked shops and threw items at police, with 13 arrests

In Bristol, police arrested 19 people following a second night of trouble

Thames Valley Police made 15 arrests linked to trouble overnight

Metropolitan Police have arrested 768 people and charged 105 in connection with the violence in the capital, including a 21-year-old man who was arrested on suspicion of arson with intent to endanger life following a fire which took hold of the Reeves Furniture store in Croydon on Monday night

Officers from all eight Scottish Police forces are being sent to help colleagues in the Midlands and North of England deal with rioting and looting

A 26-year-old man found shot in a car in Croydon, amid rioting in the south London town, has died in hospital

Government minister Michael Gove has praised the Met's response to the riots, saying bringing in an extra 10,000 officers helped to prevent further riots from taking place in London

Meanwhile, two 18-year-olds in Folkestone, Kent, and a 19-year-old woman in Wakefield have been arrested. A 16-year-old boy in Glasgow was charged with breach of the peace while another man, aged 18, has been arrested. All relate to allegations of inciting violence through internet social networking sites

The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) said on Tuesday that ballistic tests presented "no evidence" that a handgun found at the scene where Mark Duggan, 29, was killed in Tottenham had been fired at officers

[Cain]

One journalist wrote that he was surprised how many people in Tottenham knew of and were critical of the IPCC, but there should be nothing surprising about this. When you look at the figures for deaths in police custody (at least 333 since 1998 and not a single conviction of any police officer for any of them), then the IPCC and the courts are seen by many, quite reasonably, to be protecting the police rather than the people.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/08/context-london-riots?CMP=twt_gu

[Cain]

http://politicalscrapbook.net/2011/08/roger-helmer-shoot-rioters/

[Cain]

This is worrying

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/blog/2011/aug/09/london-riots-day-four-live-blog?CMP=twt_gu

It was only a minor skirmish, but a potentially bad sign for community relations. Police, who have flooded the streets, were quickly on the scene when about 70 men started chasing local youths.

I wouldn't mention their ethnicity, but it seemed to be relevant. The men were white - in their 30s and 40s - and shouting that they wanted to get the "blacks" and "pakis". Lots of them seemed drunk. One man being held back by police shouted: "They're rats, they mugged my Auntie the other night."

Jay Bradley, 30, a witness, told me: "What happened here? What I just saw - everyone from this area aren't gonna have any looting.
What I saw was a couple of ethnic lads, if you can call them that, black lads, and they chased them away.  A lot of it is alcohol - I don't think the kids were doing anything. They were just on bikes and in masks. But no-one around here is going to stand for any looting. What are we supposed to do. The Co-op is closed and we're running out of food."

Not least because, as Richard Seymour points out:

I don't believe that this is just a spontaneous response to looters. When the BNP membership list was leaked, it emerged that there were a number of members scattered around the lower middle class areas, and I wouldn't be surprised if they, along with local EDL supporters, were among those out tonight. The emergence of racist vigilantism is not unique to Enfield. It's also emerged that racist Millwall fans are supposedly 'protecting' Eltham tonight. Apparently, the EDL have been marching through the area. [Update: local residents and Millwall fans both assure me that this is untrue, and that it's just locals protecting themselves. Which, if true, is a relief - but one is still uneasy about vigilantes in football gear posing as defenders of the community.]

[...]

Update: Given that there are lots of unsupported rumours flying about, I think it's important to add a couple of important qualifications to this post. A lot of the rumours going about are originating from the far right themselves - part of their propaganda about being men of action, etc. And some of them could result in people getting hurt. Naturally, I have no wish to contribute to either, so I'm just being cautious. First of all, I have heard conflicting things about the far right being involved in Enfield, but as yet no proof of this has emerged. It may well be just local racists. Guardian journalist Paul Lewis is being careful to say he only witnessed a brief skirmish (though, from the footage I've seen, it was a really nasty, scary event). Second, loads of people have been tweeting me to say it's not the EDL in Eltham. (There is some footage of what appear to be EDL being kettled there, but not the 400-strong mob that the casuals were bragging about). I'm still not okay with vigilantism, but there are degrees of danger. I'm not arguing for complacency. There are some real fascist efforts at stirring. Most of it has been kettled by the cops so far, however. So, I would bear these points in mind when you're scanning social media for updates.

[Pope Pixie Pickle]

i have had fun reporting racists on facebook. 

[Cain]

http://lhote.blogspot.com/2011/08/revolution-is-name-you-give-riots-you.html

It's become an instant cliche-- if the protests in London were happening in Iran, everybody's blog would be covered in green ribbons. The question is, why the difference?

Because, dear reader, many of the self-same people who have such considerable solidarity for the Iranians don't see Persians as fully human. The condescension inherent in blogger head-patting of protesting Iranians was apparent from the jump. The source of that condescension was, in part, explained by the simple fact that most first world people find any populist expression of discontent threatening; it gives the lie to our own constant self-aggrandizing narratives of being a free people. Truly free people take to the streets. Those who find succor in playing pretend organize a committee. (And the criticism is apt of me too: I am not in the streets.) In the face of this discomfort, the actual on the ground disagreements between protesters and government are stripped away and reduced to a simplistic struggle between good and evil. Because we live without tyranny, casting the Iranian (or Syrian, etc.) conflict as a mere matter of good people vs. bad tyranny removes the unthinkable implied judgment.

This is simply true: there was more than a little violence involved in the Green Revolution, despite the desperate need among American politicos to argue the contrary. There are socialist elements within the Green Revolution. There is a comfort with religious governance that is quite at odds with American "classical liberal" sentiment. The Green Revolution is not and has never been the perfectly lily-white expression of Enlightenment values that it has been made out to be.

No, guilt ridden white first-world bloggers (of whom, generally speaking, I am a member) love protests in Syria and Iran and elsewhere because they can cast those people, members of an alien culture, race, and religion, as the perfect representations of resistance while totally stripping them of the actual thorny reality of political rage. Theocratic preferences are stripped away; violent behavior (and there was much in the Green Revolution, if you looked beyond the headlines) is ignored; the re-instantiation of sexist Islamic doctrine within the structures of protest movements are conveniently elided. This is the way of all patronizing attitudes from the overclass towards resistance: in order to preserve its romanticized view, it has to occlude the particular grievances and goals that make the protest meaningful in the first place. So the American civil rights movement becomes not a matter of black people undertaking both nonviolent and violent protest against a hideously racist system, animated at times by straightfoward ethnic nationalism, but a whitewashed, toothless prayer meeting where a rainbow coalition destroyed evil with protest songs. So India's righteous rejection of British domination is stripped of the violent religious conflict that attended its entire history.

Support for the Iranian resistance, with some exceptions, was one of those rare moments where people across ideologies came together in the blogosphere. Who could fail to stand with a people rejecting a thuggish and corrupt theocracy? I couldn't. But the realist in me insists that it was a moment of unity precisely because the protests had been stripped of all content. There was no disagreement about the movement because the movement was so taken out of context by condescension and guilt that there was nothing there to disagree about. That writers constantly sought out the elements of the resistance who expressed opinions that were palatable to liberal western audiences was as inevitable as it was distorting.

Does any of this mean that I now don't support the Iranian resistance? Of course not. It means that my support is founded ultimately on the principles of resistance themselves. It means that the beliefs and consequences of that resistance are, on balance, beyond my capacity to fairly judge. And it means that there is always a substantial risk of righteous resistance to oppressive governments becoming itself a vehicle of oppression. We have a very bad habit in this country of supporting the autonomy of oppressed peoples only when geopolitically convenient; that's the classic critique of realism, after all, and a powerful one. Yet I find something similar in the opinions of decent American liberals as they chew over the propriety of various resistance movements; in elevating or denouncing their interpretation of the values of various foreign protest movements, they confer precisely the moral authority of the West that so many of these movements reject. When I have argued about the Libyan revolution, I have tried to argue against American intervention by pointing out all that could go wrong, while not judging the actual content of the Libyan rebels themselves. I'm sure I've failed. And I'm equally sure that my criticisms here aren't lacking in incoherence, condescension, and white guilt.

(I read about that Zapatista movement and I support it. I think harder and think that they don't care about my support. It is a tension I am willing to own.)

Oh, and-- never underestimate the simple fear of angry people, particularly angry black and brown people, in the first world mind. "They're smashing windows and stealing DVD players" is about as direct of a dog whistle as I can imagine. And while Tehran seems a million miles away in the American mind, London might as well be main street. (That's where we took our honeymoon, Francine!) Violent protest in the streets of a major Anglophone city scares people who live in major Anglophone cities. (For contest, you might consider the historical narrative about black American riots in the 1960s, and how they were an unpleasant but inevitable result of a violently racist system, to attitudes towards the London riots.)

In that vein, the typical forces will insist "but Freddie! You can't possibly support this horror!" And I will say to you the same thing I will say to you regarding the Green Revolution: the idea that I am morally equipped to judge the consequences of all of that rage is exactly the paternalism that any protest movement rejects. Do I, in some distant sense, condone smashing windows and burning cars? I do not. Do I think that my moral judgment in that instance has any real valence when it comes to judging the larger motives of the riots in London? I do not. The brutal rape of Lara Logan opened a fissure in the standard, pleasing Western vision of made-for-TV Egyptian resistance. It reminded us that there is no such thing as moral coordination in combat, that there is no such thing as safe upheaval, and that the search for righteousness in violence is a game of willful blindness. That Logan's rape was an inexcusable crime seems obvious to me. What moral lessons about Egyptian revolution I could meaningfully draw from that act, I couldn't tell you.

For that reason, for the reason of the utter collapsing of my own capacity for meaningful judgment within the confines of protests that don't ask for or care for my blessing, I am sympathetic to those who think that they can perfectly judge. The only thing that bothers me is the pretense, here. The pretense that, were this exact behavior to happen in a regime that the United States is unfriendly with, there would be an equally pedantic focus on which windows get smashed and who gets robbed and whether it's fair game to throw at rock at cops-- that's what bothers me. Because it involves a holistic view of both Middle Eastern protests and first world riots that is vastly distorting of both. Because it assumes that financially secure bloggers sitting at computer screens thousands of miles away (like me) can fairly and neutrally judge the anger of distant people enraged by the status quo. Because it suggests that our discrimination is greater than our prejudice. Because it flatters us with its assurance that our opinions are formed by principle and not by signalling.

I don't know what the lesson here is, except to say that when we become enraptured by our own goodness, funneled through the conduit of expressing support for revolution in foreign countries, we should pause, and remind ourselves that this little piece of reflected glory comes with a price.

[Cain]

http://flyingrodent.blogspot.com/2011/08/theres-really-nothing-positive-at-all.html

I think a lot of commentators are missing just how bad this could turn out to be.  This could prove to be a more or less unstoppable public disorder problem causing major damage and disruption, at a time when we've got a near-enough infinite supply of excitable kids who were regarded as being practically a sub-species by much of the populace before the riots started.  Soon, we'll have a massive public demand for Something To Be Done.

This means crackdowns, and I don't know if anyone else watched Sky and BBC News most of the day, but the calls for martial law started early and got louder as the day went on.  David Cameron doesn't strike me as the Nixon type, but you'd better believe both major parties are crammed to the hoop with authoritarian dinosaurs whose dreams are filled with clunking coppers in space marine armour and weapons catalogues full of shiny guns.

Maybe I'm being alarmist here - it wouldn't be the first time - but if this continues, the way is clear for some seriously Nixonian behaviour here, and when the state takes the gloves off, it's unlikely to be the ringleaders who are on the receiving end of the bare-knuckle boxing.

We're talking about major wedges being shoved between existing political blocs, pushing those who already have some wacky beliefs out to the far edges of wingnuttery, with the resultant arguments and policies you'd expect... In the middle of an economic disaster and huge unemployment.  That would have lots of effects, none of them good, and few if any of the new and shiny ideas about smashing heads are likely to stop the damn rioting - quite the opposite, in fact.

Jesus.  I hope not, but the potential is on here for a political atmosphere that's going to make the Daily Mail in full flow look like an address on forgiveness by Rowan Williams. 

[Cain]

These London riots are fairly impressive.

Tottenham, Lewisham, Hackney, Brixton and Putney are all on fire right now.  200+ arrests.  Theresa May reduced to blubbering about "criminality".  Barricades going up, buses and police cars being set on fire.

Maybe if the police didn't go around shooting people for completely random reasons all the time, and everyone had jobs, people would be less inclined to riot?  Just a thought.

Change "had jobs" to "weren't wageslaves or considered useless" and I agree with you.

And yeah, that is pretty impressive. Funny how it's a "political demonstration" in the middle east but a "riot" further west.

Well, speaking from personal experience, almost any job is better than long-term unemployment.  And these areas of London are those with horrific levels of long-term unemployment. Between that and police violence, people are pretty fucking pissed.

Cameron seems to have cooled his rhetoric somewhat.  He was on the news just now, trying to link the "lack of responsibility" the rioters were displaying to a lack of repsonsibility elsewhere in society.  He didn't say where, and might have just as easily been talking about the welfare state as about, say, banking fucking criminals who sold this country down the river due to their irresponsibility, but it's much further than pretty much any major politician has been willing to go, so far.

[Pope Pixie Pickle]

http://blog.alexanderhiggins.com/2011/08/10/guardian-aljazeera-set-straight-corporate-media-lies-london-riots-53711/

[Cain]

http://blog.alexanderhiggins.com/2011/08/10/guardian-aljazeera-set-straight-corporate-media-lies-london-riots-53711/

If that is the Al-jazeera article that quotes Richard Seymour, then it's a very good one indeed, and doing the rounds on the blogosphere currently.

[Kai]

Also, I hate the "don't protest or resist, you'll make the government go all 1984" argument. It sounds like LOOK WHAT YOU MADE ME DO!!

[Pope Pixie Pickle]

http://blog.alexanderhiggins.com/2011/08/10/guardian-aljazeera-set-straight-corporate-media-lies-london-riots-53711/

If that is the Al-jazeera article that quotes Richard Seymour, then it's a very good one indeed, and doing the rounds on the blogosphere currently.

it is the same.

[Cain]

Also, I hate the "don't protest or resist, you'll make the government go all 1984" argument. It sounds like LOOK WHAT YOU MADE ME DO!!

Yeah.  I mean, understand that this is a likely reaction, sure.  I can see that.  But it's the ought/is distinction.  "The government is going to come down on us all like a ton of bricks, therefore we ought not to protest".  HUME REJECTS YOUR LOGIC AND SUBSTITUTES IT WITH HIS OWN!

The government is going to try and come down on everyone like a ton of bricks.  But, they cannot afford it (our government has been surprisingly consistent in their cuts, with the military, police and security all taking hits along with everyone else).  That kinda puts them in a bind.  Shit, the government negotiated with the banks when they tried to blow up the world, because they didn't have a choice.  So long as the violence continues, the government doesn't have a choice except to politicize the riots and so find a political, rather than force-based solution.

[P3nT4gR4m]

Canning Circus police station in central Nottingham was firebombed by a male gang on Tuesday evening. Nottinghamshire Police said 90 people had been arrested

In Liverpool, Merseyside Police have arrested 50 people in relation to disorder in the city

Nine people have been arrested in Gloucester after police officers came under attack from youths throwing stones and bottles from 23:00 BST

In Leicester, a group of up to 100 youths attacked shops and threw items at police, with 13 arrests

In Bristol, police arrested 19 people following a second night of trouble

Thames Valley Police made 15 arrests linked to trouble overnight

Metropolitan Police have arrested 768 people and charged 105 in connection with the violence in the capital, including a 21-year-old man who was arrested on suspicion of arson with intent to endanger life following a fire which took hold of the Reeves Furniture store in Croydon on Monday night

Officers from all eight Scottish Police forces are being sent to help colleagues in the Midlands and North of England deal with rioting and looting

A 26-year-old man found shot in a car in Croydon, amid rioting in the south London town, has died in hospital

Government minister Michael Gove has praised the Met's response to the riots, saying bringing in an extra 10,000 officers helped to prevent further riots from taking place in London

Meanwhile, two 18-year-olds in Folkestone, Kent, and a 19-year-old woman in Wakefield have been arrested. A 16-year-old boy in Glasgow was charged with breach of the peace while another man, aged 18, has been arrested. All relate to allegations of inciting violence through internet social networking sites

The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) said on Tuesday that ballistic tests presented "no evidence" that a handgun found at the scene where Mark Duggan, 29, was killed in Tottenham had been fired at officers

Anyone have a number of cats who we can look forward to being away?