salute tottenham

you

you

Well-known member
When will K Punk post an analysis up on his blog? I've been checking it for a week now but still nothing.....

Felt like a Gordon Burn novel for a whilst the other week.
 
IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
OK, located the prison, thanks Baboon, I owe you a number of pints as does [redacted]. I've emailed them and one of my friends has phoned as follows

I just spoke to a nice lady on the help line, she said she's had a lot of calls looking for people. She also said when a prisoner gets taken down they are offered a £2 phone credit, or a pouch of tobacco.. so I think that rules out any phone calls.
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Which I think is pretty shocking - if you're a smoker you're offered the chance to bargain away your rights to feed your addiction.
 
?

...

Beast of Burden
I've been thinking about joining the police in the last few months. Not because I want to become a police officer, but you have to do a few years on the beat before you can become a homicide detective.
 
C

crackerjack

Well-known member
DannyL said:
http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkin...l-ignorance-media-journalism-riots-tony-evans

This is excellent, deserves to go viral.

Couldn't help but be reminded of Chomsky's comments on the class background of most journalists. Just also want to express my incredulity at why the FUCK Kelvin Mackenzie is ever allowed onto a serious news programme.
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Great post Danny. And yes, Mackenzie is scum, though I think his regular appearances on shows like Newsnight is less to do with innate political bias than TV's need for rumbustious polarised 'debate', which explains why somebody there thought it'd be a jolly good wheeze to have David fucking Starkey talking about black culture and the 'underclass'.
 
IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
People were talking about the effect of the reporting on the spread of the riots - was reminded of that when I read a piece in Private Eye the other day saying that there riots on a similar scale in Tottenham in March but it wasn't reported (not even in the Evening Standard) because everyone was concentrating on the earthquake in Japan.
 
G

gumdrops

Well-known member
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/aug/28/ken-loach-class-riots-interview

I ask whether it upsets him when his films are censored or withdrawn, and he says: "It makes you angry, not on your own behalf, but on behalf of the people whose voices weren't allowed to be heard. When you had trade unions, ordinary people, rank and file, never been on television, never been interviewed, and they're not allowed to be heard, that's scandalous. And you see it over and over again. I mean, we heard very little from the kids in the riots. You hear some people being inarticulate in a hood, but very few people were actually allowed to speak."

We talk more about the riots, and the subsequent heavy-handedness of the courts. "They'll shoot people for stealing sheep next, won't they?" he says. "But, in a way, whenever something dramatic happens, you know that everybody retreats to their comfort zone – so the Tories retreat to cutting benefits, pulling people out of their houses, savage prison sentences. They want that anyway. So whatever happens is an excuse for them to do what they want to do."

I mention the two young men put away for four years each, after trying to provoke rioting through their Facebook pages. Loach notes, with a shrug, that their cases will probably go to appeal, then adds: "It's the ruling class cracking the whip, isn't it? It's disgusting. We've got to organise. In the words of the old American trade unionist Joe Hill: don't mourn, organise."

He continues, apologising occasionally for "lecturing" me. "I think the underlying factors regarding the riots are plain for anyone with eyes to see … It seems to me any economic structure that could give young people a future has been destroyed. Traditionally young people would be drawn into the world of work, and into groups of adults who would send the boys for a lefthanded screwdriver, or a pot of elbow grease, and so they'd be sent up in that way, but they would also learn about responsibilities, and learn a trade, and be defined by their skills. Well, they destroyed that. Thatcher destroyed that. She consciously destroyed the workforces in places like the railways, for example, and the mines, and the steelworks … so that transition from adolescence to adulthood was destroyed, consciously, and knowingly.

"I don't recall the nihilism among kids now, 40 or 50 years ago," he says. "Now there is no place for kids, period. So I think despite the material advances, we're worse off." We also don't seem to have a political class that understands, on any level, what it's like to face unemployment. "No, the Bullingdon boys have never had to confront that," says Loach. "The Bullingdon boys will wreck restaurants and …" he pauses. "Just throw some money at it?" I say. "Yes, or their parents will throw money at it."
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