UK riots: The end of the liberals’ great moral delusion. David Starkey's Newsnight race remarks: hundreds complain to BBC. The BBC has received nearly 700 complaints about the historian and broadcaster David Starkey's claim that "whites have become black" during a discussion about last week's riots on Newsnight. Of those contacting the BBC, 696 were protesting about Starkey's comments, and 21 complained the debate was chaired poorly and he was treated "unfairly". The media regulator Ofcom also had complaints and an online campaign by an organisation called gopetition.co.uk demanding that the BBC issue a public apology for "unacceptable comments" had attracted more than 3,600 signatures by mid-afternoon . The Labour leader, Ed Miliband, described Starkey's comments on race as "disgusting and outrageous".
Speaking at Haverstock school, his former school in Chalk Farm, north London, Miliband said it was "absolutely outrageous that someone in the 21st century could be making that sort of comment". UK riots: Big Brother isn't watching you. I no longer live in London.
I've been transplanted to Los Angeles by a combination of love and money; such good fortune and opportunity, in both cases, you might think disqualify me from commenting on matters in my homeland. Even the results of Britain's Got Ice-Factor may lay prettily glistening beyond my remit now that I am self-banished. Police water cannon and plastic bullets? After 50 years of the most lavish welfare state on earth? What an abject failure. Bitter laughter is my main response to the events of the past week.
You are surprised by what has happened? Why? I have been saying for years that it was coming, and why it was coming, and what could be done to stop it. I have said it in books, in articles, over lunch and dinner tables with politicians whose lips curled with lofty contempt. So yes, I am deeply sorry for the innocent and gentle people who have lost lives, homes, businesses and security. Gangland culture takes over where UK society leaves off.
Commentators around the world have rushed to link the London riots to the protest movements in Arab countries which sparked revolution in Tunisia and Egypt, and near civil war in Syria.
Of course there are similarities in every street disturbance, but in this case trying to draw comparisons is a dead end. It does not get us closer to understanding what was happening in either case. This is easily illustrated by contrasting the risks that the young people ran. Thousands of Arab protesters have been shot dead by police and the army.
Leading article: Liberalism has improved Britain – its defenders must speak up - Leading Articles, Opinion. Less predictable, perhaps, was the near-unanimity on parade in Parliament on Thursday, where MPs from all parties vied to identify a malaise that stemmed, as they saw it, from a destructive moral laxity pervading Britain.
From parenting to education to policing, a cross-party consensus called for discipline, toughness and the re-establishment and enforcement of boundaries. It could be argued that, in their clarion calls, the politicians were doing no more than reflecting the public mood. An e-petition demanding the withdrawal of state benefits and council homes from those involved in the disturbances has soared to the top of the 10 Downing Street website. A poll we publish today has 78 per cent of those asked supporting automatic prison sentences for anyone convicted of rioting and 54 per cent agreeing that Mr Cameron failed to provide the necessary leadership. A palpable change in the national mood. How to recover Britain’s streets for civilisation. What isn’t behind the London riots. If the revelation has puzzled outsiders, it has confused Britons no less.
The mood here is a mixture of rage, fear and bafflement. Not that we’re not used to riots: We are. England caught fire during that other royal-wedding year, 1981. But 30 years ago, the battle lines were relatively clear. Race was central, especially in the predominantly black south London neighborhood of Brixton. Mark Steyn: Lessons for us from London in flames. Mark Steyn: Lessons for us from London in flames LONDON, ENGLAND - AUGUST 08: A rioter throws a rock at riot police in Clarence Road in Hackney on August 8, 2011 in London, England.
Pockets of rioting and looting continues to take place in various boroughs of London this evening, as well as in Birmingham, prompted by the initial rioting in Tottenham and then in Brixton on Sunday night. It has been announced that the Prime Minister David Cameron and his family are due to return home from their summer holiday in Tuscany, Italy to respond to the rioting. Disturbances broke out late on Saturday night in Tottenham and the surrounding area after the killing of Mark Duggan, 29 and a father-of-four, by armed police in an attempted arrest on August 4. Photo by Dan Istitene/Getty Images. UK riots 2011: Liberal dogma has spawned a generation of brutalised youths. Riots without responsibility. The looting and rioting over the last few days have been committed by a very small proportion of this nation's young people.
They have shown us – the "grownups" – what can happen when a minority decide to take things that do not belong them, using violence as an intimidation tactic. London’s burning: a mob made by the welfare state. Many commentators are on a mission to contextualise the riots that have swept parts of urban London and other British cities.
‘It’s very naive to look at these riots without the context’, says one journalist , who says the reason the violence kicked off in the London suburb of Tottenham is because ‘that area is getting 75% cuts [in public services]’. Others have said that the political context for the rioting is youth unemployment or working-class anger at David Cameron’s cuts agenda. ‘There is a context to London’s riots that can’t be ignored’, said a writer for the Guardian , and it is the ‘backdrop of brutal cuts and enforced austerity measures’. The ‘mass unrest’ is a protest against unhinged capitalism, apparently. These observers are right that there is a political context to the riots.
What we have on the streets of London and elsewhere are welfare-state mobs. Article continues after advertisement. ‘The police are just scratching their arses’ Following riots, fires and looting in the north London town of Enfield, last night a group of up to 300 local men patrolled the streets in an attempt to ‘reclaim them’. UK riots 2011: London and Birmingham people forced to strip naked in the street. By Daily Mail Reporter Updated: 00:51 GMT, 10 August 2011 This picture shows the shocking depths the thugs were prepared to plumb – stealing the clothes from a man’s back.
The taller, broader man already holds a pair of white and green trainers and a white T-shirt in his hands. Now, it seems, he wants the trousers too. The shorter man dutifully removes his jeans, leaving only his dark blue underpants and his white socks. Humiliation: A young man is forced to strip to his underpants in the street, having apparently already handed his T-shirt and trainers to a looter. The image appeared on Twitter as internet rumours claimed that, on top of widespread violence and looting across London, thugs were even removing clothing from their victims. The year we realised our democratically elected leaders can no longer protect us. The soul sinks at the pictures – of a woman leaping from a burning building, of the owners of a family shop seeing their life's work turned to ash, at the sight of a thug unzipping the rucksack still on the back of an injured teenager and taking from it what he wants.
The soul sinks at the sight of people trashing the places where at least some of them live. There is another sensation you feel watching these pictures, and it is one with which we are becoming increasingly familiar, especially in 2011, the year the news refused to stop. Melanie Phillips On The UK Riots. Goodbye to the Enlightenment. Published in: Melanie's Blog An illuminating report on BBC Radio Four’s Today programme (0810) this morning said it all about the British riots. Some teenage thugs who were hooding up to go looting were asked why they were doing it. Maybe they couldn’t afford the trainers and other goods they were setting out to steal? Yeah, we can afford them, came the reply; but since the goods were there to be robbed, it was an opportunity that couldn’t be passed up. London riots: 'People are fighting back. It's their neighbourhoods at stake' London riots: an officer from South Wales police in Hackney. Some business owners have taken to defending their property themselves.
Photograph: Ian Nicholson/PA When the rioters came to attack the premises of Kurdish and Turkish businesses in Hackney's Stoke Newington High Street and Kingsland Road on Monday night, the owners were waiting for them. "It was between about nine and 10 at night," said Yilmaz Karagoz, sitting in his coffee shop next to a jeweller's shop that has been shuttered since Sunday when the rioting began and a pharmacy that closed a day after. "There were a lot of them.
On Green Street in East Ham a similar-sized group of rioters was chased away by several hundred Asian residents. Tuesday night there were further reports of communities taking steps to defend themselves. Around 200 people were walking around the centre of Eltham, south-east London, following rumours that the area was going to be the latest place to be hit by disturbances. Boris Johnson heckled in Clapham Junction over London riots. Link to video: Boris Johnson heckled in riot-hit Clapham Junction The London mayor, Boris Johnson, forced to return from holiday, reportedly in North America, visited Clapham Junction, the scene of some of the worst London rioting, on Tuesday.
Johnson faced severe criticism from local residents, who complained that they had not had enough protection from police. Who are the rioters? Young men from poor areas ... but that's not the full story. London riots: victim in YouTube video is Malaysian student. UK riots 2011: 16k police ready to use plastic bullets keep lid on London's looters. Fresh violence flares in Birmingham, Wolverhampton, West Bromwich, Greater Manchester, Salford, Liverpool, Bristol and GloucesterPrime Minister David Cameron recalls Parliament on Thursday as Government tries to quell uprising'Unprecedented' 16,000 police on duty in London - compared with just 6,000 on Monday nightCost of clean-up expected to run into 'tens of millions''There are no plans for the Army to get involved,' says police chiefPolice arrest 21-year-old man in connection with fire at Croydon furniture store768 people arrested in total and more than 160 people have been chargedAll police cells in London are now FULL By Emily Allen and Rob Cooper and David Williams Updated: 10:48 GMT, 10 August 2011.
Riots Spotlight London’s Troubled Youths. The World from Berlin: 'Riots Reveal the Decay of British Society' - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International. Britain is searching for answers after four consecutive nights of riots that have shocked the country and led to hundreds of arrests. Prime Minister David Cameron, who cut short his vacation in Italy in reaction to this week's violence, was due to chair a meeting of Cobra, the British government's emergency council, on Wednesday to discuss how to proceed.