Panic on the Streets of London
I’m huddled in the front room with some shell-shocked friends, watching my city burn. The BBC is interchanging footage of blazing cars and running street battles in Hackney, of police horses lining up in Lewisham, of roiling infernos that were once shops and houses in Croydon and in Peckham. Last night, Enfield, Walthamstow, Brixton and Wood Green were looted; there have been hundreds of arrests and dozens of serious injuries, and it will be a miracle if nobody dies tonight. This is the third consecutive night of rioting in London, and the disorder has now spread to Leeds, Liverpool, Bristol and Birmingham. Politicians and police officers who only hours ago were making stony-faced statements about criminality are now simply begging the young people of Britain’s inner cities to go home. Britain is a tinderbox, and on Friday, somebody lit a match. How the hell did this happen? And what are we going to do now?
The government and their cohorts in the media are trying to characterize the events as apolitical criminality.
In the scramble to comprehend the riots, every single commentator has opened with a ritual condemnation of the violence, as if it were in any doubt that arson, muggings and lootings are ugly occurrences. That much should be obvious to anyone who is watching Croydon burn down on the BBC right now. David Lammy, MP for Tottenham, called the disorder 'mindless, mindless'. Nick Clegg denounced it as 'needless, opportunistic theft and violence'. Speaking from his Tuscan holiday villa, Prime Minister David Cameron – who has finally decided to return home to take charge - declared simply that the social unrest searing through the poorest boroughs in the country was "utterly unacceptable." The violence on the streets is being dismissed as ‘pure criminality,’ as the work of a ‘violent minority’, as ‘opportunism.’ This is madly insufficient. It is no way to talk about viral civil unrest. Angry young people with nothing to do and little to lose are turning on their own communities, and they cannot be stopped, and they know it. Tonight, in one of the greatest cities in the world, society is ripping itself apart.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article28794.htm
The most notable aspect so far has been the way the British loyalist media, in particular the BBC (Bourgeois Broadcasting Company), has lurched into full scale protectionist mode. Following the lead of their government masters, the Beeb has mounted an aggressive defamation campaign against the rebels. Here is as blatant an example of media hucksterism as one is ever likely to find. The "journalist" wont let the interviewee say what he wants, critiques what little he does mention to cram in between the interviewer's condemnations, then at the end tries to discredit him with an accusation of past lawlessness, and a false one according to the interviewee. If the BBC saw him as disreputable, why did they bring him on? To use him to discredit the rebellion, why else?
Here's another disgraceful episode. The link will take you to a video of two young women who revel in the violence and destruction. The Beeb must have searched far and wide to find these two people (assuming they are not British intelligence). What's most important is that these women are expressing things which the broadcaster knows will make them unsympathetic to viewers. As a result, the class perspective they manifest willl be discredited along with them. This is artful propaganda. And I must say that as I listened to them I thought that the entire thing was scripted. No, I cannot prove this, but the two of them sound as though they are straight from central casting.
London rioters: 'Showing the rich we do what we want'
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14458424
There is a context to London's riots that can't be ignored
Since the coalition came to power just over a year ago, the country has seen multiple student protests, occupations of dozens of universities, several strikes, a half-a-million-strong trade union march and now unrest on the streets of the capital (preceded by clashes with Bristol police in Stokes Croft earlier in the year). Each of these events was sparked by a different cause, yet all take place against a backdrop of brutal cuts and enforced austerity measures. The government knows very well that it is taking a gamble, and that its policies run the risk of sparking mass unrest on a scale we haven't seen since the early 1980s. With people taking to the streets of Tottenham, Edmonton, Brixton and elsewhere over the past few nights, we could be about to see the government enter a sustained and serious losing streak.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/08/context-london-riots
