#ukriot

Social media and legal experts have ridiculed a proposal by British Prime Minister David Cameron to restrict the use of services such as Facebook, Twitter and BlackBerry Messenger to prevent riots.

Read in The Sydney Morning Herald:
’London riot social media blocks ’totalitarian’
http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/london-riot-social-media-blocks-totalitarian-20110812-1iq0o.html

704 inculpations à Londres
https://www.lereveil.ch/704-inculpations-a-londres
« Selon la presse bourgeoise, 704 personnes sont accusées d’avoir pris part aux émeutes qui ont secoué la capitale britanniques, sur plus de 1200 arrestations. »
#UKriots #répression

Mother of man arrested in riots is served with eviction notice - Crime, UK - The Independent
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/mother-of-man-arrested-in-riots-is-served-with-eviction-notice-233685

The mother of a man alleged to have been involved in the riots in London has become the first person in the country to be served with an eviction notice in relation to the violence.

Wandsworth Council announced yesterday that it was evicting one of its tenants, saying it was part of a drive to take “tough action against tenants or members of their households who were directly involved in the disturbances”.

#UKriots

Police monitor beaten in back of police van : Network for Police Monitoring
http://networkforpolicemonitoring.org.uk/?p=349

Independent police monitor punched and kicked to the head and legs in back of police van, while monitoring policing of disturbances.
The Network for Police Monitoring will make a complaint to the Metropolitan police after one of its volunteers was arrested and beaten by police while monitoring the policing of disturbances in Enfield on the night of Sunday 7th August.
Along with two others, Taherali Gulamhussein was stopped and searched by police under section 60 powers, which gives them the right to search for weapons. The police found no weapon, nor any other item that gave them cause for concern. Despite this he was arrested and subsequently beaten in the back of a police van.
Taherali has described how, in the course of the search, he was kicked and punched in the chest and thigh, and that his head was smashed against a wall.
He has also said that after being arrested and placed in the police van he was held down and kicked and punched repeatedly to the face, head and legs. He was left with cuts and abrasions across his face, a suspected fractured nose, bleeding lips, and a sprained thigh muscle. He was held for three hours, and afterwards received treatment for his injuries at hospital.
Taherali and two colleagues were in Enfield to monitor the policing of disturbances in the town and neighbouring areas.
“Things were quiet, and we were walking down the street towards our car”, said one of the police monitors present, “but as we walked by the side of a police van, there was suddenly mayhem.”
“The three of us were wrestled to the ground, handcuffed and searched. It was never made clear why Taher was arrested. The only possible reason I can see is that, while I was carrying identification, he was not. I think he was arrested just so they could find out who he was. That is not a lawful reason for arrest when they had no reason to think that we had done anything wrong.”
“The next time I saw Taherali, it was obvious he had been beaten. His face and forehead were cut and bruised, and he was bleeding around his nose and mouth. The question is, if the police felt they could get away with beating up one young black man in the back of their van, how many other times have they done it? And they wonder why there is such anger towards the police?”
Taherali said “Most black people and young people have their personal stories of this violent racist, ageist aggression. The riots that have happened must be seen in this context, and the context tackled full on.”
The Network for Police Monitoring has said that it is unacceptable that one of its monitors was treated in this way, and that they will be asking for a full explanation and apology

#UKriots #Copwatcher

Quand David cassait les vitrines

http://leveil2011.syl20jonathan.net/?p=1908

Dans une ville anglaise une bande de jeunes défonce une vitrine, s’enfuit dans la nuit, et se dirige en courant vers le jardin botanique. La police les suit, en charge quelques uns sur ses téléphones portables et les met au trou.
Le problème c’est que nous ne parlons pas d’un épisode survenu ces jours-ci. Et que les jeunes arrêtés ne sont pas des casseurs sous-prolétaires. Non, l’épisode a lieu il y a 24 ans à Oxford et les 10 jeunes gens étaient tous membres du Bullington Club, une association étudiante oxfordienne de 150 ans d’âge, fameuse pour ses frasques estudiantines, ses cuites et pour considérer la vandalisation de boutiques et restaurants comme le fin du fin de la distraction. Restaurateurs, commerçants et dénonciations à la police, tout est remis en ordre avec quelques généreuses indemnisations qu’on va puiser dans les grassouillets portefeuilles paternels. Quelques heures plus tôt, les dix jeunes gaillards s’étaient fait tirer le portrait sur les marches d’un grand escalier, tous en uniforme du club, habit de soirée à 1.000 livres sterling (1.150 euros) pièce. Emergent du groupe un jeune David Cameron et un, tout aussi imberbe, Boris Johnson.

#UKriots

British Leader Seeks Public Housing Evictions for Rioters and Their Families - NYTimes.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/13/world/europe/13britain.html

As Britain begins to weigh the costs of the rioting of recent days and ponder measures to prevent a recurrence, the government of Prime Minister David Cameron put forward on Friday a new way of punishing the looters and vandals who rampaged through many of the country’s cities and towns: kick them and their families out of their government-subsidized homes.

#ukriots

Emeutes britanniques ou émeutes anglaises ? http://bigbrowser.blog.lemonde.fr/2011/08/11/uk-or-not-uk-emeutes-britanniques-ou-emeutes-anglaises

#ukriots

Images des émeutes de Manchester : attention, ça dégénère grave.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cbVW_QS2eE

#ukriots

Les yeux grands ouvert à Londres
https://www.lereveil.ch/contrib/les-yeux-grands-ouvert-a-londres
« Des visages souriants, certains derrières des écharpes et des cagoules. Nous sommes à #Hackney, #Londres. Ou alors c’était Hackney hier soir. C’est quelque part ailleurs ce soir, et ce sera encore ailleurs dans quelques heures à peine. Les sourires sont là parce que les rues ont été prises et parce que plus personne n’a peur de la police. »
#UKriots

The State Will Never Shut Down Social Networks « beyondclicktivism
http://beyondclicktivism.com/2011/08/12/the-state-will-never-shut-down-social-networks

On Christmas Eve in 1913 in Calumet, Michigan at a crowded party for striking mine workers and their families, seventy-three people were trampled to death in a panicked rush for the exits when someone shouted “Fire!”. Fifty-nine of the dead were children. There was no fire.

Woody Guthrie’s song “1913 Massacre” blames the event on strike-breaking thugs hired by the mines and it is a dramatic illustration on the necessary limits free societies place on free speech. Reckless and malicious speech – popularly described as “falsely shouting fire in a crowded theatre” – is not a protected or guaranteed right.

.....

This will never happen.

Technically, politically, economically it is impossible.

Technically, it is impossible. Those who want to use communications networks to cause trouble will find ways around the censor ....

Politically, it is impossible. Those who used social networks to share vital information when press and police were absent will not stand for a government that tries to close their only avenue of communication.

Economically it would be a disaster. Business would not stand for it.

To consider shutting down social networks because one person might shout “fire!” is as willfully ignorant and dangerous as suggesting that after someone shouts “fire!” in a crowded theatre we should switch off all the lights.

David Cameron may have shown extremely poor judgement over the last week but even he is not that stupid.

#UKriots #censure

Please Britain, don’t let Mubarak inspire your response to unrest | Mona Eltahawy | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/12/riots-egyptian-mubarak-civil-liberties

Water cannon? Calling in the army? Shutting down or disrupting mobile phone messaging services and social networks in times of civil disorder? Oh the irony of ironies. Six months after my country’s dictator, Hosni Mubarak, stepped down after 18 days of a popular uprising, British prime minister David Cameron, members of parliament and the security services were seriously discussing those draconian measures in response to days of riots.

#UKriots

Ed Miliband links riots to banking and expenses scandals | guardian.co.uk #ukriots
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/aug/12/ed-miliband-links-riots-scandals?CMP=twt_gu

Ed Miliband has said Labour failed to “rebuild the ethic of our country” in its 13 years in government as he linked the looting and rioting of recent days to the “irresponsibility” of MPs’ expenses, the banking crisis and phone hacking.

Attacking a “me-first” culture in which people had lost their sense of right and wrong, the Labour leader said: "There is an issue which went to all our souls – this is an issue not just about the responsibility and irresponsibility we saw on the streets of Tottenham. It’s about irresponsibility wherever we find it in our society.

“We’ve seen in the past few years MPs’ expenses, what happened in the banks, what happened with phone hacking.”

Destroy Property
http://destroyproperty.com/post/8783875058/minneapolis
http://static1.seenthis.net/local/cache-vignettes/L240xH180/tumblr_lpry67f8b-eba2f.jpg
#UKriots

The Clash - Police On My Back
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzZ1N9IuzJM&feature=related

the Clash - Police On My Back

#musique #ukriots

Anti-riots Facebook group deleted after creator exposed as racist | Political Scrapbook
http://politicalscrapbook.net/2011/08/riot-facebook-group-deleted

An anti-riots Facebook group praised by David Cameron was deleted last night after sickening racist comments from its creator were exposed. The page “Supporting the Met Police against the London rioters” had gained nearly one million supporters by the time it was pulled by Sean Boscott, along with his personal Twitter page with over 50,000 followers.

As the viral success of his group even saw interviewed by a Canadian TV station, his past running a Twitter account specialising in “bad taste/offensive jokes” returned to haunt him:

http://cdn.politicalscrapbook.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/boscott_tweet3.jpg?cda6c1
#facebook #UKriots

The Blackberry Shift: From the executives to the urban poor | Anarchogeek
http://anarchogeek.com/2011/08/11/the-blackberry-shift-from-executives-to-the-urban-poor

It happened without us even noticing. Blackberry’s user base has shifted — from business executives to the urban poor. It happened so fast that it’s hardly been noticed in the media. RIM may not even know it themselves.

This past weekend the riots in the UK were not organized via sms, nor twitter, or facebook, but by BBM (BlackBerry Messenger). If you were to say, “a riot organized via blackberry,” you might assume it was a riot of the bankers, it happened in Argentina in 2001, but that’s not what was happening. It was the poor, the underclass, who was using blackberry.

#UKriots

For black Britons, this is not the 80s revisited. It’s worse | Joseph Harker | The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/11/black-britons-80s-mps-media?mobile-redirect=false

So no, this is not 1981. In many ways it’s worse. Those riots were in their own way aspirational – people thought things could get better. This time all the indicators seem to be pointing downwards.

#ukriots

Étudiant, pas d’antécédents: six mois fermes pour avoir volé pour 3,5 livres de bouteilles d’eau.

#UKriots: in courtrooms across country, there was little room for leniency | The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/aug/11/uk-riots-courtrooms-country?CMP=twt_gu

At Camberwell Green magistrates, Nicholas Robinson, 23, an electrical engineering student with no previous convictions, was jailed for the maximum permitted six months after pleading guilty to stealing bottles of water worth £3.50 from Lidl in Brixton. He had been walking back from his girlfriend’s house in the early hours of Monday morning when he saw the store being looted, his lawyer said, and had taken the opportunity to go in and help himself to a case of water because he was thirsty. He was caught up in the moment, and was ashamed of his actions, his defence said.

La justice n’a pas toujours la main aussi lourde:
Deaths in police custody since 1998 : 333 ; officers convicted : none | The Guardian
http://seenthis.net/messages/30475

A total of 333 people have died in or following police custody over the past 11 years, but no officer has ever been successfully prosecuted, according to a watchdog’s report.

Ou encore:

The moral decay of our society is as bad at the top as the bottom – Telegraph Blogs
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/peteroborne/100100708/the-moral-decay-of-our-society-is-as-bad-at-the-top-as-the-bottom

A great deal has been made over the past few days of the greed of the rioters for consumer goods, not least by Rotherham MP Denis MacShane who accurately remarked, “What the looters wanted was for a few minutes to enter the world of Sloane Street consumption.” This from a man who notoriously claimed £5,900 for eight laptops. Of course, as an MP he obtained these laptops legally through his expenses.

Yesterday, the veteran Labour MP Gerald Kaufman asked the Prime Minister to consider how these rioters can be “reclaimed” by society. Yes, this is indeed the same Gerald Kaufman who submitted a claim for three months’ expenses totalling £14,301.60, which included £8,865 for a Bang & Olufsen television.

Or take the Salford MP Hazel Blears, who has been loudly calling for draconian action against the looters. I find it very hard to make any kind of ethical distinction between Blears’s expense cheating and tax avoidance, and the straight robbery carried out by the looters.

Is Rioting Revolutionary ? | Adbusters Culturejammer Headquarters
http://www.adbusters.org/blogs/blackspot-blog/rioting-revolutionary.html

This is, for me, the fundamental point: at what point does a riot become a revolution? Must the London youth don Black Bloc attire and shout utopian anarchist slogans while burning cop cars before their acts are recognized as a kind of political rebellion? Must they be able to articulate themselves in a way that is intelligible to readers of Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben and Antonio Negri before their riotous flashmobs are acknowledged as the highest form of networked insurrection yet achieved? I suspect that when revolution comes, the ones who have been too long waiting for it will be the very ones who miss it. For they will be too accustomed to looking in the wrong direction, waiting for the wrong words, the wrong actors, the wrong kinds of political deeds.

The London Riots may not be pretty but as the old-lefty adage goes: “Revolution is not a dinner party, nor an essay, nor a painting, nor a piece of embroidery; it cannot be advanced softly, gradually, carefully, considerately, respectfully, politely, plainly, and modestly. A revolution is an insurrection…” And the London Riots are, whether we like it or not, what an insurrection might look like if the forces of capitalism do not peacefully, voluntarily relinquish their stranglehold.

#UKriots

Bon, dénoncer l’échec du multiculturalisme, ça c’est fait. Maintenant: civiliser l’internet.

In wake of riots, British PM proposes social media ban - CNN.com
http://edition.cnn.com/2011/TECH/social.media/08/11/london.riots.social.media

Saying the “free flow of information” can sometimes be a problem, Cameron’s government has summoned those two social-networking sites, as well as Research In Motion, makers of the BlackBerry, for a meeting to discuss their roles during the violent outbreaks.

“Everyone watching these horrific actions will be struck by how they were organized via social media,” Cameron said Thursday during an address to Parliament. “Free flow of information can be used for good. But it can also be used for ill. And when people are using social media for violence, we need to stop them.”

Cameron said that government officials are working with authorities “to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality.”

Massive Attack soutient les vilains émeutiers // http://massiveattack.com/blog/2011/08/10/media-reaction-to-the-riots

In context with the complicit support of the government, the banks looted the nation’s wealth while destroying countless small businesses and brought the whole economy to its knees in a covert, clean manner, rather like organised crime.
Our reaction was to march and wave banners and then bail them out. These kids would have to riot and steal every night for a year to run up a bill equivalent to the value of non-paid tax big business has ’avoided’ out of the economy this year alone. They may not articulate their grievances like the politicians that condemn them but this is absolutely political.
As for the ’mindless violence’… is there anything more mindless than the British taxpayer quietly paying back the debts of others while contributing bullets to conflicts that we have absolutely no understanding of?

#UKriots

PressTV - ’UK should accept Iran’s investigators’
http://www.presstv.com/detail/193491.html

On Tuesday, Deputy head of Iran’s Majlis (parliament) National Security and Foreign Policy Commission Hossein Ebrahimi said Iran is ready to send a delegation to investigate human rights in Britain.

Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad also on Wednesday strongly condemned the violent treatment of British protesters by police forces.

#ukriots #iran

Pas politiques, les émeutes britanniques ?
https://www.lereveil.ch/contrib/pas-politiques-les-emeutes
« Comme durant les émeutes de 2005 en France, sociologues, éditocrates et lecteurs indignés se bousculent pour affirmer que les émeutes britanniques sont dépourvues de toute portée politique, qu’il s’agit de “pure criminalité”. On pourrait citer tel article du Monde où, par exemple, un garçon de 29 ans déclare : “Il faut se révolter, Les taxes sont trop élevées, on n’a pas de travail et il y a eu trop de coupes dans le budget. Pour le gouvernement aujourd’hui, les jeunes sont d’abord un problème. Il ne faut pas s’étonner de ce retour de bâton”, et une dame, plus lapidaire, sortant d’un magasin un téléviseur sous le bras : “Je récupère ce que m’ont pris les impôts”. »
#UKriots

The Blazing Light in August | Online Only | Granta Magazine
http://www.granta.com/Online-Only/August

I’ve woken up in a riot – inside a London phone box. A brick has just smashed into the glass. There are four of us squashed in to get out of the rain of bottles and stones. I can’t get my arm up to protect my face, we’re all trying to crouch down, I can feel glass fall on my hair. But I’ve got a thick, springy Afro and I can still shake it. My friend’s got blood on his ear lobe; we look at each other and nod, instinctively – the two of us bursting out onto the road and legging it hard and low so the wind of the riot blows over us.

....

That was August thirty-five years ago, and this is August 2011. By my reckoning, the difference between then and now is that this generation of rioting looters and arsonists thinks we failed. Not only did we fail to end discrimination, create better outcomes in education, health, employment and social mobility, we failed to end the entrenchment of hopelessness and poverty in the young. These are not even our children; they strike me as the grandchildren of Thatcherism which told us that the only thing that matters is the money, a consensus submitted to by New Labour – which bought social justice by redistributing money to keep the young in education, to bolster healthcare and the incomes of the poor, and handed on a Treasury note that ‘there is no money’ in an atmosphere of crisis and cuts in public spending to this present Coalition government. These looters are doing what they’resupposed to; grabbing These are riots in the cause of consumer goods.the goods they see in the shops and can’t buy in a recession. They loot the bling – the sports shoes, gold watches, mobile phones and plasma TVs; and you can recognize the very poor when you see a woman looting potatoes from a corner shop. These acquisitive looters are certainly copying the gold standard of a social contract eroded by and evaporating with the money. These are riots in the cause of consumer goods. Burning and robbing other people’s things is one thing, but soon enough, and with no social cause or justice worth the name, people too become indistinguishable from things: witness the widely-circulated photo of the woman leaping for her life from a burning building; such potential deaths still threaten to bring the house down on top of us. This whole distressing episode began with the police shooting dead a black man in north London they said was a gunman; no evidence he fired a shot, we’re told, but the man was already indistinguishable from his gun.

.....

Back then, the sus law, a provision under the 1824 Vagrancy Act, could get you stopped, arrested and convicted on suspicion of an arrestable offence, and was used as a stop and search tool by the police, disproportionately against young black people. Today, provisions under the 2000 Terrorism Act serve much the same function, and I have to ask myself and my generation, what has changed? If the rioters on the streets of London and other UK cities have any accusation to level against me, and against our money-oriented society, I would have no defence against the claim that instead of working our way towards a new kind of social contract that privileged the future of the young we offered them the freedom to over-value money, and then we took it away.

#UKriots

Eyewitness to the London riots - it’s all about class | Workers Solidarity Movement
http://www.wsm.ie/c/eyewitness-london-riots-class-race-2011

Eyewitness to the London riots - it’s all about class

Workers Solidarity interviewed Hackney local and education worker, Alex Carver, about the roots of the London riots. Alex is a long standing activist in the IWW union, housing struggles in the East End, and the big left events since the start of the recession, most recently the M26 Militant Workers Block and the J30 Strike project. He was a direct witness to the rioting on Monday. Here he tells Workers Solidarity why he thinks that the riots are best understood by loooking at class rather than race.

What do you see as the main reasons people are rioting? The left, at least, is identifying racism as a major cause.

I feel quite strongly on this. It is not about race, and it’s not about the shooting either. Those are only elements in an overall economic situation. Up and down the country a racial mix of youth have been taking advantage of the chaos - together. I saw this mix personally, but you can see it on the news and internet too. People are looting because they want things. That’s economic and social, that’s not some kind of misguided protest at police racism.

#IWW #UKriots