egafd.com

As we sit back for another dose of "the riots are the symptom of moral decay in broken Britain after 14 years of New Labour" and ready ourselves for another pile of benefit cuts allied to the usual "idle hands make mischief" Cameroonian shallow shite, can I take forumites back to the time of the Second World War Blitz?

Ah yes, I hear you say. A time of community, halcyon days which showed the best of being British. Well not entirely....

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/ ... h-blackout

If I draw forumites attention to a couple of paragraphs...

"Juliet Gardiner, the social historian and author of Wartime: Britain 1939-1945, says that, while most people found looting despicable, examples differentiated between stealing someone's property and spotting a wireless or jewellery lying on the pavement after an air raid and reckoning that, if you didn't take it, someone else would."

"One trader in east London at the beginning of 1941 reckoned that shopkeepers lost more from crime than they ever did from German bombs. When the Caf? de Paris, which had a supposedly secure underground ballroom, suffered a direct hit in 1941, rescuers were shocked to find that looters were among them, yanking brooches and rings from the bodies of the revellers. The courts were kept busy. In December 1940, Sheffield Assizes set aside two days to deal only with looters. And the press were in no doubt as to the heinous nature of the offence. "Hang A Looter And Stop This Filthy Crime!" exhorted the Daily Mirror in November 1940."


As we frequently say in Blackpool, "Plus ca change, c'est la meme chose, matey"

Cheers
D

This part of our hidden history was also illuminated here, a few days ago:

And there are other reasons for doubting Cameron's 'analysis' of events...

?Moral collapse? claim clashes with data (ft.com)

David Cameron?s speech attacked the riots as the culmination of a ?slow-motion moral collapse?. He complained that ?social problems that have been festering for decades have exploded in our face?. But the prime minister supplied no evidence that the riots marked a long-term decline in behaviour ? perhaps because the available data point in the opposite direction.

According to the 2010-11 edition of the British Crime Survey, the most authoritative measure of criminal trends in the UK, the riots are anything but the climax of a crime wave. The survey found the rate of lawbreaking ?now remains around the lowest level ever reported?.

Most members of the public believe that criminal behaviour is on the rise but the number of crimes recorded in 2010-11 was half the rate at its peak in 1995. Last year, according to this measure, there were 10m fewer criminal incidents than there had been 15 years earlier.

Mr Cameron dwelt on the ?criminal disease? of gangs but gave no evidence that the recent unrest was any worse than the bouts of fighting and vandalism that took place in the 20th century involving mods and rockers or football hooligans.

In a speech in which he sought to explain the underlying causes of the riots, he was clear that existing government programmes would resolve them. An important part of his prescription was welfare reform and efforts to turn around failing schools ? already part of the coalition?s agenda.

A senior Conservative summarised the speech as ?a very long, drawn-out way of saying ?we told you so?. We?re doubling down on public sector reform. We?re making the case for marriage. The riots make the case for what we?re doing. They vindicate what we?ve been doing since 2005.?

Mr Cameron raised the stakes on another of his reforms, pledging ?a stronger police presence ? pounding the beat, deterring crime, ready to re-group and crack down at the first sign of trouble?. Amid police budget cuts of one-fifth and the possibility of further outbreaks of rioting, it was a high-risk claim.

Neil O?Brien, director of Policy Exchange, a centre-right think-tank, said that it would be a ?hard slog? to deliver police reform to make the required savings. But he added: ?After a decade in which the police had a 40 per cent real terms increase in their budget, but the detection rate stagnated, there is no question that the police have scope to become more efficient.?

Mr Cameron made the bold pledge that, within this parliament, he would ?turn around the lives of the 120,000 most troubled families in the country?. But he gave no criteria by which the families would be selected, nor did he define how success would be measured.

Ian Mulheirn, director of the Social Market Foundation, a think-tank, said: ?It is not clear whether this is a reprioritisation of existing spending or a pledge of new spending. If it is the former, then it will be controversial. If it is the latter, it will be expensive.?

Marriage and family were a strong theme, with Mr Cameron musing that many of the rioters perhaps ?come from one of the neighbourhoods where it?s standard for children to have a mum and not a dad?. His comments were swiftly followed by calls from the Tory right to bring forward proposals on a marriage tax break now being considered by the coalition.

Even here, though, there is scant evidence of its effectiveness. Tim Leunig, chief economist at Centre Forum, a think-tank, and an academic at the London School of Economics, said: ?There is no evidence that a transferable allowance would increase the number of people who get married, nor increase the longevity and stability of marriages that already exist.?

The riots may have shaken Britain, but the political equation remains the same as it was before the unrest. The coalition?s fate depends on its ability to deliver public sector reform and economic growth while closing a double-digit deficit

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/0fcf194e-c729 ... z1V8r71z4s

Hi Ravis,

Not sure that being badly brought up and being in that list of people are mutually exclusive.

I'm fairly sure that estate agents are still thought of as something between robbers and that scum that forms on stagnant canals.

A millionaire's daughter. Well that just reeks of rebelling against mummy and daddy. Having money doesn't prevent idiots breaking the law.
Just as being relatively poor, doesn't mean you're going to loot Aldi, at the drop of a hat.

As for politicians telling judges what to do.

a. They're not. Though they are making stupid public remarks about sentences, I don't believe that they are directly asking judges to go medieval on the scum.

b. Even if they did, judges are independent. I agree that some of the sentences are a tad harsh and will probably be reduced by the appeal court.

However, the sentences were always going to be plus sized, to help send a message to anyone in the future, who happens to be 'caught up in the moment' and decides to help themselves to a injured Malaysian student's bag's contents or thinks it's good form to punch and ultimately kill, a pensioner, as he's trying to put out a fire.

For the past few years, there has been much gnashing of teeth, about the wishy-washy sentences that criminals get. Then when they do get them, they only do roughly half of that sentence.
Now that the judges are handing down pretty decent punishments, suddenly they're too harsh.

Some of the kiddy winks that have been done for stealing a bottle of water etc, etc and have been sentenced to 6 months or so, won't do more than 3 months, probably a lot less. But I bet they won't do it again in a hurry.

As part of Cameron's inquiry into Broken Britain I can only hope that evidence will be taken from a wide range of miscreants so that the Tories can work out the best approach in terms of swingeing sentences, benefit cuts, family intervention, enforced homelessness etc to stop this happening again.

One of the first people to be called could be Nicholas Clegg who as a 16 year old went on a drunken rampage and burned down a couple of greenhouses in Germany containing a European renowned collection of cacti plants.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLDGpBVHzD8

Personal intervention prevented any charges being brought apparently, but presumably a perp like Clegg can provide an insight into the questions we are all asking ourselves.

Why Cleggie? Why?

Was it the horrors of a dysfunctional upbringing? His father, Nicholas Clegg CBE, is chairman of United Trust Bank. Clegg's paternal grandmother, Kira von Engelhardt, was the daughter of a baron from the multiethnic Imperial Russia, of German-Russian and Ukrainian origin, whose family fled the Bolsheviks after the 1917 Russian Revolution.

Was it the horrors of a disastrous education which left him no outlet but arson for his inarticulate rage? After all Clegg was educated at two independent schools: at Caldicott School in Farnham Royal in South Buckinghamshire, and later at Westminster School in Central London.

Was it an obsession with gangsta rap, innit?

Hopefully the inquiry will throw some light onto this issue and fingers crossed it won't be too late for family intervention.

Cheers
D