Let’s send a message…
That was what Cameron said a little after this time last year: let’s send a message that rioting and looting were both behaviours that would not be tolerated.
And thus it was. The courts sat late and long: ne’erdowells were handed down ultra-tough sentences; and amessage was well and trulty sent.
Just as Cameron now is sending the opposite message in a way almost guaranteed to have London ablaze this August. Read the rest of this entry »
Oh. Did i fail to take seriously the subject? My apologies.
Still, its this association i make, every term i hear the word “robust”, with “rotund”. I think of the ludicrous “Theophilus Goon”, a bumbling police character in Enid Blyton’s Mystery books. Or the laughing policeman. Or a host of jovial comedy policemen that have graced British film from the earliest of days.
But its “robustness” that politicians are demanding right now, and i am a tad puzzled as to what they might mean.
Robust practices
They surely can’t be thinking of the approach employed by the Chicago Police back in the 60′s, which were certainly robust. Also unlawful, brutal and violent.
Perhaps they mean “taking no chances”: so police should shoot first, as they appear to have done with a certain Brazilian electrician and latterly, just before this rioting kicked off, with Mark Duggan in Tottenham; and they should ask questions after.
On the other hand, that approach could see the body count rise rapidly, whilst public confidence would fall.
Perhaps they mean being less prepared to listen, and having no truck with bleeding heart liberals and alleged rape victims. Ooops! Did i mention rape? Cause this appalling story of Layla Ibrahim, jailed for “wasting police time” in the matter of her own alleged rape, seems pretty robust and no-nonsense to me.
Could it mean not bothering with silly stuff, like the actual detail of statute. So, as i have reported on time and time again over the last couple of years, we will see yet more instances of police unlawfully stopping people trying to take photos, unlawfully seizing their cameras, and unlawfully destroying film.
Hey! Maybe it means zero tolerance of ANY wrong-doing. So when police do commit crim damage (as above) we won’t hear any of this namby-pamby nonsense about IPCC investigations. We’ll just fire the officer and charge them, as appropriate.
And as for politicians who fiddle expenses and News of the World Management. Puh-lease! They’ll be down the station tonight, helping polie with their inquiries. Or else.
Political blether
I know. At this point, some of you are reading this as an anti-police diatribe. But actually, it ain’t. Its much more of an anti-politician thing.
Just listen to what the police themselves have been saying. Up pops Cameron with a bright idea about using rubber bullets and water cannon: Hugh Orde, ACPO chief and an experienced copper patiently explains how pointless such things would have been.
In the end, i really have a hard time working out just what extra the police were meant to be doing last week.
Many of the supposedly exceptional powers that politicians say they needed were in place and used. I am hearing very few calls from the police themselves for massive new legal powers.
The main criticism seems to be they didn’t go in “hard enough” – is that what robust is meant to mean? But i’ve tackled that elsewhere. If police have a failing, it is that they are unable to respond nimbly enough to fast-moving situations. But possibly that is true of any police force, anywhere in the world.
No. In the end, this all feels like meaningless soundbite. I don’t know what “robust” policing would look like or how different it would look from the current model.
I have yet to hear any politicians spell it out in detail.
Maybe that’s the point. They haven’t a clue.
But it sounds good.
And meanwhile, it is just possible that community policing between the riots isn’t such a bad thing after all – and we would all benefit from a few more happy – and rotund – police officers on the beat.
jane
xx
The why of this apeal is mostly in my last post. I think the Broken Britain campaign is just such a bad idea if you’re an establishment politician with a dodgy background to your name. But that’s Cameron’s look-out, and who am i to gainsay him?
Still, I am a girl with a strong sense of right and wrong, as well as a nose for bullshit and a hatred of all things hypocritical. So i am appealing to you, my readers, for information.
Its a bit like “shop a rioter”, which has seen so much mileage in the press recently. Only this is about hypocrisy.
Take Wandsworth: they claim that their action in starting to evict council tenants associated with criminality is just standard practice. But is it? Anyone who lives in Wandsworth (or any other council pursuing this sort of vendetta) with evidence of criminality unpunished, please let me have it.
If you know of local councillors accused of criminal activity and NOT removed from office (or their homes, if they are council tenants) please let me know. If you know of council tenants evicted, please tell me. And if you know of criminals not evicted, i’d like to know that, too.
Meanwhile, pride of place in my appeal goes to anyone with a close acquaintance of the Bullingdon Club. Did you know any members of same? Can you substantiate the claim that they ran a “damages” fund? Do they still? Are you aware of crim damage they carried out? Are you aware of any named individuals responsible damage?
Guess what: i’d like to know. 
(Wow! I’m starting to sound like a bad pastiche of crimewatch!!).
All the same, any help you can give would be gratefully received.
jane
xx
One bit of boyish geekiness i suspect i won’t ever lose is a long history of studying matters military. It means i know irritatingly conversation-stopping details about key battles and campaigns…the strategies that worked…and the follies that didn’t. Context. Background. Insight.
It also leaves me, along with most who have ever studied War, with a healthy disrespect for using force and confrontation as a means to solve issues. Mostly, they don’t. They may provide temporary palliative: but longer-term, they are just ways of storing up problems for the future; of putting off the necessary in favour of the spectacular and the feelgood.
War: what is it good for?
That’s one reason why i so dislike it when governments, which ought to know far better, adopt military rhetoric when faced with difficult issues. How goes the War on Drugs? Have we won it yet? Probably not.
Or the War on Terror?
And is anyone still convinced that War in Iraq produced an unashamedly useful result – as opposed to stoking the fires of resentment for the future?
In the end, when it comes to Wars, you need to be pretty sure that you need to fight, that you have no alternative, or that you are able to come down on your enemy with such overwhelming force that a root and branch destruction of all opposition is possible not just now but next year, and the years after that as well.
Mr Cameron goes to War
But, following last week’s riots, pretty much all the language emanating from Downing St, even if it doesn’t employ the W-word, suggests that our PM, at least, sees riots and rioting as tantamount to the action of hostile forces. It therefore makes no sense to talk to the perpetrators. No sense to distinguish between what look increasingly like very different causes in London, Nottingham and Manchester. No sense, in fact, in anything other than driving for complete and total victory.
Not only has Cameron identified an enemy: by his actions and rhetoric, he is busy creating enemies.
I noted this unpleasant turn of mind this week in the tone of debates about “what should be done”. Weird stuff. I’m scarcely a bleeding heart liberal. If anything, i’m something of a stickler for Law and Order but, because of my respect for that, i get all hot and bothered when i see authorities mis-using the Law for political motives.
I’m interested in what may work to prevent a repetition: and classically, that probably involves analysis, information and…heavens!…sitting down and talking to those who don’t quite share government certainty on these matters.
If you play with fire – you’re liable to get burnt
Because otherwise, what i think we are seeing is not a slow sweeping victory for the forces of Right, so much as a vastly increased polarisation, with Cameron’s non-friends developing a much-increased taste for retaliation.
It goes something like this. The initial kickstart to lawlessness was police shooting an individual (Mark Duggan) in circs that require investigation and which might well represent yet another own goal by the police. Strike one for the Liberals.
The subsequent rioting was not justified, and the scale and viciousness of it wound up Middle England something rotten. The forces of reaction struck back, so much so that by mid-week almost nothing was off the agenda.
And now it is the turn of Liberalism again. After suffering a temporary moment of heart-stopping angst, they aren’t buying the reaction. Instead of creating a big tent and bringing in to it all those who might have a useful voice in future debates, Cameron et al, by their rhetoric, by reaching for extreme sentencing, by twisting the law for temporary political ends, have lost the chance to have a truce in which everyone would be on side.
The authorities go too far
As examples of the ludicrous harshness, i’d cite the way in which courts have now jailed individuals for offences such as stealing £3.50 worth of water: or the pompous pontificating way in which various police forces are now seeking to dominate the websphere.
Northumbria, for one, scouring Facebook and arresting individuals for incitement.
And what about Wandsworth? Threatening eviction of a family not for involvement in the riots, but because one of their members has been charged with same.
Result: the Liberal tendency, temporarily stunned by events early in the week, is now finding multiple flags to rally round. Cameron had a chance to create a broad consensual common front – and he blew it.
Worse, if he and his ilk insist on piffle about zero tolerance for law-breaking, he is on very shaky ground indeed. There can scarcely be a progressive poster who is now unaware of his own youthful involvement in the law-breaking and riotous Bullingdon club.
I suspect the documentary makers are circling as i type – and i’d certainly be more than interested in any tales people would like to send me, privately or otherwise, about that period of his history.
There is real and growing anger at the apparent double standards. The differences in treatment between what looks increasingly like lying newspaper management and thieving Members of Parliament on t’one hand…and “rioting scum” on the other.
No. Cameron has a chance to sit, talk, jaw-jaw instead of war-war. He had the chance to build a grand coalition against social unrest.
And i fear he’s blown it, already.
jane
xx
Now this is not a rational thing. But since ophidophobia (or a fear of snakes) is one of the more widespread fears, perhaps it is something that government could, please, give some thought to.
I have never liked snakes. Actually, i remember nightmares about them and, once into my teens, i would drop books that had snake pics in them.
I would skip pages with snake pics.
And i would avert my eyes if a snake hissed its way on to TV.
I have not watched “Snakes on a plane”. I intend never to do so. And i wasn’t exactly happy about the appearance of Nagini in the latest Harry Potter.
Much as i love trans activist and Cambridge Councillor Sarah Brown, i am not sure i could possibly ever pay her a return visit…after discovering, first time around, that her flat is also home to several…how to put this politely…footless reptiles. Ugh! No.
The boy happily explored and made friends with the hissing denizens of Sarah’s flat. I cowered on the sofa.
SO why…oh why, oh why…must Cameron, on returning to take charge of events, have to meet with a large Cobra? Eeeyuw! The very idea makes my flesh crawl.
So, OK. It stands for something as anodyne as Cabinet Office Briefing Room A (and not some Boy’s Own wankronym like Command of Operations Beyond Reasonable Ability).
But still its a snake. And a poisonous one, to boot.
And yes: i’m sure it gives some military types a bit of a buzz to be dealing with a body named after a vicious venomous beast. But not only does it fail to fill me with confidence: it actually makes me even more worried.
So here’s an appeal. Surely, given the brainpower at work in the Cabinet Office it would not be beyond the wit of assorted civil servants to come up with something less horrid.
Maybe CUDDLE (Cabinet Urgently Dealing with Dastardly Lawless Events) would be a bit extreme. And the headlines would be appalling:
Cameron, Clegg, Osbourne go into Cuddle Huddle
But in a world that is so often harsh, grey – and filled with revoltingly venomous serpents – maybe something a bit warmer would be more re-assuring.
jane
xx
Stand up Michael Gove.
Oh: you are stood up already (ooops! apologies for that mildly heightist reference). But please: do tell us what you really think.
Gove with the wind
First, last night, we had the dyspeptic Michael Gove on Newsnight, arguing, post David Cameron’s statement on the riots, that the causes were all very simple, and apparently horror-struck at the possibility that Harriet Harman might in any way think at all different. Actually, all Ms H was doing was agreeing absolutely to condemn the rioting and violence and stating plainly there was no justification for it, whilst repudiating Cameron’s simplistic assertion that the issue was “simple”.
Gove shrank back in his chair (sorry!), and looked as though he had just eaten something that disagreed. Or maybe he was thinking about eating someone who disagreed and was summoning up the courage to sink his teeth into Harriet’s leg.
Whatever. And what a difference a night makes. This morning, Gove was on the Breakfast Show talking about the complex causes of what has just gone down. Which maybe suggests that his previous night’s indignation was just show, designed to emabarrass Harman. He also mentioned that one of the problems was a “values”.
Oxford double standards
Yet, as the saga unfolds, the real victim of long-term embarrassment looks increasingly likely to be his boss, diddy Dave Cameron.
I went to Oxford. I wasn’t some rich hooray henry: was, in fact, mostly alienated by the antics of the old etonians and left Oxford feeling thoroughly resentful at the whole experience. If that was the pinnacle of UK
education, i reckoned, there was something very rotten at its heart.
A friend – a law student – frequently regaled me with her experiences in the local magistrate’s courts, where she was sent to observe “justice” at work. It was instructive. Very. For justice, when it came to the offspring of local council estate dwellers was swift, harsh, and took no prisoners. Well, it did send them to prison…but you know what i mean.
Whereas that same justice, faced by the scions of posh and titled families just bent over backwards and beseeched the accused to give it a good rimming. Lord Alexander… I see you have a character reference. From a Bishop? Well done. Very well done. And you were caught committing criminal damage? Quite understandable. Don’t do it again…and see your dad down the club.
Actually, that’s a fib: most Oxford magistrates were several social grades below the uppermost hooray’s who passed thru.
The bullying Bullers
They were certainly well below the ranks of the “Bullers” – members of Oxford’s elite Bullingdon Dining Club – whose recent intake included David Cameron, George Osbourne and Boris Johnson.
And whilst saome of us might jib a little at the sheer outrageousness of a club designed to indulge the vanity of some of the UK’s richest students by encouraging them to dress in clothes that cost a small fortune and indulge themselves until they were well and truly sick, there are other aspects of the Bullingdon that might give pause for thought today.
Its “values” for one. Because the Bullingdon had a formidable reputation for carrying out criminal damage: wrecking restaurants, destroying private property. So as well as ordinary costs and subscriptions, the club is alleged to have levied a sum every term to cover damages.
Ah. So that’s clear. If i should take it into my head to go on a rampage round the Deepings, pouring petrol through the letterbox of my local councillor and hurling a bin through the front window of the local baker, all would be OK if i just popped round the next day and offered to pay for the damage? Wouldn’t it?
Is it even worth asking the Met if they take that view? If some of Monday night’s rioters offered to pay for goods removed, would the heat be off? What a stupid question. The answer, as Dave put it, is simple: nothing justifies young people, rich or poor, going out and creating mayhem like this.
The questions Cameron et al need to answer
Which is where the Bullingdon may yet turn out to be Achilles’ heel for this government. I posted last night about how a quote attributed to Johnson/Cameron glorifying their role in past crim damage was probably fiction. And i don’t like debate to be carried out on the basis of fiction.
But still, there are questions to be answered. Did Cameron, Johnson and Osbourne take part in criminal damage whilst at Oxford? How did they make amends? And what action, by the authorities, helped them to understand the error of their ways? Were they ever prosecuted? And if not, why not?
At what point in their lives did they decide that criminal damage was not a good thing to commit? And – the $64,000 question – what standing do these individuals have today in lecturing youth on criminal damage if they, themselves, were once guilty of inflicting it at a similar age.
jane
xx
