BB FANS

Channel 4's Head of News & Current Affairs Dorothy Byrne has commissioned a special one-hour live Channel 4 News debate about the riots.

Made by ITN Productions, the 60-minute special will air on Saturday August 13 at 19:00.

Presented by Krishnan Guru-Murthy, the debate will explore the circumstances which sparked the series of rioting and looting that has spread across the capital and Birmingham and will confront the possible solutions.

Dorothy Byrne said: "These riots represent a national crisis. Confidence in the police to protect public safety has been undermined and many have felt that those in authority have been slow to respond. The sight of young people wrecking their neighbourhoods without hindrance has provoked outrage. These events raise some of the most important issues a democracy can face."

waveguide.co.uk

PM forced to deny rift with police

By Tom Morgan and James Tapsfield

Independent

UK riots: Why did the riots happen? Who are the rioters? What can we do to end this madness?
by Tony Parsons



THE Britain that we knew, the Britain we loved, died on our streets this week. It went in an orgy of mindless wanton murderous violence.

The apocalyptic images of fear are etched in our minds. Decent hard-working people burned out of their homes and businesses, the woman jumping for her life from a blazing building and the have-a-go hero beaten to death in the street.

There are tens of thousands of riot police patrolling our cities, vast numbers of young people locked up and 24-hour courts to mete out justice to them.


Even now it is hard to make sense of such a cataclysmic week. Trying to understand the feelings of the rioters is like trying to understand the feelings of a man who has his boot pressed against your throat.

They don’t have hope? They don’t have a future? They don’t have plasma TVs? Who cares?

Frankly, my dear, many of us do not have the stomach for sympathy right now.

We just want to see the rioters banged up and stewing in their own filth.

Too many innocent people have suffered because of these riots. Too many have felt terror. Too many have had their world ripped apart.

Too many have been burned from their homes. Too many have seen their children weep in terror. And too many have seen their loved ones die.

When the Luftwaffe dropped bombs on the East End, my grandmother did not ponder the underlying causes of Fascism.

And yet if we are to hang onto some last hope that this is still a civilised society, then the questions have to be asked. Why did the riots happen? Who are the rioters? And what must be done to prevent them making our lives a misery? As the assorted goons get dragged off to court, much is being made of the almost infinite variety of scumbags.

Grown men and children. Male and female. White and black. The sons of single parents and allegedly the daughter of a millionaire, plus a primary school teacher.

An organic chef and university student are also alleged to have been involved.

But as a Londoner, let me make a wild guess – the overwhelming majority of the rioters will turn out to be of a very specific type, and it was this lost generation that made the riots possible.

As all law and order broke down on the streets of the capital, when the buildings burned and the children screamed and 999 calls meant nothing, there were opportunists who joined the riots to grab whatever they could. Common thieves will always be with us.

But most of the rioters were not organic chefs. They were of the generation that is good for nothing and yet scared of nothing.

Without the gang culture of black London, none of the riots would have happened – including the riots in other cities like Manchester and Birmingham where most of rioters were white.

The snarling, amoral pack mentality of gangs that are too often a substitute for family, school and work made the riots possible. These youths were the shock troops of the riots, and its inspiration – even in the white riots of Piccadilly, Manchester.

This is desperately sad for all of us – but especially all the decent, hard working black men and women in this country. They have worked hard for all they have. They are a positive force in this country. They do not deserve to see the clock turned back to the Seventies and Eighties, when racism was overt and vicious. But that is what will happen. The images of black youths running wild will not be quickly forgotten.

We hear a lot about feral children. But when Tottenham erupted it was pointed out that there were many men in the area who are in their late twenties, and who have never worked.

It has always been hard for this community. Too many schools where it is not cool to study. Too many homes where there is no father figure to put the fear of God in you. Too many streets where they have been sapped by a welfare system that was meant to protect the vulnerable not bankroll an unemployable generation.

Too many looks from white faces who fear and hate you because you are black.

Yes, and too many dreams built around hard-core porn that is now as difficult to get as electricity or running water. Too many songs where women are “bitches” and men make their point of view with extreme violence.

Too many Grand Theft Auto fantasies that make the powerless dream of being powerful. It is an unholy mess, and it is a national tragedy, and I see no end to it.

There are too many out there who have no respect. Too many who are uneducated, illiterate and stupid. Too many who do not know the difference between right and wrong. Too many who think the rules do not apply to them.

The story going round is the riot in Tottenham started when, after the death of Mark Duggan, a girl threw a stone at the police and was then pushed by a cop. But what do you think is going to happen if you throw rocks at the police?

The key, I believe with all my heart, is social mobility. Children of every background need to believe that hard work will be rewarded. That if you study at school it will result in higher education and a job. That – no matter where you come from – it is possible to get up and out if you want it bad enough, and if you work hard enough.

But social mobility is dead in this country now. Too many have no hope of self-improvement. There is an Old Etonian in 10 Downing Street who despises the idea of grammar schools. Because they are unfair. Just like life, you mean?

I spent the first five years of my life living in a flat above a greengrocer’s shop. Yet I never doubted I could be anything I wanted to be.

Why did the riots happen? Because we live with a lot of scum in our midst.

Mark Twain said, it is cheaper to build schools than jails.

But we did not build the schools, and we let the schools we do have rot. Now we must build the jails.

Mirror

David Starkey claims 'the whites have become black' during UK riots Newsnight debate
By Mirror.co.uk

BBCIplayer

Historian David Starkey has sparked controversy after claiming 'the whites have become black' in a discussion on Newsnight about the UK riots.

In what has been described as a "career-ending moment" by Labour MP Jeremy Corby, Starkey, who received a CBE in 2007, spoke of "a profound cultural change", and said he had been re-reading Enoch Powell's 'Rivers of Blood' speech.

He said: "His prophesy was absolutely right in one sense. The Tiber did not foam with blood but flames lambent, wrapped around Tottenham and wrapped around Clapham. But it wasn't inter-community violence. This is where he was completely wrong."

Gesturing towards one of the other guests, Owen Jones, who wrote Chavs: the Demonisation of the Working Classes, Starkey added: "What has happened is that a substantial section of the chavs that you wrote about have become black.

"The whites have become black. A particular sort of violent destructive, nihilistic gangster culture has become the fashion and black and white, boy and girl, operate in this language together.

"Its language which is wholly false, which is this Jamaican patois that has been intruded in England and that is why so many of us have this sense of literally a foreign country."

"It's not skin colour, it's cultural. Listen to [Tottenham's Labour MP] David Lammy, an archetypal successful black man. If you turn the screen off so that you are listening to him on radio you would think he was white."

Starkey's comments were challenged by fellow guest, writer and education adviser Dreda Say Mitchell.

She told him: "You keep talking David about black culture. Black communities are not homogenous groups. So there are black cultures. Lots of different black cultures. What we need to be doing is ... thinking about ourselves not as individual communities ... as one community. We need to stop talking about them and us."

His comments sparked outcry on Twitter.

One tweet said: "Just watched #newsnight could hardly believe what I was hearing! Well done to @OwenJones84 for standing up to him despite interruptions!"

Another tweeted: "I'm not sure what honors or titles David Starkey has, but it must certainly be an embarrassment to be associated with him #newsnight."

Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn tweeted to the BBC: "Why was racist analysis of Starkey unchallenged? What exactly are you trying to prove?"

Mr Corbyn later told The Guardian: "He tapped into racial prejudice at a time of national crisis. At other times, those comments would be inflammatory but they are downright dangerous in the current climate.

"I fear that some people will now say that David Starkey is right, and you could already see some of them on Twitter. I am worried about a backlash from the right and he will give legitimacy to those views in the minds of some."

A spokesman for Newsnight said: "I think that [presenter] Emily Maitlis very robustly challenged David Starkey.

"The two guests [Jones and the writer and education adviser Dreda Say Mitchell] that we had also quite clearly took issue with his comments."

Mirror

Pack of looters caught on camera pulling biker off his scooter and stealing it

Riots in West Croydon Youtube

Evicting rioters' families from their homes? There's a horrible logic to it

This kind of collective punishment fits into a wider housing agenda of pushing the poor out of profitable inner cities


Social housing
David Cameron has said people who 'loot and pillage their own community' should be evicted from social housing.

Ponder, for a moment, the second-most unequal country in Europe. Its prime minister, who failed to win an outright majority, heads a government whose cabinet contains several millionaires, and embarks upon an ideologically driven economic policy against almost all international and professional advice. It has just faced its largest strikes for decades. Its lawmakers were recently found fiddling their mortgages en masse. Its press was caught phone tapping hundreds of private citizens and politicians, with little hindrance from the police.

Meanwhile, members of that police force had killed a bystander at one protest, and were criticised for violence and intimidation at another. Then, they shot a man, wrongly claimed he'd shot at them first, and young people across the country rioted, setting fire to police cars, attacking police stations, looting high streets and retail parks. After that, courts worked through the night; in Manchester, a mother-of-two got five months for accepting a looted pair of shorts from a friend and a young man got six months for pinching a bottle of water. Finally, these young people's families started to be issued with eviction orders from their social accommodation; a form of housing which said government had already committed itself to dismantling. The prime minister claimed this would help break up criminal gangs.

Put like that, the UK sounds much like what the rest of the world must surely see us as, by now – akin to some post-Soviet Republic about to undergo a "colour revolution'" maybe, or a Mediterranean ex-dictatorship convulsed by civil unrest. Imagine the fundraisers and the Facebook declarations of solidarity were it so.

Yet instead, disturbingly, all these events have been disassociated in many people's minds, with the all-encompassing and highly public corruption and violence of the last few years forgotten (or worse, forgiven) after four days of hardly unconnected, albeit incoherent and indiscriminate, unrest. Yet, even if we acquiesce in the claim by the government and many others that last week's rioting was solely a bizarre, inexplicable explosion of "pure criminality", we should note that criminals are still subject to the rule of law. In a democratic country, if a youth is convicted (let alone suspected) of burgling a shop, it would be all-but-unprecedented for his or her family to be made homeless as punishment. Yet that is what is happening, with Wandsworth council starting the ball rolling and many other councils promising to follow suit.

On one level, it exemplifies that failure of the most basic social understanding that at least helped trigger these riots. The idea seems to be that those in social housing could just find somewhere else, they could just walk into private housing. Like the similar proposals for taking away housing benefit from miscreants, it is based on an inability to imagine what poverty is like, to think for a second what might happen to a family when it loses its income or its home. Given that the riots were largely concentrated in areas where extreme wealth and poverty rub up against each other – from Clapham to the Thames Valley, from Manchester to Bristol – it shows the total mutual incomprehension that we have for our literal neighbours. On another level it is of dubious legality – for a council tenancy to be rescinded, the tenant has to have been convicted of an offence on or near the premises, not always the case in these highly mobile riots; and given that so many of the rioters were minors, their parents will be those being evicted. There's a term for this – collective punishment. It is illegal under international law.

It fits very neatly, however, into a wider agenda on public housing, which is already an emergency remnant of a once-proud institution. The coalition sets time limits on council tenancies and freezes the already meagre levels of social housebuilding; Labour councils embark on massive demolition programmes of large estates and their replacement with developer-led mixed private and supposedly affordable estates. Both have much the same effect – removing the "undeserving" poor from highly profitable inner-city sites.

This is an intensification of that already existing agenda. Knowing that many of the thousands of young people who rioted were living on estates, their expulsion can free up some more space, clear that overstretched waiting list a little. It will make our cities even more Balkanised and unequal, and it will make the young even more dispossessed and angry. Brutal as these proposals may be, they are hardly inconsistent. Like the long-predicted riots themselves, they have not come out of the blue.
Guardian

Revealed: Mark Duggan was not armed when shot by police

Investigators find no forensic evidence he was carrying gun when killed


The investigation into the death of Mark Duggan has found no forensic evidence that he was carrying a gun when he was shot dead by police on 4 August, the Guardian has learned.

A gun collected by Duggan earlier in the day was recovered 10 to 14 feet away, on the other side of a low fence from his body. He was killed outside the vehicle he was travelling in, after a police marksman fired twice.

The new details raise questions about the official version of events. The shooting triggered some of the worst riots in modern British history, which began in Tottenham, north London, in response to the treatment of the Duggan family. The investigation into Duggan's death is being carried out by the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC), but the Guardian has learned new details of the shooting, and a much more complex picture than first revealed is emerging.

On the day Duggan was shot, there is overwhelming evidence he had obtained a firearm, and there is video supporting that. But the investigation is considering whether Duggan had a weapon in his possession when he was shot dead by the police.

The revelations raise questions for the Metropolitan police about the intelligence they had and its interpretation, the planning of the operation, tactics deployed, and the actions of its firearms officers.

The Crown Prosecution Service may have to consider if any officer should face criminal charges.

But the revelations also raise questions for the IPCC, whose public statements appeared to give a different impression of the shooting.

The IPCC had to correct the initial information it released, which came from the Met but which it adopted, saying Duggan had fired and that a bullet had lodged in a radio worn by a police officer. The IPCC later admitted the bullet was in fact most likely a ricochet from one fired by a police officer.

The day he was shot, Duggan hired a people carrier from a taxi firm. Officers from the Met's Operation Trident, which investigates gun crime within the African-Caribbean community, followed it.

Their intelligence that Duggan would obtain a firearm proved correct. A box, believed to have contained the weapon at some point, was found inside and at the back of the Toyota Estima people carrier.

Duggan was followed from an address in Hackney and one in Leyton, east London. As he entered Tottenham, police decided they would halt his vehicle and, fearing he had a weapon, decided to involve armed officers from their elite firearms unit, C019.

The new findings include:

• The weapon Duggan obtained was in a shoe box, in a sock, with a small hole cut away for the barrel.

• The weapon was a converted BBM "Bruni" self-loading pistol. It contained one bullet.

• Neither Duggan's DNA nor fingerprints have yet been recovered from the sock or the weapon. His fingerprints have been found on the shoe box, which was found in the back of the hired vehicle.

• Evidence suggests Duggan's weapon was not fired.

• Duggan appears to have known police were not just following him, but were going to stop him. At 6.05pm, some nine minutes before police say they shot him dead, he sent a BlackBerry message: "Trident have jammed me," he wrote, adding that people should look out for a maroon people carrier in which he believed officers from Trident were travelling.

• Toxicology tests indicate Duggan had some illegal drugs, namely ecstasy, in his blood stream. The effect on his behaviour, if any, is unclear.

• The vehicle was moved by police after the shooting, before independent investigators examined the scene.

Police following Duggan were from Operation Trident and believed the situation developing was "a crime in action", and were aware a relative of Duggan had been killed recently and that he might seek revenge for that.

A rival scenario detailed by a community source is that Duggan was obtaining a firearm after being attacked himself just days before.

Recent police shooting cases have shown that even where the person killed had no weapon, or it was some distance away, if officers can show they had a reasonable belief their life or that of others was in danger, they are highly likely to have a lawful defence.

Part of the reason the IPCC was set up was to have greater credibility within communities affected by police actions. But after the Duggan shooting, the dead man's relatives were critical of how they had been treated. The IPCC and police blamed each other for a failure to keep the family properly informed.

An IPCC spokesperson said: "The ongoing IPCC investigation into the death of Mark Duggan is examining a range of issues. We are providing updates and, where possible, answers to the family of Mr Duggan.

"This is a complex investigation that involves gathering information including witness statements, pathology, forensics and ballistics analysis and we have stated to the coroner that it will be completed within four to six months. We are unable to put information in the public domain until appropriate to do so. Ultimately, the evidence from our investigation will, rightly, be tested and challenged in a public forum before an inquest jury. We would urge people not to rush to judgment until they see and hear the evidence themselves."

In other high profile incidents involving death after police conduct, the first official version has proved wrong, adding to the damage and suspicion surrounding police actions.

Police insiders stress that firearms officers have a highly dangerous job, the risks and realities of which are little understood outside law enforcement circles.

In another development, it emerged police are under investigation over the weapon found where Duggan was shot, after it emerged it may have been used a week earlier in an assault by another person. The IPCC said tests suggested the gun may have been carried by another man in an assault, before somehow being transferred to Duggan.

The IPCC also announced that two Metropolitan police officers are under investigation over whether the assault was investigated properly. It was reported to police and no arrests were made immediately afterwards.

Sarah Green, commissioner of the IPCC, said: "Our investigation will consider whether all investigative lines were promptly identified and acted upon by officers from the Metropolitan police service and to what extent, if any, the conduct of this investigation may have impacted on the supply of the firearm found at the scene of the shooting of Mark Duggan."

In a statement the Met said: "Due to concerns about the quality of the investigative response the MPS has voluntarily referred the investigation to the Independent Police Complaints Commission.
Guardian

Alex Reid: Teaching Croydon children cage fighting could have prevented the riots www.thisiscroydontoday.co.uk

Birmingham riots: Men jailed over police shooting BBC

Riot Deaths: Eight Men Cleared Of Murder
Eight men are found not guilty of the murder of three friends during last summer's riots in Birmingham.
Skynews