Coffee House poll: What is the best method for quelling the riot?
Parliament is to be recalled on Thursday to debate the riots and the correct response to them. In the meantime, we thought we’d let CoffeeHousers have their own say:
Crime
Tuesday
Cameron announces that Parliament will be recalled
So far as its tone went, David Cameron’s statement just now was firm and unyielding. He did express his sympathy for the victims of the riots; the emergency services, the shopkeepers, the fearful. But the major emphasis was on bringing the culprits to book. His “clear message” for the perpetrators of this destruction was that “you will feel the full force of the law”. He preceded that by describing their actions as “criminality, pure and simple — and it has to be confronted and defeated”. There were no excuses nor prevarications, and rightly so. As for the content, it seems that the government is eager to keep this a police
Last night in Peckham
This was what Peckham High Street looked like at about 6.45 last night. I had heard that a bus was petrol-bombed although I neither saw nor heard evidence of that. There was no confrontation between police and the public and I didn’t see any arrests. Mostly it was just a case of people standing around wondering what, if anything, to do next.
Monday
Cameron to return to London as the riots spread
There we have it: David Cameron is to return to London tonight, and chair a meeting of Cobra in the morning. There was an inevitability to the decision even earlier today, with the news that both Theresa May and Boris Johnson had curtailed their own holidays. But the fact that the riots have spread — starting in Hackney this evening, and erupting even in Birmingham — served to underline the point. It is the right decision, in any case. Cameron’s ability to control the situation may be limited, but his continued absence might only have inflamed things further. There are a lot of people scrabbling around for a grievance to
Sunday
Voters back the death penalty in polls — but will they petition for it?
Really, I expected a tidal rush of new opinion polls on the death penalty after Guido launched his campaign for its restoration last week — but, strangely, that hasn’t happened yet. There is one poll today, though, by Survation for the Mail on Sunday. It suggests that 53 per cent of people support the death penalty being reintroduced for “certain crimes”, against 34 per cent who don’t. So far as the supplementary findings go, the death penalty is more popular among older people and among Tory and UKIP voters. Almost half of all respondents believe that serious crimes would decline were the penalty reintroduced. And the three crimes deemed most
Twitter had the riot covered
The revolution may not be televised, but the riot was tweeted pretty well last night. I was up at 3am (don’t ask), and BBC News hadn’t even interrupted their normal programming. But turning to Twitter, it was all there. Specifically, via two reporters: Paul Lewis from the Guardian and Ravi Somaiya from the New York Times. They behaved like instinctive reporters: picked up (on the news or, more likely, on Twitter) that a riot was underway, then went out and reported it. And they did so with pictures and observations that were well-judged and informative, never hysterical or futile. The presence of a TV camera, with the bright lights, have
Tottenham smoulders
London has become used to protest recently, but there was still something terrible and unexpected in the images emerging from Tottenham last night. Here we had firebombs, missiles, riot police, burning vehicles, smashed-in shops, looting and other criminality — and it has left eight policemen injured, as well as others in hospital. The cause of the rioting was, apparently, the fatal shooting of Mark Duggan by police on Thursday. The effect was scenes reminiscent of Brixton or Broadwater Farm in the 1980s. There will be fresh attention paid to Tottenham — one of the poorest areas of one of London’s poorest boroughs — by politicians now, and rightly so. But
Friday
From the archives: “Capital punishment is absolutely indefensible”
Thanks to Guido and his co-conspirators, capital punishment is back on the political agenda. Here’s what The Spectator, under the editorship of Ian Gilmour, wrote about the hanging of Ruth Ellis — the last woman to be hanged in the UK — some 14 years before the abolition of the death penalty in Britain: The execution of Ruth Ellis, The Spectator, 15 July 1955 It is no longer a matter for surprise that Englishmen deplore bull-fighting but delight in hanging. Hanging has become the national sport. While a juicy murder trial is on, or in the period before a murderer is executed, provided that he or she has caught the
Monday
Bitter Turkish delights
Turkish accession to the EU is apparently no more than a dream of those who desire it at present, but it remains a point of contention across Europe. The British government, for instance, are in favour of enlargement, believing Turkey’s economy to be essential to Europe’s continued economic strength. Accession would also hamper the goal of political integration in the EU, which is expedient to Britain. Not everyone in Britain shares the government’s unqualified enthusiasm for Turkey. The Home Affairs Committee has issued a report this morning, criticising aspects of the government’s policy and insisting on careful management of accession. Specifically, the committee argues that the errors made when EU
Saturday
Some context for the death penalty debate
Something quite remarkable has happened over the past couple of the days. It started with the launch of the government’s new e-petition site, which promises that any petition which secures 100,000 signatures will be “eligible for debate in the House of Commons”. And it continued with Guido Fawkes submitting a petition to reinstate the death penalty for “the murder of children and police officers when killed in the line of duty.” Now national newspapers and MPs alike are adding their voice to Guido’s campaign. And an issue that has huge public resonance, but which is rarely discussed in Westminster, is suddenly getting an airing. Even if — like me —
Friday
U-Turns in the Government’s DNA
But first, another grubby little piece of u-turning from this government. You might think that a commitment to remove from the DNA database the details of more than a million innocent people was both simple and easily honoured. Such a suspicion fails to appreciate the so-called complexity of the matter and, one must presume, the deviousness of civil servants. Consequently the promise is not being honoured. Or not to the letter anyway: However, Home Office minister James Brokenshire admitted to MPs on a committee which is considering the legislation that police forces will retain innocent profiles. Mr Brokenshire said he had won agreement from the information watchdog that the DNA
Thursday
The phone hacking scandal rumbles on
“The News of the World proved is is a force for good.” So said Sara Payne, the mother of the murdered schoolgirl Sarah Payne, in a column for the final edition of the paper. Its writers and editors had supported her unerringly, she wrote, in her campaign for tighter laws against child molesters. “I shall miss you all and to you I say thank you and good luck.” All of which makes the latest phone hacking allegations particularly disquietig. According to the Guardian, Glen Mulcaire, the private investigator hired by the News of the World, had Sara Payne’s phone number in his extensive collection. “The evidence that police have found
Saturday
Recent crime fiction | 23 July 2011
John Lawton’s Inspector Troy series constantly surprises. John Lawton’s Inspector Troy series constantly surprises. A Lily of the Field (Grove Press, £16.99), the seventh novel, has a plot stretching from Austria in 1934 to Wormwood Scrubs in 1949, via Los Alamos and Paris. Fiction rubs shoulders with fact. There are big themes — including the Holocaust, the atomic bomb and Cold War espionage — but they are linked to individual lives, beautifully and economically described. Meret is a cellist whom we meet as a schoolgirl in prewar Vienna, and her career provides the thread that binds together the various strands of the novel. Like all the characters, she is caught
Thursday
Coalition’s crime worries ease, but concerns remain
The British Crime Survey is published today and the Home Office had prepared for the worst. For months now, figures close to Theresa May have been expressing their fear that the combination of Ken Clarke’s liberal prisons policy and economic hardship would cause a rise in crime for which the Home Office, graveyard for so many political careers, would be blamed. Today’s figures will have eased their disquiet somewhat, insulating them from Labour’s critique that police cuts are endangering society. The headline is that crime in England and Wales has remained stable over the last year, except for a 14 per cent spike in domestic burglaries according to the British
Monday
A victory for common sense
For years, teachers have been increasingly reluctant to restrain unruly pupils — for fear of being slapped with a lawsuit. But now, it seems, the government is trying to ease those concerns. Its guidance today may not change any laws, but it does encourage schools to change their approach. Among the directions is that “schools should not have a ‘no touch’ policy”: teachers can use reasonable force to restrain pupils, remove disruptive children from the classroom or prevent them from leaving the classroom when they shouldn’t. However, the guidance does stress that there are limits on the use of force, making it clear that “it is always unlawful to use
Monday
A New Tabloid Low
Even by the debased standards of the tabloid press this Guardian account of how the News of the World intercepted and deleted messages left on Milly Dowler’s mobile phone days after the 13 year-old’s disappearance in 2002 must represent a new low. That’s assuming the Guardian story is accurate, of course, but there seems little reason, at present, to doubt it. It may be one thing to spy on movie stars and pop sensations; quite another, most people will think, to use the same “techniques” in the matter of a missing – and subsequently murdered – teenage girl. As Nick Davies and Amelia Hill report: [W]ith the help of its
Saturday
No paramilitary link to last night’s riots in East Belfast
The PSNI is clear that last night’s riots on Castlereagh Street, East Belfast, were not linked to sectarian paramilitary activity. Rather, this was a ‘spontaneous demonstration’ against the police. As I wrote last week, gangs on both sides of the Ulster divide have been targeting the police in recent months; and they rely on exploiting current economic hardship and ancient sectarian divisions to further their criminal ends. The continued violence is a test of Stormont’s ability to govern without the close supervision from Westminster. It’ll be interesting to see how the authorities, and Peter Robinson and Martin McGuiness in particular, respond in the coming weeks, recognising that this violence does
IDS’ great expectations
There is no rest for IDS. Yesterday he was in Madrid talking about youth unemployment and immigration and today he turns his attention to child poverty. Of all life’s accidents, the accident of birth is the most decisive. It is said that a child’s prospects are determined by the age of five, and numerous other statistics and factoids lead to a similar conclusion. IDS rehearses some in a piece in today’s Guardian. IDS and Labour MP Graham Allen have conducted a report into these matters, and have concluded that early intervention in a child from a deprived or broken family is vital if the poverty gap is to be closed,
Sunday
Clarke’s bill still not tough enough for the Right
David Cameron made a great show on Tuesday of pledging to be tough on crime. He bowdlerised the most contentious and liberal elements of Ken Clarke’s proposals and vowed that “the right thing to do is to reform prison and make it work better, not cut sentences.” He insisted that his change of heart was a sign of strength, but even the least cynical observer could detect a sop to the mutinous Tory right. Well, it seems that the withdrawal has not gone far enough. The Sunday Times reports (£) that several backbenchers object to the redrafted Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill, on grounds that manifesto pledges
Friday
Parliament and Mob Rule
You’d need a closed heart not to feel great sympathy for the family of poor Milly Dowler. Her killer Levi Bellfield is a vile, appalling creature and one can understand why the Dowler family would wish him executed. Many will share their sentiments. Among them is Guido who writes: The political class complains that the public is disengaged, could that be in part because there are a number of issues where the political class refuses to carry out the wishes of the people. All polls since 1965 when hanging was abolished show that there is majority support for capital punishment, yet there is no majority for it in parliament. It