These Are English Riots 89


The Guardian has a whole stream of articles, each under the heading “UK Riots”. Actually pretty well every mainstream media outlet is using the term “UK Riots”, as a simple google search affirms.

Bollocks. These are English riots. Glasgow is as poor as North London or Salford, but people up here are not burning out their neighbours. Newsnight Scotland last night had a discussion of what was happening in England, which it struck me could as well have been a discussion of Haiti.

I have the cheering thought that whether it is the sickening sight of the looters or the sickening sight of David Cameron, it must be crossing numerous Scottish minds that England is a liability best jettisoned.


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89 thoughts on “These Are English Riots

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  • Canspeccy

    “If every cell in the human body replaces itself every seven years, this means that Alfred now is Canadian”

    Suhayl, you’re so pathetically ignorant. It’s the information that determines race, the DNA sequence. You’re no more a Scot because you’ve lived on a diet of porridge and kippers, than John Bull was English because he eat beef.

    As for calling me a “nationalist”, that’s just an example of your fundamental dishonesty. You have all these terms, nationalist, fascist, Nazi, EDL, Tea Party, whatever, which you equate with the uttermost scum, then you label people as you see fit, without admitting any obligation to prove the falsehood you wish to convey.

    To call me a nationalist on the evidence available to you is like calling an opponent of the Jewish holocaust a Zionist. Just bollocks.

    Which is why I rarely answer taunts and smears on this site. The sincerity of the participants, including those dressed like a Ghost or a Ku Kluxer seems non-existent.

    Bet let me repay the insult. You are propagandist pushing liberal bollocks.

  • Suhayl Saadi

    Alfred, tell us all: Does your website have a link to the site of Lee John Barnes, one-time legal advisor to the BNP and notorious White Nationalist? Yes or no?

  • John K

    As I see it semantic musing about whether these were “English riots” isn’t really helpful. As far as I can tell they are not even riots on any sensible use of the term, they are a mixture of opportunistic theft, organised theft and gleeful wanton destruction in certain cities but not others – urban looting and arson.
    .
    And they are definitely an big city phenomenon. Out here in the country we have not been barricading our shops and buying baseball bats on Amazon.

  • John K

    BTW Craig, you’ve stated several times on various threads that the N Sea Oil / hydrocarbons belong to Scotland. Where does this 90% figure come from? I can’t find any professional report anywhere which provides evidence either way, just diatribes from both sides of the independence argument. Is there any recent non-partisan evidence?

  • Canspeccy

    And when I say, SS, that you are a propagandist pushing liberal bollocks, I mean, pushing the agenda of the New World Order, which requires the destruction of every nation state, i.e., genocide as Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term, defined genocide.
    *
    As for your question, go ahead, SS, answer it yourself, and make sure to tell no lies when you do so, assuming you are capable of such restraint.
    *
    In the meantime, I invite everyone to take a look around here:
    *
    http://canspeccy.blogspot.com
    *
    and see what proof of evil they can find.
    *
    Today I have had no time for original composition, but I included some photos of NATO destruction in Libya. Liberals of course try to avoid talking about this because, despite their half-hearted cries of dismay at the bombing, they actually support the destruction of Libya. They want to break it up into petty states more easily subjugated by US/NATO, just as they are intent on destroying every nationality in the World. As a first step, in Britain, their agents stir the narrow nationalisms of the Scotch and the Welsh, while seeking to destroy the coherence of the English nation through mass immigration and multiculturalism. The end pursued is the reduction of Britain to a collection of powerless provinces subservient to the undemocratic EU.
    *
    Oh, and today I added a link to Buddhist Alan Watts discussing nothing.
    *
    Yesterday, I discussed the US credit downgrade in the context of globalization and the need to force wage convergence between east and west, mainly by driving down wages in the West.
    *
    But if you find any nasty Nazi, fascist, racist stuff, do let me know.

  • Canspeccy

    And when I say, SS, that you are a propagandist pushing liberal bollocks, I mean, pushing the agenda of the New World Order, which requires the destruction of every nation state, i.e., genocide as Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term, defined genocide.
    *
    As for your question, go ahead, SS, answer it yourself, and make sure to tell no lies when you do so, assuming you are capable of such restraint.
    *
    In the meantime, I invite everyone to take a look around canspeccy.blogspot.com and see what proof of evil they can find.
    *
    Today I have had no time for original composition, but I included some photos of NATO destruction in Libya. Liberals of course try to avoid talking about this because, despite their half-hearted cries of dismay at the bombing, they actually support the destruction of Libya. They want to break it up into petty states more easily subjugated by US/NATO, just as they are intent on destroying every nationality in the World. As a first step, in Britain, their agents stir the narrow nationalisms of the Scotch and the Welsh, while seeking to destroy the coherence of the English nation through mass immigration and multiculturalism. The end pursued is the reduction of Britain to a collection of powerless provinces subservient to the undemocratic EU.
    *
    Oh, and today I added a link to Buddhist Alan Watts discussing nothing.
    *
    Yesterday, I discussed the US credit downgrade in the context of globalization and the need to force wage convergence between east and west, mainly by driving down wages in the West.
    *
    But if you find any nasty Nazi, fascist, racist stuff, do let me know.

  • Suhayl Saadi

    Why haven’t you answered my question, Alfred? Does your website have a link to the site of Lee John Barnes, one-time legal advisor to the BNP and notorious White Nationalist? Yes or no?

  • Canspeccy

    As I thought, SS, if you cannot lie about me, you cannot answer your own question without proving my contention that your question was a dishonest and contemptible smear.
    *
    But why is it, SS, that you reduce debate to such a childish level?
    *
    Well, I suppose I can answer my own question. For a propagandist, the dumbest argument is the one assimilated by the greatest number. And better than an argument, is a smear, that activates the limbic system while bi-passing the intellect altogether.
    *
    You really disgrace the sublime gift of the human intellect.

  • ingo

    Well maybe not Glasgow, but Edinburgh will do, take the No. 27 Bus to Silverknows, but don’t get out, you’ll drive past burned out tennament blocks on your left Craig.
    People who are hooded up and covering their face should be made responsible to the public, put up before the local panels and the victims, those who lost their flats, businesses and lives and answer their questions, make them feel the full wrath.

    then prosecute them.
    It is also ludicrous and far removed to expect those on the margins, those who are economically dormant, less aspirational, not to respond to scathing hikes, some 28% combined price rises for energy, cuts to EMA, rising university fees, VAT up to 20%under the Con Dems, rising petrol taxes, and all that other liberal rubbish.

  • Jim Lambie

    Helen
    In 1999 Tony Blair secretly made 6,000 MILES of SCOTLAND’S SEA – ENGLISH
    by moving Scotland’s marine boundaries from Berwick-up-on-Tweed to Carnoustie.
    The shocking thing about this secret order is that it was not openly discussed in the Commons, passed by the house of Lords and then passed by a very select Labour and Liberal committee in the Scottish Office.
    This unjust act secretly passed, without the consent of the Scottish People took 15% of oil and gas revenues out of the Scottish sector of the North Sea taking £2.2 Billion out of the Scottish economy. This lost revenue is more than the proposed £35 Billion Scottish budget cuts for the next 15 years (£2.16 Billion per year)
    Helen did you know that of the seven oil-fields you refer to six were in the 6.000
    miles of scotlands sea border that Blair made English

  • Jim Lambie

    Ministers in Edinburgh are preparing to legislate to ensure much of the fortune earned by the Crown Estate from the multi-billion-pound offshore energy industry goes to local communities in Scotland.
    The move by the Scottish Government comes after The Herald highlighted the possibility of the Crown Estate rights to the seabed being challenged by Holyrood, at a critical time when licences for renewable energy have massive financial potential.

  • Suhayl Saadi

    Still no answer, Alfred to my very simple question: “Does your website have a link to the site of Lee John Barnes, one-time legal advisor to the BNP and notorious White Nationalist?” Perhaps I am dumb, as you say (since I lack the British Mitochondrion), but if so, my question must be sublimely easy for a microbiological botanical arboreal genius like yourself to answer. Yet still, no answer. It’s easy: It’s either ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Why might that be?
    .
    On another note…
    .

    I’ve heard a rumour from a friend, who heard a rumour, that police have been going into big dept stores in Glasgow telling the staff to remove displays from the windows as they’ve heard a rumour that there might be rioting on Friday/Sat nights here. I emphasise that this is third or fourth-hand info. Perhaps ‘the teenagers’ will know more…?

  • Suhayl Saadi

    Jim Lambie, if that’s true, about the Norway-style fund, which I hope it is, the Security Service et al will pull out every dirty trick in the (sports) bag, including, arguably, murder, to prevent it.
    .
    I hope it is true, though.

  • Mike

    It is true that the events in London and other English cities have so fart not been replicated in Glasgow and Edinburgh. So far. The city that has given us regular exhibitions of violence and bigotry between Papes and Prods, the home of Celtic and Rangers, should not be too smug about their avoidance of English urban mayhem. Nor indeed should the citizens of Belfast have reason to mock London. Only recently, Catholic mobs were rampaging along the Falls Road, intent on stoning the six counties into the Eurozone, joining Ulster to a a bankrupt economy, and chucking Molotov Cocktails out of devotion presumably to the doctrine of transubstantiation and the Immaculate Conception.

    One thing that pdoes puzzle me is how many Scots there are who urge the unity of Ireland and the partition of Britain. That there is a distinct ethnic group in Northern Ireland that has no desire to be ruled from Dublin is of no consequence to these Scots Nationalists. Their own distinctive ethnic identity is the justification for partitioning the island of Britain and the advocacy of the forced unity of the island of Ireland. Of course, the logic that Sinn Fein used when they called for an all Ireland vote on unity could not possibly be applied to Britain. Ironically, it may be that an all Britain vote on unity could produce the surporising result of the English voting to jettison Scotland while the majority of Scots vote to remain part of Britain. What then?

  • lochlong

    Maybe we had time to realise that what was happening in London wasn’t really world revolution:

    Reported in the (Glasgow) Herald yesterday (Thursday): ‘more than 75,000 Scots piled on to social networking sites to urge people not to riot north of the Border. One FB page had clocked up almost 50,000 followers in the space of 48 hours while various household names took to Twitter over the affair.’

  • OldMark

    Mike- your question at the end of your comment is a perfectly valid one, but where the hell did you get this from ?

    ‘Only recently, Catholic mobs were rampaging along the Falls Road, intent on stoning the six counties into the Eurozone, joining Ulster to a a bankrupt economy, and chucking Molotov Cocktails out of devotion presumably to the doctrine of transubstantiation and the Immaculate Conception.’

    Citation please!

    From my limited knowledge of West Belfast, highly devotional Catholicism of the type caricatured here has been out of favour since this guy was removed from the Republican leadership-

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_McKee

  • dreoilin

    ‘Only recently, Catholic mobs were rampaging along the Falls Road, intent on stoning the six counties into the Eurozone, joining Ulster to a a bankrupt economy, and chucking Molotov Cocktails out of devotion presumably to the doctrine of transubstantiation and the Immaculate Conception.’
    .
    This above is either deliberately silly or badly misinformed. Ulster has nine counties, and three of those are in the Republic. You cannot join something to something else when they have always been joined, and were only separated on political paper in 1922. The Irish economy was far from bankrupt before the recent crash. Ireland joined the Eurozone in 1999, a year after the Good Friday Agreement. Transubstantiation and the Immaculate Conception had nothing to do with Catholic/Nationalist civil rights marches (or later riots) in the North, but everything to do with discrimination by the majority of Unionists/Protestants in northern Ireland for 50 years. The majority that was deliberately created by partition.
    And I might remind you that the same Protestants/Unionists threatened bloody war on Britain if the whole island was given back to the Irish. Had it been, these same Unionist/Protestants would have been in a minority on this island, rather than a majority in the newly-created artificial entity known as the North. In which they proceeded to mete out “law and order” with a ~100% Protestant/Loyalist police force, and discriminate in jobs and housing and other ways.
    .
    I do not come here, as I’ve said before, to fight about Ireland and Britain. And I won’t do it now. But silly ‘descriptions’ need to be challenged. And I have seen nobody from Belfast mocking London here. Or anyone from anywhere else, for that matter.
    .
    Craig says he favours reunification of Ireland. So do I. I’m sure both of us are far too sensible to think it could be imposed by force. But Israel would do well to re-think its policy of settlements in occupied territories. I suspect Zionists are only too well aware of the bloodshed and mayhem in Northern Ireland. What I fear is that they embrace them wholeheartedly.

  • dreoilin

    I edited a sentence and now it reads wrongly above:
    .
    Transubstantiation and the Immaculate Conception had nothing to do with Catholic/Nationalist civil rights marches (or later riots) in the North which were about discrimination by the majority of Unionists/Protestants in northern Ireland for 50 years.

  • Suhayl Saadi

    Dreoilin, have you read Denis Lehane’s book, ‘Unperson’? I’d recommend it. He also co-wrote, with Martin Dillon, ‘Political Murder in Northern Ireland’.

  • Graham

    Suhayl:

    Tariq Jahan also spoke very movingly in an interview on ‘The World At One’ on Wednesday. You can listen to him here, seven minutes in. Make sure you listen to the end.
    .
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b0132l6y
    .
    Someone has made a copy of it here:
    .
    http://audioboo.fm/boos/435734-the-world-at-one-bob-walker-interviews-tariq-jahan-the-father-of-21-year-old-haroon-jahan-one-of-the-men-who-died-in-birmingham
    .
    That a man whose son had been murdered just hours earlier in such circumstances could show such dignity and wisdom, is astonishing to me. The interview is heart-breaking, but somehow also uplifting. While there are people like him in the world it is tempting to think that, despite all indications to the contrary, everything might just turn out alright after all.

  • Graham

    [I posted this once but it didn’t appear. Have I been blacklisted because of my previous post? How odd. Maybe I was on to something after all?]
    .
    Suhayl:
    .
    Tariq Jahan also spoke very movingly in an interview on The World At One on Wednesday. You can listen to him here, seven minutes in. Make sure you listen to the end.
    .
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b0132l6y
    .
    Someone has made a copy of it here:
    .
    http://audioboo.fm/boos/435734-the-world-at-one-bob-walker-interviews-tariq-jahan-the-father-of-21-year-old-haroon-jahan-one-of-the-men-who-died-in-birmingham
    .
    That a man whose son had been murdered just hours earlier in such circumstances could show such dignity and wisdom, is astonishing to me. The interview is heart-breaking, but somehow also uplifting.
    While there are people like him in the world it is tempting to think that, despite all indications to the contrary, everything might just turn out alright after all.

  • Suhayl Saadi

    Though Lehane later developed an ambivalent attitude towards Dillon – which he explains in the book. MI5 dirty tricks, intimdation and so on. In the book, Lehane claims that Dillon told him that MI5 put a gun to his (Dillon’s) head and told him that they would shoot him if he refused to act as an agent for them. I emphasise that this is an allegation made by Lehane in his book. But it gives one an idea of the sort of activities the UK State was engaged in Northern Ireland.

  • dreoilin

    Thanks for the recommendations, Suhayl. I’ll make a note of those. I haven’t read a whole lot about British dirty tricks in Ireland. One of the worst involvements I know of (or most of us think we know of) is the Dublin and Monaghan bombings in 1974. One just around the corner from my office, and I’d very likely have been in the middle of it if I hadn’t left Dublin at lunchtime for the weekend.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dublin_and_Monaghan_bombings
    .
    “Three exploded in Dublin during rush hour (killing 26 people and an unborn child) and one exploded in Monaghan ninety minutes later (killing 7 people). Most of the victims were young women, although the ages of the dead ranged from five months to 80 years.
    .
    “No-one has ever been charged with the attacks, which have been described by the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Justice, Defence and Equality as an act of international terrorism with allegations of the involvement of British security forces.[1]”.
    .
    If they could be involved in this, what else? On the British mainland. That’s the big question.

  • dreoilin

    Graham,
    Your comment was probably slow to appear because it had more than one link. It’s a common happening here. To make sure it doesn’t happen you can leave out the H.T.T.P. at the start of URLs.

  • Suhayl Saadi

    Dreoilin, indeed. Professor David Miller (founder of Spinwatch) specialises in the Northern Ireland situation, which he decribed to me as “an unresolved colonial situation” (also Lehane’s view), and has written a lot about that kind of thing – though I haven’t read a lot of his work on it, I must admit.
    So, as for ‘The Quiet American’, ‘The Quiet Britisher’ (‘Britisher’ is the term still used in South Asia). Very glad you did leave Dublin early that day in 1974. Utterly dreadful.
    .
    For many years, there was widespread discrimination against Catholics in the west of Scotland. Most of the marching bands who go over to N. Ireland are from the west of Scotland. Ayrshire and Lanarkshire in particular had/have deep-rooted issues in this regard. I remember, as a child, how some people in the Orange Order network used to exclude and demean Catholics, esp. Irish Catholics in everyday life. It was disgusting.
    .
    Well, for many years, it became part of the normal daily aural furniture in the UK for us to hear: “A couple with Irish accents have been arrested…” (usually in Liverpool or Stranraer). So then, after a while, and for many years, in spite of yourself, every time you heard an Irish accent in real life, esp. from Northern Ireland (or Donegal, which, to the untutored ear, can be difficult to differentiate), you’d think: “A couple with Irish accents have been arrested”, you’d think “which side are they on”, you’d have to resist the temptation to ask, you’d attempt to determine whether the accent was ‘Protestant’ or ‘Catholic'” and you’d think, “bombs and Armalites”. People forget very quickly how such constant propaganda works, how effective it is, and so we are ever-ready to demonise the next group.

  • dreoilin

    “you’d attempt to determine whether the accent was ‘Protestant’ or ‘Catholic’” and you’d think, “bombs and Armalites”.”
    .
    I was very aware when travelling to Britain in those days, of the car reg and our accents (although they were Southern). But to be fair, Suhayl, the population of Northern Ireland is small, and the IRA was waging a vicious campaign. Even if there was propaganda involved too. I’m constantly shocked by the rabid reaction I see on some UK and US sites (especially US) when the word ‘Muslim’ is mentioned. I see 1.6 billion people demonized in a way that’s appalling. And Roger Ailes is personally responsible for a lot of that. I recently read this:
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/aug/10/roger-ailes-fox-news-murdoch
    .
    I can’t quite decide if he’s greedy or unhinged.

  • Suhayl Saadi

    Good lord, what a dangerous man, Dreoilin. Yes, I remember the Richard Nixon makeover in 1968. When he won the election (he’d been far behind RFK in opinion polls, but of course RFK was assassinated during the Primaries, leaving the field clear for Nixon against the compromise Hubert Humphrey), I was travelling north in a train from England to Scotland. We – I was seven years old – met a lovely American lady from California. She wore one of those 1920s-style, broad-brimmed hats which old ladies used to wear in the 1960s. My mother asked her what she though of the President-Elect. She said (get this):
    .
    “He’s fine, but he’s not hard enough. Not as hard as Johnson. Johnson was hard.”
    .
    Eek. This was long before Fox News, of course. But now, looking back, it might have been that Richard Nixon had had the media makeover, so now appeared like ‘the car salesman-next-door’ – “not hard enough”, whereas of course we know now that he was always a mass murdering, paranoid bastard, far ‘harder’, actually than Johnson (also a mass murdering bastard; historically, that quality seems to be de rigeur for the leaders of empires – no surprises there).
    .
    So, in retrospect, the work undertaken by this dangerous shit, Roger Ailes, may have been of relevance in relation to a conversation had between my mother and the nice Californian lady, in December 1968 on a British Railways train from Sheffield to Glasgow.
    .
    God, that is truly scary.

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