Blame Consumer Capitalism Too

This Post Originally Appeared Here, at Harry's Place, and Was Written by Gene


I was taking a break from blogging last week, and so you were spared my thoughts about the rioting, arson and looting in parts of London and other UK cities (I hate alarmist headlines of the “London Is Burning” variety) as it was happening.

However if I had posted something, it probably would have been along the lines of what Charlie Brooker wrote in The Guardian:

“If preventing further looting is our aim, then as well as addressing the gulf between the haves and the have-nots, I’d take a long hard look at MTV Cribs and similar TV shows that routinely confuse human achievement with the mindless acquisition of gaudy bling bullshit.

The End of David Starkey, I hope

This Post is Brought to you by Talal Rajab, of The Urbanite

As a History graduate, I used to respect David Starkey.  Although Tudor history was not always my favourite subject I loved his style of writing and his Channel 4 programme on the monarchy excited the geek inside me. 

As I heard more of his political and moral views, however, I began to like him less and less.  It started with his appearances on Question Time and the lazy, stereotypical Daily Mail-esque attacks on New Labour.

It then got worse when he made an appearance on Jamie Oliver’s ‘Dream School’ and bullied a kid about his weight in order to get kudos from the other schoolchildren.  He ultimately failed to understand the troubled kids on the programme and appeared out of touch and erratic. 

So maybe I should not have been surprised by his comments on Newsnight last night.  Maybe I should have expected it.  For those that missed it, here is a selection:

David Starkey – “I have just been re-reading Enoch Powell, The Rivers of Blood Speech, his prophesy was absolutely right in one sense. The Tiber did not foam with blood but flames lambent, they wrapped around Tottenham and wrapped around Clapham.  But it wasn’t inter-communal violence.  This is where he was completely wrong. What’s happened is that a substantial section of chavs…have become black.  The whites have become black.  A particular sort of violent, nihilistic gangster culture has become the fashion.  And black and white, boy and girl, operate in this language together.  This language, which is wholly false, which is this Jamaican patois that has been intruded in England. And this is why so many of us have this sense of literally, a foreign country”.

Miliband’s Moment

This post is brought to you by Frank Lefty, of The Urbanite

“This is not about poverty, this is about culture”

And with those words, Dave ‘hug a hoodie’ Cameron set the tone for the debate in the House of Commons on Thursday on what went from being called the ‘London Riots’ to the ‘UK Unrest’ in the media.  To be fair to Dave he did manage to perfectly capture the public mood when he eventually returned from holiday in sunny Italy, even if it seemed too late for many of his detractors on both the left and the right.  I admit, his speech on Tuesday in which he promised to track down and find every rioter sounded George Bush-esque.  But by that time things looked so severe, with the country on the brink of what seemed like internal civil war, that part of my left wing self prayed for a George Bush type Prime Minister, complete with cowboy hat and pistols drawn, to fly down from the skies and take out the rioters one by one. 

All in all, however, it appears that Dave did well.  He managed to sound both tough and understanding at the same time, although his refusal to admit that police cuts are having an effect on the morale and capability of the police is akin to Arsene Wenger claiming that Arsenal do not need to spend money.  They do. And the police need extra resources to ensure that something like this does not happen again. 

But what about my main man Ed Miliband?  Well after coming out with the predictable soundbites that the riots were ‘shocking’ and ‘unacceptable’ (no shit!) Miliband seemed to find his feet during the week and unlike Cameron actually attempted to find a cause for the riots. As Miliband correctly stated, to seek to explain the riots is not to seek to excuse them.  And unlike his Labour counterparts Harriet Harman and Ken Livingstone, he wisely avoided blaming cuts to EMA or youth clubs for the disturbances and correctly sought to identify other underlying long-term issues such as social inequality and a lack of ethics in our society.  He also correctly identified that this lack of ethics is not just rampant amongst the ‘underclass’ section of society that most people blamed for the riots, but also amongst the upper echolons of society; from irresponsible bankers to expense fiddling politicians.

The London That I Know

When going to bed last night, those of us who stayed up at Team Urbanite were pissed off.

Our local Sony centre was on fire in Enfield, a man was fatally shot in Croydon and the rioting had now spread beyond the city of London to Birmingham and Liverpool.  It seemed like there was no control and that the country we love had well and truly 'gone to the dogs'.

So it was with great pleasure that we saw these images first thing in the morning and that the hashtag #riotcleanup was trending on twitter.

Spurred on by twitter and Facebook, Londoners took the streets today and helped clear the mess that was  heaped on us by mindless idiots.  This is the London that we know.  This is the London that we love.

We at The Urbanite hope that this is just the start.  We need to reclaim the streets from these mindless thugs. Not by violence.  But by showing them that they can loot and riot all they want but we will not be frightened off from cleaning up our streets and going about our daily business.

It's time we got together and showed the country, and the world, what London is really about.

Warzone

Pictures from the streets....

Unfortunately, this is London. Not a Middle Eastern warzone. We at The Urbanite are disgusted

What is Happening to Our City

So Peckham is on fire.  There have been clashes in Hackney.  Here in North London, there is an eerie silence as all the shops have closed early and people are waiting to see if things kick off again.

All we can do is wait to see when this will end. I am afraid that it will not be any time soon.

The Riots That Will Define My Generation

This Post is brought to you by Talal Rajab, of The Urbanite

Having been bought up and raised in North London, right bang in between Tottenham and Enfield, this weekend’s events have left a sour taste in my throat.  Seeing the streets that you call home in disarray, the shops that you visit burnt down and the community that you love given a bad name hurts.  Shop keepers have lost businesses, people have been made homeless and the decades of community work that has gone in around this area has been rendered meaningless within the space of 48 hours by the actions of idiotic thugs. 

What hurts even more, however, is the misinformation and ill-advised comments that I have witnessed on various media platforms and social networking sites over the weekend regarding the trouble in North London. 

From the shotgun reaction from certain sections of the media, who quickly labelled Mark Duggan a ‘gangsta’ who shot at police without waiting for verification of the facts, to the completely idiotic muppets on twitter and Facebook who called for fellow North London residents to ‘rise up against the f***ing feds’, what we have witnessed here is a merry-go round of claims and counter-claims that has finally escalated into the apocalyptic headlines that we see today.  Some of these claims clearly need to be addressed.