London and UK riots (started in Tottenham 10:30PM, 6th Aug)

OPENROAD

evercloserunion wrote: »

I'm asking a bit late, but... I'm planning to fly into London tomorrow, just for a night. We'd be hanging around the centre really, doing some touristy things and staying near Hyde Park. For those of you who are more familiar with the situation, can you advise if this is a good idea? How affected is the centre by the rioting?

You should be ok.

Most of trouble is in suburbs, just be streetwise and alert to your surroundings particularly on the tube.


Where are you staying?

Pompey Magnus

SnowY32 wrote: »

i can without a shadow of a doubt see undercover cops looting with people in the footage from birmingham???? headsets and microphones on their faces! WTF

Not very undercover if they are that obviously identifiable. Probably the worst undercover agents since this guy

YBTurbo

OPENROAD wrote: »

You should be ok.

Most of trouble is in suburbs, just be streetwise and alert to your surroundings particularly on the tube.

TBH I'd avoid it if possible, but if you have to be street smart.

Keep the head down and walk fast.

BooYa

mickydoomsux wrote: »

No worries :pac:

It's a busy thread, easy to lose track. I appreciate the apology.

You must also take some sort of pleasure in the idea of him re-reading the thread

ascanbe

BooYa wrote: »

You must also take some sort of pleasure in the idea of him re-reading the thread

Didn't have to re-read the thread; merely had to access and read his posts.
You'll learn, newb.

YBTurbo

Right I'm off




Night Guys, possibly same time tomorrow night.

ascanbe

YBTurbo wrote: »

Right I'm off




Night Guys, possibly same time tomorrow night.

Let's hope so..eh..i mean not.
Seriously, though, hope that's the end of this sh*t.

SnowY32

YBTurbo wrote: »

Right I'm off




Night Guys, possibly same time tomorrow night.

Yeah im the same, more then likely tomorrow night again!

ballsymchugh

i'd say the notting hill carnival in a few weeks will be a right barrel of laughs.
the locals usually board all the shops up and feck off for the weekend on a quiet year anyway.

ascanbe

Dude on Sky News is trespassing

evercloserunion

OPENROAD wrote: »

You should be ok.

Most of trouble is in suburbs, just be streetwise and alert to your surroundings particularly on the tube.


Where are you staying?

As I say I'm staying by Hyde Park, near the Bayswater Tube stop. To be honest at this point I think I'll give it a miss. I've seen the map of verified incidents and Bayswater seems to be right in the middle. The flights weren't too expensive, and I think that even if we would be relatively safe a lot of London will be closed tomorrow.

Jayob10

evercloserunion wrote: »

As I say I'm staying by Hyde Park, near the Bayswater Tube stop. To be honest at this point I think I'll give it a miss. I've seen the map of verified incidents and Bayswater seems to be right in the middle. The flights weren't too expensive, and I think that even if we would be relatively safe a lot of London will be closed tomorrow.

is London closed tomorrow? have they taken the roads in?

Ah for feck sake

evercloserunion

Jayob10 wrote: »

is London closed tomorrow? have they taken the roads in?

Ah for feck sake

Well you don't want rioters to run off with your roads do you?

More seriously, what I meant was that a lot of public transport and many shops, pubs etc will probably be closed tomorrow.

norris_minor

Come to think of it chavs are so in all walks of life by now, they are even royalty as of last week so who's to say this wasn't engineered from the top down?! By the f*cking chavs in power!!! awful lenient on their little frankensteins... very suspect

"Our kids 'r well 'ard, just look don't f*ck with us..Typical; middle easterns making life difficult for you defending their patch.. Go on my little potential soldier boy!!"

heh; I conspire to jest

ballsymchugh

evercloserunion wrote: »

Well you don't want rioters to run off with your roads do you?

More seriously, what I meant was that a lot of public transport and many shops, pubs etc will probably be closed tomorrow.

what airport are you flying to? you don't have to go to central london either. if you're going to gatwick, could head down to brighton for the evening.

Ouijaboard

evercloserunion wrote: »

As I say I'm staying by Hyde Park, near the Bayswater Tube stop. To be honest at this point I think I'll give it a miss. I've seen the map of verified incidents and Bayswater seems to be right in the middle. The flights weren't too expensive, and I think that even if we would be relatively safe a lot of London will be closed tomorrow.

You're probably better off not going. Having lived over in London when the IRA were bombing the place and the obstructions that those incidents caused even if they were restricted to a single location each time, I can just imagine the west end tomorrow, it will be working, but with enormous police presence and cordons all over. The main idea now is to stop the centre of the city being overrun. This event is unprecedented in its widespread scale, literally full social breakdown in one of the largest cities in the world. Go over when it calms down....which could take a week or so yet. tbh I've never seen anything like it! I could imagine if it happened in Berlin or New York, there would be 30 or 40 yoofs shot by now, regardless of age!

ColeTrain

evercloserunion wrote: »

As I say I'm staying by Hyde Park, near the Bayswater Tube stop. To be honest at this point I think I'll give it a miss. I've seen the map of verified incidents and Bayswater seems to be right in the middle. The flights weren't too expensive, and I think that even if we would be relatively safe a lot of London will be closed tomorrow.

I'd still go, you can always say you were in the middle of it and you might be able to get a TV for yourself.

OPENROAD

evercloserunion wrote: »

Well you don't want rioters to run off with your roads do you?

More seriously, what I meant was that a lot of public transport and many shops, pubs etc will probably be closed tomorrow.

Will be business as usual. London is a huge city, the likes of Harrods, Selfridges, Covent Garden etc... will be open as usual.

Ouijaboard

As my mate say, this is the chavolution! ...I'll get my coat!

spitfireIRL

I'm meant be going over Thursday evening for a week not looking like such a good idea...

who the fug

spitfireIRL wrote: »

I'm meant be going over Thursday evening for a week not looking like such a good idea...

Don't worry our chavs don't have much stanmina, come over and get yourself a deal on a 42 " plasma


all together so now


so you tell me that you want a chavolution

well well

steve9859

From the telegraph. A good way to sum up the night. A little apologist at times, but makes you worry for the future


A looted store in Tottenham: the community lies in ruins
Photo: JOEL GOODMAN/LNP
By Mary Riddell
Last Updated: 8:48PM BST 08/08/2011
London's rioters are the products of a crumbling nation, and an indifferent political class that has turned its back on them.

No one seemed surprised. Not the hooded teenagers fleeing home at dawn. Not Ken and Tony, who used to live in Tottenham and had returned to stand vigil over the missiles and torched cars littering an urban war zone. Tony claimed to have seen the whole thing coming. “This was always going to happen,” he said.

The police shot a black guy in suspicious circumstances. Feral kids with no jobs ran amok. To Tony’s mind, this was a riot waiting for an excuse. In the hangover of the violence that spread through London, the uprisings seemed both inevitable and unthinkable. Over a few days in which attacks became a contagion the capital city of an advanced nation has reverted to a Hobbesian dystopia of chaos and brutality.

“In the evening there is fear, and in the morning they are gone. This is the fate of those who take our goods, and the reward of those who violently take our property.” Isaiah 17:14. No such Old Testament fate awaited the pillagers of N18, strolling away from 21st-century megastores with a looted haul of iPod accessories and designer trainers.

This is the most arcane of uprisings and the most modern. Its participants, marshalled by Twitter, are protagonists in a sinister flipside to the Arab Spring. The Tottenham summer, featuring children as young as seven, is an assault not on a regime of tyranny but on the established order of a benign democracy. One question now hangs over London’s battle-torn high streets. How could this ever happen?

Among several obvious answers, one is a failure of policing. The evidence so far points to more ignominy for the rudderless Met, as doubts emerge over whether Mark Duggan, whose death inspired the initial riots, fired at police. The stonewalling of Mr Duggan’s family precipitated the crisis, and the absence of officers to intervene in an orgy of looting led to a breakdown of order suggestive of the lawless badlands of a failing state.

The second alleged culprit is ethnicity. But, as David Lammy, Tottenham’s MP, has said, these are no race riots. The Eighties uprisings at Broadwater Farm, as in Toxteth and Brixton, were products, in part, of a poisonous racism absent in today’s Tottenham, where the Chinese grocery, the Turkish store and the African hairdresser’s sit side by side.

So blame unemployment and the cuts. It is true that Tottenham is among London’s poorest boroughs, with 10,000 people claiming jobseeker’s allowance and 54 applicants chasing every registered job vacancy. In other affected boroughs, such as Hackney, youth clubs are closing. Unwise as such pruning may be, it would be facile to suggest that homes and businesses have been laid waste for want of ping-pong tournaments and skateboard parks.

The real causes are more insidious. It is no coincidence that the worst violence London has seen in many decades takes place against the backdrop of a global economy poised for freefall. The causes of recession set out by J K Galbraith in his book, The Great Crash 1929, were as follows: bad income distribution, a business sector engaged in “corporate larceny”, a weak banking structure and an import/export imbalance.

All those factors are again in play. In the bubble of the 1920s, the top 5 per cent of earners creamed off one-third of personal income. Today, Britain is less equal, in wages, wealth and life chances, than at any time since then. Last year alone, the combined fortunes of the 1,000 richest people in Britain rose by 30 per cent to £333.5 billion.

Europe’s leaders, our own Prime Minister and Chancellor included, were parked on sun-loungers as London burned. Although the epicentre of the immediate economic crisis is the eurozone, successive British governments have colluded in incubating the poverty, the inequality and the inhumanity now exacerbated by financial turmoil.

Britain’s lack of growth is not an economic debating point or a stick with which to beat George Osborne, any more than our deskilled, demotivated, under-educated non-workforce is simply a blot on the national balance sheet. Watch the juvenile wrecking crews on the city streets and weep for all our futures. The “lost generation” is mustering for war.

This is not a cri de coeur for the failed and failing. Nor is it a lament for the impoverished. Mob violence, despicable and inexcusable, must always be condemned. But those terrorising and trashing London are also a symptom of a wider malaise. In uneasy societies, people power – whether offered or stolen – can be toxic. Most of the 53 per cent of e‑democrats calling to have the death penalty reinstated (of whom 8 per cent would opt for firing squad or gas chamber) would never dream of torching a police car, but their impulses hardly cohere either with David Cameron’s utopian ambitions.

What price the Big Society as Tottenham, the most solid of communities, lies in ruins? The notion that small-state Britain can be run along the lines of Ambridge parish council by good-hearted, if under-funded, volunteers has never seemed more doubtful. Nor can Ed Miliband take much credit for his unvaried focus on the “squeezed middle”, rather than on a vote-losing underclass that politicians ignore at their peril, and at ours.

London’s riots are not the Tupperware troubles of Greece or Spain, where the middle classes lash out against their day of reckoning. They are the proof that a section of young Britain – the stabbers, shooters, looters, chancers and their frightened acolytes – has fallen off the cliff-edge of a crumbling nation.

The failure of the markets goes hand in hand with human blight. Meanwhile, the view is gaining ground that social democracy, with its safety nets, its costly education and health care for all, is unsustainable in the bleak times ahead. The reality is that it is the only solution. After the Great Crash, Britain recalibrated, for a time. Income differentials fell, the welfare state was born and skills and growth increased.

That exact model is not replicable, but nor, as Adam Smith recognised, can a well-ordered society ever develop when a sizeable number of its members are miserable and, as a consequence, dangerous. This is not a gospel of determinism, for poverty does not ordain lawlessness. Nor, however, is it sufficient to heap contempt on the rioters as if they are a pariah caste.

One of the most tragic aspects of London’s meltdowns is that we need this ruined generation if Britain is ever to feel prosperous and safe again. If there are no jobs for today’s malcontents and no means to exploit their skills, then the UK is in graver trouble than it thinks. Mr Osborne may congratulate himself on his prudence, but retrenchment also bears a social cost. We are seeing just how steep that price may be.

Financial crashes and human catastrophes are cyclical. Each reoccurrence threatens to be graver than the last. As Galbraith wrote, “memory is far better than the law” in protecting against financial illusion and insanity. In an age of austerity, there are diverse luxuries that Britain can no longer afford. Amnesia stands high on that long list.

kraggy

steve9859 wrote: »

From the telegraph. A good way to sum up the night. A little apologist at times, but makes you worry for the future


A looted store in Tottenham: the community lies in ruins
Photo: JOEL GOODMAN/LNP
By Mary Riddell
Last Updated: 8:48PM BST 08/08/2011
London's rioters are the products of a crumbling nation, and an indifferent political class that has turned its back on them.

No one seemed surprised. Not the hooded teenagers fleeing home at dawn. Not Ken and Tony, who used to live in Tottenham and had returned to stand vigil over the missiles and torched cars littering an urban war zone. Tony claimed to have seen the whole thing coming. “This was always going to happen,” he said.

The police shot a black guy in suspicious circumstances. Feral kids with no jobs ran amok. To Tony’s mind, this was a riot waiting for an excuse. In the hangover of the violence that spread through London, the uprisings seemed both inevitable and unthinkable. Over a few days in which attacks became a contagion the capital city of an advanced nation has reverted to a Hobbesian dystopia of chaos and brutality.

“In the evening there is fear, and in the morning they are gone. This is the fate of those who take our goods, and the reward of those who violently take our property.” Isaiah 17:14. No such Old Testament fate awaited the pillagers of N18, strolling away from 21st-century megastores with a looted haul of iPod accessories and designer trainers.

This is the most arcane of uprisings and the most modern. Its participants, marshalled by Twitter, are protagonists in a sinister flipside to the Arab Spring. The Tottenham summer, featuring children as young as seven, is an assault not on a regime of tyranny but on the established order of a benign democracy. One question now hangs over London’s battle-torn high streets. How could this ever happen?

Among several obvious answers, one is a failure of policing. The evidence so far points to more ignominy for the rudderless Met, as doubts emerge over whether Mark Duggan, whose death inspired the initial riots, fired at police. The stonewalling of Mr Duggan’s family precipitated the crisis, and the absence of officers to intervene in an orgy of looting led to a breakdown of order suggestive of the lawless badlands of a failing state.

The second alleged culprit is ethnicity. But, as David Lammy, Tottenham’s MP, has said, these are no race riots. The Eighties uprisings at Broadwater Farm, as in Toxteth and Brixton, were products, in part, of a poisonous racism absent in today’s Tottenham, where the Chinese grocery, the Turkish store and the African hairdresser’s sit side by side.

So blame unemployment and the cuts. It is true that Tottenham is among London’s poorest boroughs, with 10,000 people claiming jobseeker’s allowance and 54 applicants chasing every registered job vacancy. In other affected boroughs, such as Hackney, youth clubs are closing. Unwise as such pruning may be, it would be facile to suggest that homes and businesses have been laid waste for want of ping-pong tournaments and skateboard parks.

The real causes are more insidious. It is no coincidence that the worst violence London has seen in many decades takes place against the backdrop of a global economy poised for freefall. The causes of recession set out by J K Galbraith in his book, The Great Crash 1929, were as follows: bad income distribution, a business sector engaged in “corporate larceny”, a weak banking structure and an import/export imbalance.

All those factors are again in play. In the bubble of the 1920s, the top 5 per cent of earners creamed off one-third of personal income. Today, Britain is less equal, in wages, wealth and life chances, than at any time since then. Last year alone, the combined fortunes of the 1,000 richest people in Britain rose by 30 per cent to £333.5 billion.

Europe’s leaders, our own Prime Minister and Chancellor included, were parked on sun-loungers as London burned. Although the epicentre of the immediate economic crisis is the eurozone, successive British governments have colluded in incubating the poverty, the inequality and the inhumanity now exacerbated by financial turmoil.

Britain’s lack of growth is not an economic debating point or a stick with which to beat George Osborne, any more than our deskilled, demotivated, under-educated non-workforce is simply a blot on the national balance sheet. Watch the juvenile wrecking crews on the city streets and weep for all our futures. The “lost generation” is mustering for war.

This is not a cri de coeur for the failed and failing. Nor is it a lament for the impoverished. Mob violence, despicable and inexcusable, must always be condemned. But those terrorising and trashing London are also a symptom of a wider malaise. In uneasy societies, people power – whether offered or stolen – can be toxic. Most of the 53 per cent of e‑democrats calling to have the death penalty reinstated (of whom 8 per cent would opt for firing squad or gas chamber) would never dream of torching a police car, but their impulses hardly cohere either with David Cameron’s utopian ambitions.

What price the Big Society as Tottenham, the most solid of communities, lies in ruins? The notion that small-state Britain can be run along the lines of Ambridge parish council by good-hearted, if under-funded, volunteers has never seemed more doubtful. Nor can Ed Miliband take much credit for his unvaried focus on the “squeezed middle”, rather than on a vote-losing underclass that politicians ignore at their peril, and at ours.

London’s riots are not the Tupperware troubles of Greece or Spain, where the middle classes lash out against their day of reckoning. They are the proof that a section of young Britain – the stabbers, shooters, looters, chancers and their frightened acolytes – has fallen off the cliff-edge of a crumbling nation.

The failure of the markets goes hand in hand with human blight. Meanwhile, the view is gaining ground that social democracy, with its safety nets, its costly education and health care for all, is unsustainable in the bleak times ahead. The reality is that it is the only solution. After the Great Crash, Britain recalibrated, for a time. Income differentials fell, the welfare state was born and skills and growth increased.

That exact model is not replicable, but nor, as Adam Smith recognised, can a well-ordered society ever develop when a sizeable number of its members are miserable and, as a consequence, dangerous. This is not a gospel of determinism, for poverty does not ordain lawlessness. Nor, however, is it sufficient to heap contempt on the rioters as if they are a pariah caste.

One of the most tragic aspects of London’s meltdowns is that we need this ruined generation if Britain is ever to feel prosperous and safe again. If there are no jobs for today’s malcontents and no means to exploit their skills, then the UK is in graver trouble than it thinks. Mr Osborne may congratulate himself on his prudence, but retrenchment also bears a social cost. We are seeing just how steep that price may be.

Financial crashes and human catastrophes are cyclical. Each reoccurrence threatens to be graver than the last. As Galbraith wrote, “memory is far better than the law” in protecting against financial illusion and insanity. In an age of austerity, there are diverse luxuries that Britain can no longer afford. Amnesia stands high on that long list.

That article mentions the fact that the youths have no jobs several times. It's irrelevant. If the economy was in better shape, most of them still wouldn't work.

They're scum. Pure and simple.

Many others in the same so-called bad parts of London manage to remain civilsed through their unemployment.

Cannot understand why the powers that be don't give the police more power or bring in the army and knock the **** out of these guys.

DominoDub

Nice to see some of the population taking action

http://www.riotcleanup.com/


also #RiotCleanup

newballsplease

without having to read through the entire thread, can someone explain what this started over? and why its continuing?

DominoDub

newballsplease wrote: »

without having to read through the entire thread, can someone explain what this started over? and why its continuing?

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=London+Riot+why

positron

Probly already posted - facebook video of an injured lad being helped at first and then they rob him just like that.

https://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=10150333636850851

Effing scum!

kleefarr

Someone should go and set fire to their houses. SCUM!!!

yop

Its incredible. Whats the chances the muppets over here will think this is a good idea one of the nights.

Its boiling point coming from the lack of respect for everything bar themselves, then again why is a 7 year old allowed to riot and loot. Where are their parents?
Army will be needed now to resolve this, its not going to end pretty but then again why should ordinary people suffer.

SEPT 23 1989

Sky News are really pushing for the British Army to be on the streets

very dangerous game to play