DEM not gonna CON dis NATION: Rolling UK politics in the short-lived post-Murdoch era

"I saw her taking snuff occasionally but what's wrong with that?"

oh jacob she was never gonna share her coke with you ;_;

http://i.imgur.com/cq0UE.jpghttp://i.imgur.com/cq0UE.jpg

tottenham appears to be burning

needs more 'comedians' with pies.

i agree, they are needed, right in the middle of the flames

all of them

the guardian article on it is so (maybe understandably on account of haste &c) weirdly written and sorta funny? it has lots of parts that are like Some were sighted with a television and an electric guitar, and quotes some guy being all 'looks like this is going to get pretty tasty'

http://i.imgur.com/G95ym.jpg

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nicohogg

http://cache.daylife.com/imageserve/0689dhH0un55L/x610.jpg

http://cache.daylife.com/imageserve/0dAI3PGgaa10N/610x.jpg

RIP Wood Green Shopping City.

80s revival complete then.

Meanwhile:

A government minister has claimed that opposition to proposed planning law reforms is driven by "left-wingers" within pressure groups "picking a fight with the Government".

Organisations like the National Trust and the Council for the Protection of Rural England (CPRE) have spoken out against the planned changes.

The National Trust has signalled its "grave concerns" over the planning reforms, warning that the proposed changes "could lead to unchecked and damaging development in the undesignated countryside on a scale not seen since the 1930s".

And the CPRE has warned that the planning system is "under attack from the Government's planning reforms", which would lead to the protection of precious countryside being "seriously weakened". The reforms are designed to streamline the rules surrounding new developments, cutting the current 1,300 pages of national planning policy to just 52. Councils will be told there should be a "presumption for development".

The CPRE has warned that the changes represent "the biggest shake-up of planning for over 50 years" and will "place the countryside under increasing threat and leave local communities and planning authorities largely powerless in the face of developer pressure".

Asked about opposition to the changes, planning minister Bob Neill told the Daily Telegraph: "This is a carefully choreographed smear campaign by left-wingers based within the national headquarters of pressure groups. This is more about a small number of interest groups trying to justify their own existence, going out of their way by picking a fight with Government."

First that one dude wants to abolish maternity rights, now this guy thinks the National Trust are Marxist insurgents. Shaping up to be one of the great Tory governments.

lol Nick Cohen

haha yeah

events dear boy, events

lol poor nick cohen, i kind of feel for him (but not that much cuz it was a dumb argument to be making in the first place)

like, nothing about this should remotely come as a surprise.

not sure this riot is about the_recession tbf

obvi i can see laurie penny or paul mason saying it is...

not sure this riot is about the_recession tbf

think we can file this one under broken britain

p interested in the backstory about the incident in which the guy got shot; like potentially another roaring PR success for the police?

people are out there fighting to bring about a new socio-political order and you're here quibbling. for shame.

i still don't know what it's ~about~, i wasn't there and there seems to be a lot of...agenda projection going on. but it's not a surprise that kids who don't have much, and who don't have much to do, both of which have been exacerbated of late, and who have been seeing rioting and/or protesting become a possible action, an option to vent their anger (whatever this anger is actually based on), will do this.

I'm not shedding too many tears for owners of e.g. PC World, but then on the other hand having your already poverty-stricken neighbourhood trashed by looting doesn't sound much fun. All the predictable Twitter schadenfreude is pretty disgusting too.

I'm watching the news right now and the BBC just finished interviewing an excellent youth worker called Symon who pointed out the difference between 'remembering long-ago events' eg Broadwater Farm and the 'collective memory' experienced by the locals. He also explained it all kicked off when a 16-year-old girl got truncheoned by the cops at the vigil held by the dead man's family, which media are trying to bump back to 'rumours'.

Also SMH at the media's use of the term 'community leader' as I've never, ever known it to be applied to a white person.

Recessions in popular memory mean 3 million or more out of work. Britain's unemployment figures have remained low.

ok this is a pretty fuckin' weird statement from cohen. official unemployment is about two and a half million. that's not low, it's scandalous, probably the biggest standing condemnation of british policy-makers and business elite going.

Can't believe Nick Cohen would write fatuous bullshit....

At Wood Green now. Targets were carefully selected for economic value - phones, cosmetics, etc. One exception was Brook Brothers employment agency which had its windows smashed in. Not sure what significance that may have.

what dyou mean? by any of that?

(they 'carefully selected' a shop beneath where one of my fbook friends lives; she was evacuated and the street is still off-limits.)

Apologies if it wasn't clear, i was posting via Blackberry earlier. The shops that were targeted for looting / damage were the ones where people could carry away large amounts of high-value goods relatively easily (Carphone Warehouse, Body Shop, Vision Express, etc). The only notable exception i saw that was pure property damage with no obvious financial motive was Brook Brothers. I'm not sure whether that was a deliberate thing (objecting to the lack of suitable jobs in the area and the attitude of the company in question) or whether it was random. Not a lot else looked random.

well, just cos it's opportunistic doesn't mean people aren't going to have an eye for the main chance.

acc to a sociological paper i read a while back, the only disturbances where you see properly random property damage are drunken post-sports-victory celebrations.

it's sort of hard not to hit your 'target' when the target is 'the political and economic system we live under'

(their data was from US newspapers between the 1960s and 2000s, criteria for 'disturbance' were iirc numbers over a dozen, police presence.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcwUyZ68C0k

Surprising lack of people wanking themselves into a frenzy about how cool it all is, unlike the Bristol riots a couple of months ago. A bit too close to home for the insurrection tourists, perhaps?

I think past a certain level it's difficult to call what is and isn't a "random" act of destruction - what might at the start be targeted can slip way out of control as a kind of chaotic momentum takes hold.

not sure this riot is about the_recession tbf

Pretty sure it doesn't help the situation much. Welcome to Tory Britain, Thatcherkids!

Surprising lack of people wanking themselves into a frenzy about how cool it all is, unlike the Bristol riots a couple of months ago. A bit too close to home for the insurrection tourists, perhaps?

― 50,000 raspberries with the face of Peter Ndlovu (aldo), Sunday, August 7, 2011 12:47 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark

jodymcintyre Jody McIntyre
Be inspired by the scenes in #tottenham, and rise up in your own neighbourhood. 100 people in every area = the way we can beat the feds.
14 hours ago

Weirdly, the lead clip Sky was using appeared to show a whole bunch of Orthodox Jewish geezers either running to or from the riot

ugh stfu jody mcintyre

it's not a surprise that kids who don't have much, and who don't have much to do, both of which have been exacerbated of late, and who have been seeing rioting and/or protesting become a possible action, an option to vent their anger (whatever this anger is actually based on), will do this.

this is otm imo - it may not be 'about' the_recession but we are currently in a situation in which protest-becomes-riot has become an available part of the repertoire, and i do think that's related to the_recession and the current govt's economic/social policies and how people have so far reacted to them.

isn't this riot because the police shot someone?

Yes. It's really that simnple. No need to analyse it further. Let's not worry orurselves over it.

the protest was because the police shot someone. the fact that is became a riot might have more complex causation.

the fact that it became a riot, i mean.

well yes. but the more complex causation seems to more to do with how the protest was handled on the ground, rather than s&p downgrading US debt to AA+ or the murdoch stuff.

i'm not watching the uk news at the moment, so this could be bollocks but my impression from reading the papers is this riot would have happened if the shooting was in 2008 or 1997 or whenever. not true?

absolutely not saying it's unimportant by the way. the metropolitan police are the most disgusting savages imo.