The riots, one month on

In2minds

"self-appointed community leaders and youth experts"

These people are part of the problem and not the solution.

Paul Danon

"Gathering together [sic]" and "fighting for the cause" may be PC language but it's part of what's wrong. Indignation and politicking aren't how you get on in life and build a peaceful neighbourhood.

Disco in Frisco

Rap and Hip Hop started out as party music, it was creative offshoot of disco and funk. Sadly in the late 80s it was hijacked by angry young men who were haters. They lived for violence and designer labels. This culture has stagnated for the past 25 years and has become endemic with saddos who haven't the gumption to get a life, be creative and contribute to their community. Watch SKY 370 and you'll see the Grime "artists" in full flow.

I don't know how you change this music culture. It probably has to be led by the next up and coming generation of music makers who disown this negative attitude.

It was the Grime Riot.

Hug a hoodlum?

Austin Barry

Everybody knows what happened, but an inquiry, or more anguished, liberal elite soul-searching, would be a waste of time - both being predicated on the proposition, stated or unstated, that ‘race had nothing to with it”.

The Ministry of Truth which is our Establishment, dare not swim with the Sharkeys and will keep turning a Nelsonian blind eye until Bidonville, raw and vicious, arrives on its doorstep with a self-funding, community-outreach programme of its own.

Romantically Hard Hearted Perry

Instead of meting and out short sharp and very painful shocks, - in fact it would have been better if they had been administered there and then, - we have now reached the stage of hand-wringing agonising and interminable discussions by the bien pensant liberal-lefties, and their camp-follower industries.

This, together with the previous thread about "our wonderful police force" and that on the subject of (in essence) housing immigrants, are some of the more disappointing aspects of this wretched society about which the H2B stands and pontificates.

bojimbo

' They came , they saw , they nicked ' . simples .

Dennis Churchill

As far as our establishment is concerned the only answers, that are acceptable, have to be coached in politically correct sociobabble that confirms that the cultural Marxist “Givens” they have imposed on our criminal justice and immigration systems just needs to be more rigorously applied.
Multicultural societies are unstable and if you keep telling a racial minorities that Institutional Racism is the cause of all their problems they will believe you.
Will we be given details of the ethnic origin of the arrested rioters and looters?

Simon Mason

Freddy, I've been listening to hip hop since I wore out my copy 12" of Grandmaster Flash's "The Message" in 1982, including lots of American gangsta rap and LDN grime and I have never felt the need to smash anything up or loot any shops.

Hip Hop lyrics & videos are bravado in the same way as a Fast and the Furious movie is or an Assassin's Creed video game. They are all games and that fact is understood by 99% of the consumers.

Can I suggest that you listen to Mercury prize contender Ghostpoet's album 'Peanut Butter Blues and Melancholy Jam'

http://open.spotify.com/album/2Uq7or40SdTcSrUDil3lCy

And read my post on Night and Day on The Streets masterpiece "Original Pirate Material" http://bit.ly/gaRBUN

I should blog on this.

Sir Everard Digby

Why is anyone surprised? The political classes will not 'solve' the problem as they created it. Any attempt to provide a fix would expose that to the world. Posturing and waffling work much better. Nothing happens and we become either bored or enraged by the process. Then something else happens and we all forget about the original problem.

They then throw money at it,pat themselves on the back and solve nothing.

Tim Williamson

One inevitable consequence of multiculturalism is a weakening of the host culture. For any society to cohere or, in John Major's terms, "be at ease with itself", its members need some sense of belonging to it and sharing its values. In other words, its members need to have some degree of commonalty, of 'sameness' with the other members.

To begin with, you need the shared understanding of the rule of law, of what is and what is not tolerated. You need at least a general sense of the structure of the society, the way laws are made and a very real sense of personal accountability. Underpinning the whole is the culture of the society and that requires some solid understanding of its history. If any of those are lacking in the native-born citizens, we have to lay the blame at the door of parents and the education provided.

With multiculturalism, the ties that used to bind us together are systematically weakened. We are regularly obliged by law and the creeping cultural and social cancer of "political correctness" to accept parity with -- or defer to -- alien or introduced cultures and practices, rather than insist that acceptance here necessarily entails all that integration implies. Integration requires recognition of and acceptance of the the new country's mores and culture. And while we are at it, learning English properly would be more than a good start.

The result of this craven attitude and the repeated failure of successive governments to defend aspects of national culture and heritage has been a society that is fragmenting into smaller groups who have allegiances only to themselves and their "own people" -- defined only by their race, religion, local 'honour code', gangs etc. The riots showed us itinerant groups of youths with no respect for other people, other people's property, the representatives of law and order and no sense of moral transgression. What can you expect when they have respect only for those groups with whom they choose to identify and reject censure from others they deemed irrelevant?

Equally inevitably, predictably, we have a literate and educated army of apologists who find that it is the host culture itself that is to blame, by not ceding further ground and showing compassion for the self-defined victims. Oh, and providing them with further resources, so reducing their need for further integration while, at the same time lambasting those who seek to impose rigid discipline and harsh consequences for transgressions. It's a recipe for disaster that has been a long time in preparation. It's nearly ready, simmering nicely. Our future, what there is of it, should be interesting.

Frank P

Austin Barry

Exactly. Couldn't have put it better meself (and I just tried) :-)

strapworld

Tim Williamson. Well written. I totally agree. But, sadly, the editor the Spectator will never have the guts to write such an article.

It is time for all 'racial aware groups/commissions. Community leaders (unelected) etc to be banned.

Kingstonian

I agree with strapworld, what Tim Williamson wrote was spot on.

But I don't agree with banning the self-appointed so-called community leaders, etc. - they would just love that, more grist to the grievance mill Simply ignore them.

Dennis Churchill

Kingstonian
September 6th, 2011 5:36pm
It is not the self appointed ones that concern me, it is the ones appointed by the state, including local authorities and public sector organisations and paid by us, the tax payers, I object to.
The Race Relations Act gives them a duty to promote good race relations and this in turn gives them the excuse to employ Race awareness type officers.
Paying taxes to promote political views you disagree with is a strange form of liberty.

Augustus

Tim Williamson - Good post! Neither the fanatical libertarian nor the obsessive socialist model works.

Dimoto

Typical coffee-house really.

The self-appointed "community leaders/activists", who have been trying hard to hijack the riots for their usual self-aggrandising racial resentment agenda, are castigated on here .... then the self same posters embark on their usual dreary, neo-racist ranting, giving succour and aid to the manipulators whom they have just "condemned".

I guess they need each other and feed off each other !

Which part of : "it was criminality, pure ande simple, with petty crims from all ethnic groups taking part", don't you understand ?

Inconvenient that there were few south-Asians and Muslims in the riots, wasn't it ?

Bah !!

Sean

"Tim Williamson. Well written. I totally agree. But, sadly, the editor the Spectator will never have the guts to write such an article."

Seconded

Austin Barry

Tim Williamson sums up the whole, seething mess brilliantly.

F.Cunctator

I wish that the people of this country would realize that it is unthinking social mobility and social engineering policies and agendas, allied to a weird idea about equality that is the cause of most of our current problems, both sociological and economic. The whole enterprise merely means a continuous flux; the wheel has to be reinvented on a daily basis for each person elevated to a position for which he is unprepared. This is much liked by those would espouse change for the sake of change and call it progress, no matter what its outcome as long, as its their outcome. The socialist, communitarian paradigm of society has held sway since 1945, perhaps almost since 1920, in this realm and much of the world and is strangling it to death. A change is almost impossible, as there is no vocabulary available or permitted under the paradigm able to wrest the world from its grip. The whole process is actively encouraged by the various diasporas of Mittel-Europeans, those evangelists of the Frankfurt School, who are using its methods to destroy the old European culture and replace it by what is, for want of a better term, a New World Order. The cleverest act of the proponents of this philosophy is to have duped globalized corporatism and international capitalism to get into bed with them, prior to a takeover in the name of some over-arching World Government based on totalitarian tenets. The EU is the thin end of the wedge in this process and it is likely that the model will extend its sway ever wider unless we radically alter the way we think.
I do not subscribe to conspiracy theories. This is not the work of a few conspirators; it is a paradigm of political thinking, almost a Zeitgeist, which pervades all society. It has been brought about by a general absorption into the educational curricula and general thinking of the West as a certain way of viewing the world. I neither criticize it, nor praise it, I merely observe it. I attempt, with scant success, to see its possible outcomes. However, there will be those who see this politico-philosophy as a way to achieve their desired outcomes for the future of humankind; this makes them a political movement not a band of conspirators.
The great difficulty is that we are all so embedded in this culture that even those who despise it can only discuss it in its own terms. It is the same problem as trying to discuss repairing a nuclear reactor having a lexicon of terms only suitable for describing oranges. Until someone emerges, able forge a new vocabulary and way of thinking about politics and the philosophy of life, humankind will be degraded and constrained; the human spirit crushed by a belief in systems rather than people. A semblance of Orwell’s dystopia will have been established for those who have endured the arduous path that led to this end.

Maddy1

@In2minds
September 6th, 2011 12:40pm

Well you are right! The BBC insisted in bringing on these black social workers, perhaps just to annoy us, who could do a good impression of creole patois or kitchen kuffar, reinvented as Camden Social Worker, social worker speak. I got the distinct impression even the "guides", themselves would feel more comfortable searching for mud crabs in some Carribean Mangrove, reading Walcotts, "White Egrets", than working in the present day London. I bet this is what some of them do in the hols. to relax, anyway. Still we are all limited on what we can say these days outside the usual rhetoric!

Frank P

Tim Williamson

Excellent analysis.

Frank P

Tim Williamson

http://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/members/philosophy_panel/tim_williamson

Are you he?