RETREAT UPON RETREAT; soon no doubt to be followed by appeasement. The Home Secretary, Theresa May, sounded foolish when interviewed by SKY News today. It was as if she were speaking just after Saturday night’s rioting, instead of a further two nights of such carnage: carnage which by now had extended into several parts of London including Croydon and leafy Ealing, as well as in other major cities like Birmingham, Bristol, and Liverpool.
Having been asked by Eamonn Holmes whether she should not now be considering the use of water cannon by the police; her stupefying answer belonged, as a credible response, to what had happened in Tottenham 48 hours earlier. We in this country, she said, almost sounding smug, ‘police by consent’.
But as we all know, that by Sunday, ‘policing by consent’ had become as outmoded and impractical a concept of policing as the policeman’s whistle; only the home secretary of the ‘nice’ party seemed incongruous of this fact when interviewed on Sky. In fact Twitter was inundated with complaints about her performance following her belated involvement.
It has taken our government’s leaders three days to appear before a camera and tell us what is going to be done any differently by the police to what they had been doing since Saturday night. In other words, how were the forces of law and order to be put on the front foot in this crises.
Well, at 11am this morning the prime minister stepped through the door of number 10 and approached two furry microphones. What was he going to say? not only to the British public, but to the rest of the world who have been showing the same images we have been treated to since the rioting began.
The prime minister praised and supported the police and other emergency services. He then announced that tonight, in London’s troubled areas, there would be 16,000 police officers on duty safe-guarding the public. This is 10,000 more than were available while the prime minister was holidaying. Which I suppose is something we should thank Mr Cameron’s return home for.
But, locking the stable door… springs to mind. Those businesses that were set ablaze and looted; and those people who rented flats above those businesses who now find themselves homeless; as well, of course, as all the families who relied upon these burnt out wrecks for their weekly income, and now find themselves out of work – all such victims will not take kindly to the prime minister’s offer of 10,000 extra police on their streets.
IT WAS EMBARRASING, as a citizen of this country to see the forces of law and order made to look so helpless by, in many cases, what were nothing more than children. Like most people outside of the areas affected, I saw the unfolding tragedy on television. They, like myself, witnessed children and teenagers acting without either fear or respect for the police. Knowing the police did not have the power to inflict any kind of physical punishment on them, they took full advantage of their situation. The police, many no doubt fearing months of suspension and a possible ending of their careers, stayed their hand and watched helplessly as cars were burned and buildings set alight.
The youths knew they had the upper hand over the police, just as they have over their teachers. I saw young men defying the police openly; defying them to touch a hair on their brain empty heads. For such people, only fear of the police would have corrected their actions; and the truth is, is that that fear does not exist.
The authorities boast of over 400 arrests to prove their tactics are working. But how many will be charged, and how many of those who are charged will pay their fines or be sent to prison? And in the rare event that they will be sent to prison; how many of them will serve a full term?
On top of which our prisons are already overcrowded and many of those taking part in the riots cannot be charged anyway, because they are ‘under the age of criminal responsibility’.
WHAT HAS BEEN HAPPENING in our cities has nothing to do with government cuts, as many on the Left used to do under Margaret Thatcher and now seek to do again, by shifting the blame from criminal behaviour pure and simple to the government. The BBC even brought Ken Livingston into the studio to rehash this argument (no doubt on the BBC’s behalf).
But, despite the public’s unhappiness with the Coalition’s public expenditure cuts, they know instinctively that what has been happening on our streets has nothing to do with either government cutbacks or the death of Mr Duggan.
What we have been witnessing is out and out nihilism, which cannot even be honoured with any kind of political justification; the kind of justification which those on the Left would like to see, if only to make an excuse for such behaviour. Only the feral behaviour of children from undomesticated, in many cases, one parent (usually the women) families; who, despite having had the same educational opportunities as every other child in the country, have chosen the easy option of a feral life devoid of discipline or any moral code; only such behavior can be blamed for these outrages.
On Saturday night Mr Duggan’s death at the hands of the police, provided sufficient justification for what followed in Tottenham. He was the martyred victim of police criminality, and, whatever the proven circumstance of his death turn out to be, his death carried the stamp of the following rioting.
But those who took to the streets during the following nights cared little for Mr Duggan or his fate. Even on Saturday night, once the rioters found how easy it was to come by all sorts electrical goodies by looting various premises in Tottenham; they cared very little for Mr Duggan and his fate.
Once it was seen how easy it was to loot, burn, and pillage without penalty; the following nights brought further chaos to other parts of London, as well as cities in the rest of the country. The police’s impotence in Tottenham last Saturday encouraged the untamed youth from all over the city to copycat what happened in Tottenham
Policing by consent would be laughable, if it were not so tragic for the victims of its implementation on Saturday night and every night since. But even now talk of water cannon, tear gas, and plastic rounds being used may seem too many a liberal, even after these events - extreme.
But every European police force have these means readily available to protect their civilian populations. So such measures are not of a Right-wing vintage, but common practice in, in the main, social democratic Europe.
IT ASTOUNDS ME that such precautions as water canon are only available in Northern Island. Does this mean that ‘policing by consent’ has no function when it comes to the white protestant Northern Irish; but remains the norm in the rest of the UK?
The Conservative part of this Coalition government has become less Conservative, as we, the electors, have always understood the term to mean.
Since Cameron became, first of all, the party’s leader and then prime minister of our country, the liberal taint has replaced the historical denotation of British Conservatism, and its function as a party of traditional values which has been put, like Old Labour, not even in the recycle bin - but in the rubbish bin of history, never to be used again.
These riots may have reached their climax; or may have set in motion the blood foaming Tiber. Either way, the politicians have to revaluate the policy of ‘policing by consent’. They have to back the people and their view which demand that the police, like their colleagues on the continent of Europe, should be provided with the same means of crowd dispersal provided by water cannon, tear gas, and plastic rounds.
But above all, we as a nation must counter the invincibility complex our youth have been allowed to feel toward the law. We must up the stakes and be prepared to physically punish in our schools, and make criminal behaviour among these ‘feral rats’ (as I heard them called by one of their victims today) unpalatable.
How this is done, will prove a major problem after some 45 years of liberal hegemony; part of which has demanded that all forms of discipline including physical punishment; either in our schools or any ware else should be prohibited; even if it leads, eventually, to the scenes we have witnessed on our streets since Saturday night.
No comments:
Post a Comment