The fashionable left continues its attempt to co-opt and elevate gangsters and violent thieves by an extremely poor article in the Guardian on the Duggan shooting. The Guardian acknowledge that Duggan had a gun, and that it was loaded, but call him “unarmed” on the basis that it was in a shoebox. The police, incidentally, deny that.
It is still completely beyond me why so many commenters on this blog seek to conflate the genuine problems police confront as they are increasingly faced with violent armed criminals, with the genuinely indefensible police actions in cases like their killing of Jean Charles De Menezes. Refusal to acknowledge the difference devalues the arguments around what is and is not reasonable for the police to do. Duggan is not De Menezes. The police were quite right to believe that Duggan was armed. Something went wrong in that Duggan was shot – but it was not an action without reason.
At a banal level, I had a really horrible journey down from St Andrews yesterday on a very overcrowded East Coast train, with the now routine problem of people sitting on the floor between coaches. In the coach which I was in, two tables of young people were listening to extremely loud music on a boombox. It really was very unpleasant, and prevented others from sleeping, reading etc. Two or three passengers asked them to turn it down, which they would do for perhaps thirty seconds and then turn it right up again. One notably old lady who had the misfortune to be seated back to back with them was called a “stupid old cow”. The train staff seemed cowed and resorted to treating it all as a big joke. I tried to reason with them and got “Fuck off fat man” for my pains.
They were wearing sportswear. I pondered what a pity it was that they did not kick the old lady to death and go out and smash some more shop windows and steal some more sportswear. Then commenters on this blog could have explained to me they were an enlightened part of the revolutionary vanguard.
Couldn’t agree more. There is an increasing tendency among some who claim to be on the left to determine their views on any particular matter just as being the opposite to the position of their political foes, rather than thinking the matter through for themselves. They do not realise that sometimes it is possible for their opponents to do the right things for the wrong reasons and even to do the right things for the right reasons. They also do not realise that no serious person doesn’t have some contradictions (I am sure that is a quote from someone – but I cannot remember who)
Perhaps rather than calling them the “fashionable left” we could just give them the more appropriate label of idiots, especially since I don’t believe the phenomenom is confined to those who claim to be on the left.
I am very wary of those who stick slavishly to a particular line and/or take a similar view of their opponents position.
Mary
My last post crossed with yours. Thank you for illustrating my last sentence in advance.
It is still completely beyond me why so many commenters on this blog seek to conflate the genuine problems police confront as they are increasingly faced with violent armed criminals when they look around at their colleagues, or look in the mirror.
Likewise I am very wary of slavish trolls.
I was also rather disappointed by Craig’s last paragraph, although he’s hit this note before. Pointing out that there may be causal links between someone’s social situation and their conduct is a long way from condoning that conduct – it’s mere truism. Humans are not the only creatures who behave badly under stress – there are thousands of laboratory studies. In the case of a tormented hamster it is difficult to argue that its negative behaviour is thoughtful and constructive political action, but nevertheless that behaviour was born out of its predicament.
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On the whole I think it’s a good idea to try to understand why bad things happen, including yobs on trains. Craig’s position is as stupid as accusing the doctor of approving of illness because he looks for the cause of the rash. Does he want back to Canspeccy’s mediaeval prescription – just beat the evil spirits out of the patient?
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Before condemning what the left, fashionable or otherwise, is saying Craig should find out what that is. Given his recent entry into Scottish politics I’d suggest Bella Caledonia and Scottish Left Review (I’m leaving you to google to avoid putting links in this post).
@stephen
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Were you thinking of this?
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“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”
(Ralph Waldo Emerson)
A bishop’s duty is to speak out against the benefits cap
The Church of England has a moral obligation to speak up for those who have no voice
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Saturday 19 November 2011 22.06 GMT Article history
The introduction of a cap on benefits, as suggested in the Welfare Reform Bill, could push some of the most vulnerable children in the country into severe poverty. While 70,000 adults are likely to be affected by the cap, the Children’s Society has found that it is going to cut support for an estimated 210,000 children, leaving as many as 80,000 homeless. The Church of England has a commitment and moral obligation to speak up for those who have no voice. As such, we feel compelled to speak for children who might be faced with severe poverty and potentially homelessness, as a result of the choices or circumstances of their parents. Such an impact is profoundly unjust.
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We are urging the government to consider some of the options offered by the Children’s Society before the bill is passed into legislation, such as removing child benefit from household income for the purposes of calculating the level of the cap and calculating the level of the cap based on earnings of families with children, rather than all households. The government could also consider removing certain vulnerable groups from the cap and the introduction of a significant “grace period” of exemption from the cap for households which have recently left employment.
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The Bishops of Bath & Wells,
Blackburn,
Bristol,
Chichester,
Derby,
Exeter,
Gloucester,
Guildford,
Leicester,
Lichfield,
London,
Manchester,
Norwich,
Oxford,
Ripon and Leeds,
St Edmundsbury and Ipswich,
Wakefield and Truro
/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/2011/nov/19/letters-bishops-condemn-benefits-cap
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My estimation of the Church of England has risen greatly this morning.
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Last night I heard Mozart’s Requiem and another choral work, intense and unknown to me, Dona Nobis Pacem by Peteris Vasks, a Latvian composer. In the programme note, it speaks of the repression suffered by the Latvians under the Russians when some of his works were banned.
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He says: “Most people today possess no beliefs, love and ideals. The spiritual dimension has been lost. My intention is to provide food for the soul and this is what I preach in my works.”
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Quite right. Pleased the Bishops have spoken out and that, unlike many others, they have love in their hearts.
Craig. For a Liberal, you’re awfully authoritarian.
“I pondered what a pity it was that they did not kick the old lady to death and go out and smash some more shop windows and steal some more sportswear. Then commenters on this blog could have explained to me they were an enlightened part of the revolutionary vanguard.”
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Could you possibly sneer more at your commenters?
(And could I point out to you, in passing, that as blogs go, most commenters here are more intelligent and thoughtful, as well as more mannerly, than on the vast majority of blogs I read?)
If a person is in a car, and at the back of the car there is a shoebox, within which there is a gun in a sock, is that person armed?
If I’m in my living room and police burst in, and in the sideboard there is found to be a gun, does that make me armed?
And what if my fingerprints are not found on the gun but the gun is found later on the kitchen floor, how do you explain that?
There is skullduggery here, and it’s not only “lefties” who should be concerned. You should be concerned, Craig.
Duggan’s life is/was every bit as valuable as yours. Or mine.
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There are no tiers in humanity.
Good point, Craig! Give them tasers to deal with these scumbags rather than making their jobs a nightmare. A whole catalogue of assaults listed on Inspector Gadget’s blog yesterday.
Off Topic:
Any update on the two people you were concerned about who got ‘repatriated’ to Uzbek?
regards
TFS
Is it true that between 1998 and 2010 there have been 333 deaths in police custody in Britain and not one single officer has been prosecuted?
No doubt Steve D approves.
A polite question: Why on earth does Craig think that people on the Left support nuisance and intimidation on trains? Who, on the Left, has ever called for such behaviour to be promoted or tolerated? And what on earth does that subject have to do with the shooting of Duggan?
Nuid – One has got nothing to do with the other. There’s no doubt that the figures you quote are inexcusable. But at the end of the day I support the police and want them to be able to do their jobs of arresting criminals in safety without the fear of arm chair warriors chipping in every 10 minutes with opinions.
nuid –
the article u posted is fascinating.
have read it a number of times and pondered what the final paras really mean re the gun in the box eventually found maybe 14 feet away from duggan’s body in August and the gun used in the earlier incident in July, and the two Met officers who are on restricted duties and being investigated re the July incident gun as it relates to the alleged Duggan gun.
a fairly short but concise look at the timeline:
Perfect Storm: The England Riots Documentary
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMvuoGji3yU&feature=player_embedded
Nuid: Are you referring to the video that emerged on Youtube of yobs rifling his back pack after supposedly helping him?
I saw no such comments. Post the quotes, Angry, with date and thread.
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I think I was actually the first to post the video on this blog. And then later on Craig Murray posted the video in a response to those who had been bending over backwards urging understanding of the looters and rioters and yobs who went about stealing what they could, smashing up stuff and beating people like the Malaysian lad.
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http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2011/08/the-good-delusion/
Despite obvious & tragic differences, the deaths of Duggan & Menezes have one paradoxical factor in common. Standard operating procedure.
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Specialist firearms units such as CO19 have for decades operated a de facto shoot-to-kill policy. Though for obvious reasons never publicly acknowledged, training is designed to ensure in effect nothing less. The logic being that anything less (i.e. a merely wounded target) needlessly endangers officers’ lives. Whilst doing everything to avoid firing in the first place, such units never shoot to wound.
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This is why such killings are by no means uncommon — be it the unarmed man in Hackney brandishing a chair-leg, or the unarmed man in Sussex, for example, who was naked at time of death, having just jumped out of bed.
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The same logic requires dumdum (expanding) bullets, use of which has been banned in warfare ever since the Hague Convention of 1899, because of their devastating effect on the human body — the very reason units such as CO19 use them. And why multiple shots are fired, preferably at close range.
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From this perspective (that of a special forces unit), whether Duggan was in actuality armed acquires moral & practical significance only after the event. Training ensures such units proceed on the assumption that anybody, once targeted, is armed & is prepared to kill, particularly if merely injured. This is why the completely innocent Jean Charles de Menezes died such a gruesome & barbaric death — to the apparent utter horror & disgust of fellow Tube passengers.
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The following documentary clip, despite its Yard Press Bureau framing, provides a graphic indication — 1.20 mins in — of the very likely physical circumstances seconds before Duggan’s death:
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http://bit.ly/nePowD
@ Angrysoba
I happened to agree strongly with Clarke’s interpretation of that video. It was IMHO faultless.
Angry,
It’s irrelevant who posted it. I had already seen it on Youtube by then.
I have gone through that entire thread at that archive link you posted, and I can’t find anyone at all defending the “beating up of that Malaysian lad.” Nor did I find anyone defending the “looters and rioters and yobs who went about stealing what they could”. I did find people discussing WHY they turned into looters and rioters in the first place.
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I also found Clark quoting Craig as having written earlier:
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“That police kill people too readily and with too much impunity is undoubtedly true. But that is only the spark. The existence of the gunpowder is the real problem. The existence of a society in which the gulf between rich and poor grows ever wider, and there is never even the remotest prospect of socially productive labour for a great many, was always likely to have these results.
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“These riots are not an isolated phenomenon; but together with the excesses of the banks and the collapse of public services, are all part of a much wider malaise as the capitalist engine has stalled in a vast mesh of corruption and croneyism.”
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Clark further mentioned that Craig was just back from the Fringe at the time, and Clark goes on, “Give him a few days until after the Fringe, and I expect he’ll be back to normal.”
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I suspect Craig’s ‘horrible’ train journey had more to do with the tone of his post above than some might think.
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Steve D:
“There’s no doubt that the figures you quote are inexcusable.”
Correct
“But at the end of the day I support the police”
Without qualification, and despite the figures above.
“and want them to be able to do their jobs of arresting criminals in safety”
I doubt if there is anyone who doesn’t want that, in any society, anywhere.
“without the fear of arm chair warriors chipping in every 10 minutes with opinions.”
What nonsense. People are free to express their opinions anywhere they like, whether it’s on the street or from behind a keyboard. The police are there to serve US (that’s us, you and me, not the USA) – that’s what we the taxpayers pay them for. We pay them to keep the peace, and if we don’t like how they’re doing it, or don’t like unexplained or unnecessary brutality or deaths, we should be saying so, and as loudly as possible.
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Look what’s going on in the USA now:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmJmmnMkuEM
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Coming shortly to a location near you.
“Clark further mentioned that Craig was just back from the Fringe at the time, and Clark goes on, “Give him a few days until after the Fringe, and I expect he’ll be back to normal.”
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To clarify! Clark wasn’t saying that in relation to the piece quoted immediately above that, he was referring to a later stance Craig was taking which was far more condemnatory.
This is worth a watch:
Corporate America Using the Police Departments As Hired Thugs?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxk8OYiZ3vk&feature=share
Nope. Never said, or even thought, the rioters were an enlightened part of the revolutionary vanguard. Not guilty.
My personal best on that line was a pair of Poles in the quiet carriage talking continuously at the tops of their voices on the phone (which was superfluous) to their friends in Warsaw, In Polish, obviously, which made extracting any entertainment from this impossible. Second best, bunch of pissed-up fans returning from lost match doon sooth. You times your journey, and you takes your choice. Screaming kids, footie fans, the chatty maniac or fat lady who smells of wee in the next seat…it’s the Big Society, ennit? Next time, go First, Craig. You might even meet your MP.
Ruth, it is very concerting that the ICC, which has failed to prosecute anyone at all in recent years, a very expensive and politicised court, is clammering for Saif Al Islam to be extradited. It is more about their own reputation than about seeing justice done.
The photo of Saif after capture showed him with his fingertips in bandages. This tells me that he has already been tortured, had his fingernails pulled out, or the tips of his fingers crushed with some sort of heavy implement.
I do not think that the Libya’ns will extradite him to the ICC, they have not signed up to their statutes and have no obligations to do so.
150.000 dead Libyans later, the interim Government is struggling with re building the economy and country, whilst the western Allies, sic, have nothing else in mind than to link the repayment of Libya’s due reserves in foreign banks to their perverse logic of establishing a mallable Government.
Not unless there is a US/UK/France friendly Government in place will they release Libyas foreign reserves. I suspect that the torture could have been done in order to make Saif speak out, tell them, about some private accounts.
He knows too much and it is not in our interest to have him spill the beans over Blairs schmoozing and past CIA machinations. This information is better squeezed out by the Libyans, it is too good a bargaining chip.
I have to say Craig that I find this a very flippant and distasteful post.
I’d like to start with your anecdote. The behaviour of the teenagers you describe was apparently not ‘violent’, and telling you to fuck off, as unpleasant as it may be, is not a ‘criminal’ act. What relevance do you believe this actually has to the Duggan case? The only link I can imagine you are making is one between the ethnicity and social class of the teenagers and that of the man shot dead by the Metropolitan Police. This is not merely ‘banal’, and you should think carefully about the ideological implications of this association, which you appear to have made casually and without much consideration. I personally have never heard any left-wing commentator describe the rioters you refer to as a ‘revolutionary vanguard’; what the left has done is place the riots within a social context, which is surely a welcome alternative to the right’s explanation, that of an innate, quasi-spiritual evil denoted in the idiotic, oxymoronic phrase ‘pure criminality’.
In what way is the report extremely poor? The IPCC has found Mark Duggan was not wielding a firearm, or any other kind of weapon, when he was killed by the police. This information explicitly contradicts the account made by the Met Police, and so is of vital importance to the public. You mention that the police ‘deny’ this alternative account, as though this is itself a sufficient basis on which to refute it: perhaps, considering cases like that of Jean Charles de Menezes and the 333 deaths in police custody since 1998 (http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/dec/03/deaths-police-custody-officers-convicted), you should treat statements of this kind with a little more scepticism.
Anon,
“…telling you to fuck off, as unpleasant as it may be, is not a ‘criminal’ act.”
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Pleas see S4, Public Order Act, 1986
And while you’re checking legalities, take a look at this:
http://www.policeoracle.com/news/IPCC-Examines-Duggan-Gun-Investigation_41011.html
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Curiouser and curiouser.
I think some here are misreading the nuance snd irony in Craig’s last sentence.
I dont think for a second he mena this literally,or applied to all commentators on this blog.
It was an ironic barb aimed at the occassional nutters that visit this blog,not the vast majority of decent posters.
Calm down everybody..
Anon,
“…telling you to fuck off, as unpleasant as it may be, is not a ‘criminal’ act.”
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Pleas see S4, Public Order Act, 1986
Well, I don’t know if you’ve ever been close to a lot of police with riot gear, but this is precisely the kind of language they use, far more than I ever hear from others in any other walk of life.
As for your entry, Craig, I hear anger from your nasty rail journey, but I didn’t read in the Graun article any apology for Mark Duggan’s carrying a gun.
Let’s assume that in a better world, every problem one might encounter could be cleared up with a nice sit-down and a handshake, or at worst, by a police which showed sympathy and quick, appropriate action. That would be better, right?
The trouble is, gun carriers and rioters DON’T know any better. They have come to this point by successive generations of hopeless, impoverished lives, and their life can be utterly brutal and dehumanising. What do we do with these misfits? We wait until they go crazy with the injustice of it all and then send them to prison, where their brutalised expectations of life are reinforced and intensified. Where are the police when they are stabbed? Where are the police when they are threatened by other gun-carriers?
It’s only when the comfortably off, privileged people like you and me, are confronted face-to-face with the stark ugliness of some others’ lives, that we sit up and even take notice of them. What do you think our response should be? To spit with rage and seethe at their shocking lack of politeness, call the cops on them, or try to find out what we can do to make their lives better?
Komodo
RE: S4, Public Order Act, 1986, I take your point. My intention was not to trivialise the encounter Craig describes, I am simply suspicious of its use in this context. There appears to be an attempt to sketch out a ‘criminal class’ with broad, anecdotal brush strokes against which left-wing analyses of riots and/or police brutality can be contrasted and discredited. Sigil is right to point out that such language and intimidating behaviour is frequently employed by the Met Police during demonstrations.
Just saying, Sigil. I would fully expect the police to eff and blind a bit, given the nature of their job. But if you want to get one under S4, do feel free. Me, I’d leave it. Just to labour the point, I am sure the police would be only to glad to pull in some yoof wiv attitude if it had been insulting members of the public making a reasonable request – more especially if said yoof’s income were derived, as it would have to be to fund a rail ticket these days, from illegal substances…and I would listen to them calling the yoof a fucking little fuck as they did so, with complete equanimity.