Don’t Whinge or Preach – Do The Job

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A district judge in Nottingham has said people should speak to the government if sentences seemed lenient.

Tim Devas, district judge at Nottingham Magistrates Court, also told Craig Cave, 26, of Burrows Avenue, Beeston, to “sort his life out”. Cave was found guilty of obstructing the police and was fined £60. Devas asked Cave if he now felt ashamed about being one of the “hundreds of yobbos” arrested. He went on “Let me give you a piece of worldly advice. Get a life, sort yourself out. Don’t you feel ashamed that you are now counted among the hundreds of yobbos arrested and now considered as scum by the public?”

He went on to tell the court: “If there are any criticisms of sentences handed down by the courts, if you want anyone to blame, then go and speak to the government. Do not blame the judges or the magistrates who do their jobs professionally and abide by the guidelines set down.”

Since you are keen on handing out advice judge, here is some from me. The maximum penalty for obstructing the police is one month in prison and £1,000 fine. The Prime Minister and the Home Secretary have been telling you for three days that the people responsible for the disorder that has killed people, wrecked businesses and burned people out of their homes must face the full severity of the law. Obstructing police who were there to restore order is a serious offence in that context.

Asking this criminal if he is ashamed and then whining to the public that they should complain to the government for your encouragement of crime just shows that you do not understand your role. I suspect that Cave might be rather more worldly than the judge. Sixty pounds is a penalty for parking in the wrong place or dropping a fag end on the pavement, not for contributing to terror on the streets.

OK, you take account of a guilty plea. That might justify the prison sentence being suspended, but you still fine him the full £1,000. A £60 fine is derisory and you are a disgrace Devas.

Iran Is Worried About Human Rights In Britain

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Iran has called on the British government to “restrain” the police and stop the “violent treatment” of rioters.

The foreign ministry spokesman, Ramin Mehmanparast, said dialogue would calm the situation, and urged the UK to respond to the demands of the “protesters”. He also asked human rights organisations to investigate the death of Mark Duggan, which led to the riots. Hossein Ebrahimi, the deputy head of the parliamentary committee on national security and foreign policy, said Britain should facilitate the visit of a group of experts to investigate “human rights violations” in the UK “without making false excuses”, according to the English-language state-run Press TV. Ebrahimi said that “the group of rapporteurs intend to interview political detainees and to give a report to international bodies on the treatment received by the protesters,” the report said.

Iranian media have presented the recent rioting and looting across London and other cities as social unrest fuelled by bad living conditions and police mistreatment of the poor. Iranian MPs condemned what they described as police violence. “An Iranian majlis [parliament] national security and foreign policy sub-committee has urged the UK to immediately stop violent treatment of people protesting the killing of a black man,” Press TV reported on Tuesday. Mohammad Karim Abedi, the vice-chairman of the parliamentary committee “urged London to order the police to stop treating protesters violently”.

Iran’s Fars news agency, mouthpiece of the revolutionary guards, has widely reported the rioting and looting across Britain. “We advise the monarchical regime of Britain to respect the rights of its people by avoiding savage behaviour,” Fars quoted Seyed Hossein Naqavi, an Iranian MP of the parliamentary human rights committee, as saying. Naqavi said: “The British people have come to the streets to protest at the security forces’ deliberate gunfire at Duggan.”

Iran is an ancient civilisation with a rich culture from which we could learn a lot. Unfortunately the bunch of thugs who seized power by force 30 years ago should hang their heads in shame at their sickening regime rather than preaching to other countries. The buffoon Ahmadinejad addressed the UN with the long dead ‘hidden imam’ looking over his shoulder. The guy who really runs the country, supreme leader Khamenei, claims to have met this imam who disappeared 1,000 years ago. It is bad enough that this dictatorship is headed by people who are delusional. What is more important is that they preside over murder, torture, rape and a system of unspeakable savagery.

Dozens of activists were killed and thousands detained after Iran’s disputed presidential elections in 2009, and there is widespread torture and rape inside the country’s prisons. Those detained often disappear completely so nobody knows whether they have been executed or remain imprisoned without charge or trial.

There is no proper judicial system in Iran, but in the name of sharia, they stone people to death and execute gay teenagers after savagely flogging them. Recently they sentenced a man to have his eyes destroyed with acid, but the victim of his crime decided not to carry out the punishment. This sickening barbarism is in the context of a society whose economy has been wrecked and the regime is kept in power by unaccountable thugs calling themselves revolutionary guards.

Of course we should have no regard for the criminal Iranian state suggesting how we might sort out our problems, but they feel they can make this suggestion because they are offended by British government calls for human rights enquiries in Iran. This should be a lesson to our government. Concentrate on curing the problems of the country you were elected to govern. I hope that the Iranian people will soon be able to choose a legitimate government of their own, but that is a matter for them to achieve.

Related articles

• UK riots: Iran condemns police ‘violence’ (guardian.co.uk)
• Iranians Use London Riots As Propaganda (news.sky.com)

From Duggan to Destruction – Stop the Contagion

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Who was Starrish Mark Duggan?

Duggan’s Facebook page, under his alias Starrish Mark, showed him in a T-shirt with the words Star Gang. Reports suggest he probably had links to that group and allied north London gangs such as the Broadwater Farm Posse and Tottenham Mandem. These street gangs are said to be associated with the violent ‘Yardie‘ gangs of Jamaican origin. A photograph of Duggan making a gangsta gun pose with his fingers strengthens the impression that he wanted to advertise this gang allegiance.

The Voice, Britain’s leading black newspaper, has claimed that both Duggan and his cousin, 23 year old rapper Kelvin Easton, known as Smegz, “had links to the Star Gang.” Easton, described by londonstreetgangs.com as an “elder” of a group collectively called the Farm Mandem, was stabbed to death with a broken champagne bottle at the Boheme nightclub in Mile End, East London, in March.

When Duggan was shot in a mini-cab last Thursday he was under investigation by officers from Trident, the Metropolitan police unit responsible for gun crime within the black community. Duggan’s Facebook page carried photographs of him and a large number of messages left by friends. Several shots showed him in gangster poses; in others he is dressed all in black, or shown gesturing from behind the wheel of a yellow sports car with headlights blazing. Beneath that photo Duggan posted the message: “I aint even countin money no more, if it aint right it jus aint right, it does’nt even matter 2 me no more.”

According to some residents of Broadwater Farm, Duggan was a crack cocaine dealer who routinely carried a gun. Some of the messages posted by friends on his Facebook pages suggest gang involvement, referring to Duggan as a “soldier”, a “true star boy” and a “five star general”. One of the messages left among the bouquets outside Duggan’s family home referred to “Gang N17 Farm”, the name of one of the Star gang’s allies.

Shortly before he was shot Duggan sent a message on his Blackberry saying ‘The Feds (police) are following me’. Early stories of an exchange of fire in which a police officer was hit are now in doubt after indications that the bullet lodged in the police radio came from a police issue gun. It remains likely that Duggan was the subject of police attention because he was suspected of being armed and possibly on a mission to avenge the death of his cousin.

Family and supporters of Duggan gathered outside Tottenham police station on Saturday evening. Although the whole world had been told that the IPCC was investigating the shooting and the police could not comment, this group apparently didn’t know that so they demanded ‘answers’ and ‘justice’ from the local police. At some point a teenage girl starting throwing things at the police. It is alleged that she was hit or knocked down by a police officer and this seems to have been taken as a signal to burn police cars. Full scale riot and looting began.

We won’t know the full circumstances of Duggan’s shooting until the IPCC completes its enquiry, but the information circulating so far is enough for me to consider that the dead man was a reasonable subject for attention by armed police. It is to be expected that Duggan’s family will present him in a different light. Their genuine pain is a matter for them. I hope that they will now stay completely out of public view and hold an entirely private funeral. Anything other than that will be inflammatory.

Within minutes of the first disorder on Saturday night, arson, looting and attacks on police were being coordinated by Blackberry messages. There was some degree of tactical sophistication in attacking one area and then when the police had organised their resources, calling off that activity and declaring another target area. None of this had anything to do with Duggan or the teenage missile thrower. Anything could have been the trigger. This was emphasised even more strongly on Sunday and Monday nights when the criminal attacks spread across London and into other English cities.

What common factors are there in the disorder?

• Different races are involved, but the rioters are predominantly black.
• Most rioters are young and some are children.
• The targets are high value looting without any political content.
• The rioters may be jobless or too young to work, but they have Blackberrys, Iphones, etc.

It is likely that there are a few people taking advantage of this situation to pursue anarchist or other revolutionary aims, but they are probably insignificant. There is no organised anti-government movement.

Urban gangs will undoubtedly try to consolidate their influence over neighbourhoods in this situation. Apart from asserting the territories in which they do illegal trading there may be attempts to exclude the police and impose their own control.

This is not protest about the death of Mark Duggan. It is not a politically coherent opposition to to our system of government. Although the depressed state of the economy could be an aggravating factor, there is no financial action that could be taken which would have any effect on this situation.

These riots, robberies and looting are a failure of social control. This is a society breakdown because of alienation. The criminals do not relate to the bureaucracies which hand out benefits, but are faceless and unaccountable. The youth are not dependent on work or their families for their means of life. They have a basic handout that they take to be a right and they have no interest in where it comes from. Beyond that their aspirations are to have cars, girls, status and power. The only people they can see who have these things are the gangs who control drugs, sex and protection.

There must be an immediate fix followed by a longer term solution.

The fix now requires:

• Special courts sitting continually to process those who have been charged as quickly as possible. These need to be conducted by District Judges without juries.
• Wide distribution of images of those responsible for crimes and a public appeal to identify and locate offenders.
• Emergency police powers to close businesses and clear areas until order is restored.

As soon as the riots have been suppressed the root cause has to be addressed. The heart can be knocked out of gang finances by de-criminalising recreational drug use and removing legal restrictions on the sex industry. Alongside that there needs to be targeted police action to arrest the criminal leadership without excessive hesitation due to race or supposed cultural sensitivity.

In the affected areas there must be a zero tolerance approach to criminal damage, graffiti, rubbish, gang tagging and border marking. Communities must be cleaned up by people working community sentences. It is particularly important that influential gang members are returned to their own communities and seen to be required to work, stripped of their bling and bravado. It is only in this way that the grip of these people will be broken and the culture of respect, honour and quasi-military deference discredited. Instead of lauding themselves as soldiers, community wrecking criminals have to be seen as the destructive parasites they are.

Most importantly for the longer term our welfare system must be progressively dismantled. Far from riots being the product of poverty or disadvantage they are permitted by handouts and indulgence of indolence.

It will be claimed that denying benefits to people like Duggan, who had four children, will force them into crime. This is laughable. I don’t know if he did any legitimate work, but his Blackberry, his mini-cab journeys, and his lifestyle posing with flash cars in gangsta pose was not financed by welfare. Benefits are a comfortable cushion for times when the crime is quiet or too hard work.

Time may tell whether Duggan was out to kill or that his death could possibly have been avoided. Whatever the case of that, it is not the reason why London and other cities are gripped by arson and theft. The rioting comes out of failed communities.

The only solution is greater self-reliance, simpler laws that are rigorously enforced and governments that allow people to earn money legitimately and does not take too much of it away from them when they have worked for it. The last thing we need is another army of community workers, capacity builders and all the other nonsense that has excused crime for far too long.

Related articles

• Mark Duggan died of single gunshot wound to the chest, inquest told (mirror.co.uk)
• London riots: Dead man Mark Duggan was a known gangster who lived by the gun (telegraph.co.uk)

Tottenham in Flames

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Twenty six years after PC Keith Blakelock was murdered on the Broadwater Farm estate, riots have erupted in the same area after a man was shot dead by police.

Tonight there are buildings and vehicles burning and looting has taken place in the centre of Tottenham with reports of around three hundred people involved in disorder.

We do not yet know if the man who was apparently killed by a police bullet on Thursday was himself armed, but there are reliable reports that a police officer was struck by a bullet in that incident and he only escaped injury because it was his radio that was hit.

We are already being told that this is an area of ‘deprivation’ and a friend of the dead man’s family is reported as saying:

“They’re making their presence known because people are not happy,….this guy was not violent. Yes, he was involved in things but he was not an aggressive person.”

When she says ‘he was involved in things’ she means he was a criminal. There will be an enquiry to establish whether the police acted properly when they shot Mr Duggan. It may be no surprise that his friends and relatives do not have confidence in that, but it is very telling that some of them think it is OK that a person was involved in crime and that they are justified in taking to the streets before they know whether he shot at a policeman.

The people who are attacking police, destroying property and looting shops are not doing that because they are starving, oppressed or suffering from discrimination. They are doing it because they habitually hold their communities in fear and they think they can get away with intimidating anybody who tries to establish order and safety on the streets.

The sad truth is that a quarter of a century after Keith Blakelock’s murder, the police have made no progress in breaking the grip of violent crime infesting the estates of north London. It is impossible to stop the drug dealing, prostitution, unlicensed drinking and intimidation that is controlled by criminals. There are two main reasons for this.

The first is that people will always pay for sex when they want to and people will always get high. Trying to stop these things by making them illegal has no more effect than telling the tide not to come in and outlawing activity that cannot be stopped just passes that trade over to very nasty crooks instead of it being conducted with reasonable safety. The second problem in this specific area is the failure of the police and the local authorities to deal with black criminals. This is partly due to fear of the political consequences of doing it and largely because there are too few black people in policing and running the community.

We will be bombarded with requests for enquiries into poverty and deprivation in the area. Rather than producing masses of hot air and wasting time and money on post mortems of the riot, the real need is to immediately establish zero tolerance of the real crime which destroys residents tranquility and peace of mind.

Get in hard and fast on every mugging, burglary, assault and theft. Stop graffiti and littering. Ensure that habitual offenders are prevented from damaging this community any more. Do that well enough and people will stop being afraid to speak out about crime. They will become more interested in keeping their area nice and they will want to have careers in the police, fire service and other jobs that some are seeing as enemies at the moment.

Criminal gangs are not born out of poverty or deprivation, they come from fear and alienation. Fear must be driven from the streets so that decent citizens can safely build communities.

Related articles

• Tottenham in flames as protesters riot (guardian.co.uk)

G20, tax havens and global regulation

The achievements of the G20 summit seem very limited. Little has been done to give confidence that world leaders understand, let alone agree on, what is required to avoid a repeat of the great depression of the 1930′s. An extra trillion dollars for the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank may be of some use to tide over struggling countries, but it will not provide the increase in demand that is necessary to revive economic activity. A great deal of emphasis is being placed on agreement to deal with the problems caused by tax havens. This is really a bit of a ‘so what’ development rather than the revolution that they pretend. It is a good thing that a handful of tiny countries will find it harder to hide away the money of organised criminals and third world tyrants, but it is not going to bring an end to the world economic crisis. Anybody who believes that new controls will be adopted by everybody or that they will work very well is deluding themselves. Following the failure of the banks who had brought about the most ridiculous financial bubble in history through creating new financial instruments that were traded without their purchasers having any knowledge of the underlying value, there is now a need to revive demand in the face of consumer nervousness and insufficient credit. There is a very simple way to do this and deal with tax havens at the same time. Tax havens are only of interest because taxes are far too high in the overblown interfering states of the developed world. The legitimate role of government is to protect its citizens so that they can freely go about organising their lives and providing for their families themselves. Vast welfare systems, and the dependency that they produce, must be dismantled. This will allow radical reductions and simplification of taxation. Raising the threshold at which people start to pay tax on their incomes puts money into the pockets of poorer people. These are the very people who spend rather than hoard their cash because they need to spend to feed, clothe and house their families. This provides the demand necessary for economic recovery. Taxes above the threshold should be at a flat rate so that they are easy to collect and there is no longer any incentive for honest people to look for tax avoidance in havens. Protectionist actions will be named and shamed we are told. Well so they should be, but we need to go much further than that. There are still masses of duties, quotas and anti competitive specifications which restrict international trade and the G20 states which account for more than 80% of world trade are just as guilty of these protections as the countries outside the group. We need complete freedom of international trade. Not only is this the most efficient way for people to obtain the goods they want at the optimum price, but it also allows the poorest people in the world to break free from their tyrant governments and raise themselves by their own efforts. Best of all, freedom of trade is the sure way out of economic depression. In advocating free trade it should be understood that I am not supporting such a completely laissez faire approach as to permit criminal behaviour to flourish. Wherever there is money to be made there will be a temptation for some to try to cheat. Regulation must exist to prevent crime in trade while allowing the most possible freedom to bring goods to market.

London Whale

 

The tears were for the whale, but the thoughts were for all those with mental health problems on the streets of London.

 

London Whale

 

I cried because the whale died,

Stranded, lost and helpless.

The open sea should be his home,

but he had come to London.

 

I cried because the whale died,

a mighty beast, and graceful.

In proper place with peace of mind,

he conquered all about him.

 

I cried because the whale died,

lost in the hands of helpers.

Thrashing out and twitching.

Communication lost to him.

 

I cried because the whale died,

out of place and voiceless.

He came because his mind was lost.

Compassion couldn’t find it.

Dockland

 

Down by the river

all along the dock.

You could find your way to Silvertown

by smell alone.

 

The clattering of bones

by the dockland rats

made you tremble as you

sniffed through the smog.

 

Stevedores and dockers slogged

through dark, black dockyards

heaving goods ashore

in the dawning grey.

 

The Silvertown explosion

flattened all about it,

but dockland shifted freight

and the rats gnawed on.

 

Now the smog is cleaned away,

all the dockers put in boxes.

Dockland stands in silence,

reaching for the skies.

 

Silvertown is fragrant,

past the still dock waters,

and a multi storey palace

teems with dockland rats.