Who’s to blame for the riots?

Who’s to blame for the riots? On Saturday night my co-host Danielle Nicholls came up with an interesting theory that I just love, to talk to maybe it’s rubbish maybe it’s got nothing to it but she said that she thinks one of the reasons why there is so much discontentment in Britain is because the pubs are far too expensive so people can’t go for a pint and go for the what effectively is a sort of group therapy session for Ordinary People. Instead, they are sat at home taking drugs and reading Twitter and getting very upset. Now, I’ve got to be honest with you, I think the loss of pubs has been damaging to Britain but do you think it’s been that catastrophic?

I’m not I’m not terribly much a pub person and never really have been. Back in my wicked gay youth, bars yes but pubs not really. I think certainly that what’s gone wrong is that people have stopped properly talking to each other, the old vision of the pub was really sort of the heart of the community wasn’t it? It’s where everybody got together, high and low and rubbed along and we’ve got fewer and fewer of those things but I think it’s not only pubs and I think back to the world of my childhood, you know in a northern town on a council estate as I keep reminding everybody my father was a tool maker and I was born in the pebble dash semi-detached house.

Oh come on, if you keep talking about being born in the council estate up north you’ll have to change your name to Darren Grimes indeed yeah, I’ve warned our Billy, I’ve worn much better for my age but anyway but, all sorts of other organizations have gone if you actually, if I think back to the world that I grew up in, most people had some sort of religious affiliation and there were trade unions, they were friendly societies, again one of the things that’s gone desperately wrong is the way the welfare state has consumed what used to be self-belief, what used to be self-help societies. If I look back, I’m sort of doing family history to as part of my own autobiography, if I look at the lives of my parents in the 20s and 30s by today’s standards were desperately poor, but they were involved in organization after organization.

Who’s to blame for the riots?

Well, David I will tell you that when I was a kid I was baptized in the church attached to the primary school, I went to the primary school, I went to the Cubs and the scouts that were associated with that church you know, everybody, my mom knew all of the teachers, well my mom and dad knew all the teachers and then there’d be things like the Parish Hall where they’d have parties and all this sorts of thing and you get the impression that life had been like that in England for quite a significant amount of time.

But why did it come to an end? Was it Thatcher & the end of society? When, why did it?

A great deal of it is Thatcher, I mean there is no doubt of course the idiocy of the ruthlessness of Thatcher and the idiocy of the trade unions and the incompetence of so much British history, so much British industry that destroyed society. The reason the north is a problem, those Northern towns only ever existed they were all villages until the 18th and 19th century.

They are the creation of industrialization has gone and they’ve left up these washed up remains, they’ve been cast away, I haven’t forgotten about and also terrible things have been done especially by the local authorities, when you go back to them, the Telegraph ran a piece on Sunderland, you look at what’s left of the High Street, there are a few rotting teeth of buildings poking up in this wasteland of car parks and crumbling high rises and when I go back, which I do rarely to Oldham where my parents come from.

There’s a tiny area of the old centre left and around it is just a wasteland, it’s lunar, well Sunderland, Newcastle and Durham have paid the council in Sunderland to take a lot of the immigration out from their cities into theirs, but you see you’re putting people, the immigrants who are rootless themselves, into communities, using that dreadful word again, that have lost their heart, their purpose, their structure, their economic function, that are disenchanted with the state.

Reasons for Riots Compared

Again, there’s an enormous difference between these riots and the last major ones in 2011. In 2011 the fundamental origins of them followed the shooting by a policeman of Mark Dugan who was a criminal gangster whatever, but it was essentially shopping with violence there was looting buildings and burning buildings, High Streets, there wasn’t this direct confrontation with the police, the thing that I think is really very alarming about these is the direct attack on the state, it’s the direct attack on the visible emblem of the state, the police.

But the problem is with policing today one of the big issues, I’ve stolen this from Peter Blexley so apologies if you’ve heard it before on the channel, but what the police do is one of two things; the National Crime agency deal with top level crime and then ordinary police all they do, is go to do the detective work which is fun and they go from domestic violence incident and violent assault or whatever.

Who’s to blame for the riots?

You know the vast majority of us used to see the police for things like car crime, for things like broken into sheds, for things like bike theft, for things like shoplifting, they’ve given up on all of those crimes now and so all that happens is the police feel like a regional SS that you only see every now and again and actually they’re a bit of a problem. I mean that is so true and this is the problem again with Kier Starmer, look at the words he used a ‘standing army’. It is illegal in England to have a standing army, it has been illegal since 1689 and clearly as a lawyer even without any history, he really should know that but this is the problem, we have had policing by consent, the great invention of Robert Peele back in the early 19th century.

Policing By Consent only Works with Consent

I think two things died over the weekend Andre and I’d be very interested in both of your views on that; one is the idea of policing by consent unless you are a community. If you are a community that is to say you are some form of group of immigrant origin you will be treated with by negotiation with your elders. If you’re white British you won’t and in other words you have police by non-consent that’s been going on years though it just crystallized really.

Yes, I think David we have to leave it there because we’re on that time but you asked the question, who’s to blame for the riots? Here is the answer. There is is a feeling and I think the two-tier policing is the issue here where people say I am being treated to the maximum extent, I mean what somebody said you took the knee for black lives matter, you painted your car for gay pride and you tooled up and put on a helmet for mothers concerned about their children, I think that is the attitude and rightly or wrongly that is the way that people feel, thanks so much to Dr David Starkey.