Unsung hero of the London Riots: Duwayne Brooks
By Matt Potter / @mattpotter
Some stories write themselves. Some never get written, though they’re better by far. There’s something irreducible about them, too many loose ends. They don’t have neat beginnings and endings. They don’t fit our (journalists’, readers’) idea of the arc. Sometimes they’re just collected impressions.
This one’s like that, and I’m setting it down here simply because I think someone should write the story that never got written. Maybe it isn’t a story after all, but a diary of sorts. You tell me.
It starts (though I didn’t know it at the time) nearly 20 years ago. As a newly arrived, young, white Londoner, I followed the Stephen Lawrence case through the 1990s, then the 2000s, if not avidly then certainly with the odd mixture of horror, casual compulsion, mounting disbelief at the catalogue of establishment errors or worse, and something… what was that other thing? I guess it a bit like shame, only less easily pinned down. It was a vague, nagging, sticky discomfort that came and went. Something I didn’t like feeling, but knew it wasn’t to be shied away from. It was an itching unease about what might, for others, lurk beneath the surface of a society that I, white, lower-middle-class and male, may not always have liked, but had always, personally at least, experienced as fair and neutral in its justice.
The Condensed #Nov30 PMQs
This is our semi-regular account of Prime Minister’s Questions, each PMQ exchange has been condensed into less than 140 characters.
Though it is based on what was said, it isn’t a literal document so don’t sue us.
When upwards of 2 million public sector workers were on strike, hundreds of thousands of people were marching across the country against the government’s austerity cuts in pensions and public services… Members of Parliament crossed the House of Commons picket lines to shout at each other.
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“Riot” Evictions Campaign update
Maite de la Calva with her daughter and their block of council flats
On Friday 12th August, three days after the England riots had come to an end, the Conservative Communities Secretary, Eric Pickles declared on the BBC that “looters should be evicted”. David Cameron later that day, had given his “full backing” for councils to evict entire families. Wandsworth Council had already served an eviction notice on Wednesday 10th, to Maite de la Calva even though her 18 year son, Daniel Sartain-Clarke is still yet to be convicted with riot related charges. The mother of two who took no part in the London riots and has stated fear for her 8 year old daughter’s education and well-being, has accused the Local Authority for behaving like “fascists”.
In London, four councils had publicly stated to evict “rioters”, there were two Conservative: Westminster and Hammersmith & Fulham, and two Labour: Southwark and Greenwich.
Today’s Prime Ministers Questions translated in tweets
Disclaimer: THIS IS A JOKE
Ed M: How is the Business Growth Fund going?
PM: I’d happily blame you gits for every problem we’re facing. We are doing more than you
Ed M: Keep chatting shit. You’ve helped two businesses. Are you doing enough?
PM: You failed to control banks, so *blows raspberry*
Yesterday’s Prime Ministers Questions – Condensed in Tweets
As some followers of The Multicultural Politic, are aware, every now and then I translate the waffle and guff spoken during Prime Minister’s questions into ordinary language. The words in quotes are literal, everything else is inferred by me.
DISCLAIMER: This is only for fun not an accurate reporting of the event.
Southwark Unites Against the Emergency Budget – 19/07/10 @ 7pm
Southwark Trade Union Council presents: Southwark Unites against the Emergency Budget at the Salvation Army Community Church Hall, 1 Princess Street, London SE1 6HH on Monday 19th July 2010 at 7pm.
The Coalition Government have declared war against working people and the poor. Despite attempts to dress up the budget as “progressive”, independent economists have given it a damning verdict.
Osborne’s Legacy – A generation on the unemployment scrap-heap
by Chuka Umunna
So now we know: the action being taken by this Lib-Con government in the name of deficit reduction will cost at least 1.1m jobs across the public and private sectors. How do we know this? Because the Treasury says so, hence today’s big story.
But far from the media circus, a new deficit is growing. Not a fiscal deficit, but a generational one. It takes the form of the thousands of young people who will leave school this September with no prospects of work or training and who risk slipping into a crippling cycle of long-term unemployment. It is a debt that the new government is racking up in order to fund a macho, ideologically motivated drive to slash government spending deep and fast. And unlike the fiscal deficit, it will not take four or six or 10 years to pay down; it will take a generation.
Liberal Democrat Hypocrisy
So VAT is up to 20% next year and Nick Clegg has indicated that most Liberal Democrats will vote for it.
Hat/tip: DBH
‘Knocking seven bells out of each other…’
By Majeed Neky
Having stood in the recent local elections and still catching up on sleep, I’ve spent more of my last few weeks than I’d have liked defending the coalition (a colleague even suggested that I allocate ten minutes for general abuse about the actions of ‘my’ government at the start of each day, just to get it out of the way). My arguments have been pretty similar to those already aired here. ‘New politics’ it is not, certainly not from my perspective. Having defended the government to people on the left, the right and the centre with equally little success, it doesn’t feel like Punch and Judy politics has ended – just that the Lib Dems have been inserted into the middle like the traditional string of sausages.
My petty troubles aside, the inevitable cracks in policy and, it seems, equally inevitable scandals shouldn’t distract us from a deeper point about the way that politics is conducted. This is something that I’ve been thinking about for a while, as some of my previous posts at http://whorunskingston.wordpress.com will evidence, but it came back to me sharply after last week’s Thirsk and Malton parliamentary election. With the Conservative win there a fairly foregone conclusion, press interest centred on the adversarial campaigning of the coalition partners, with Radio 4’s Evan Davis asking ‘How can they be knocking seven bells out of each other one day and then go back and be loving each other again in Cabinet?’
Why is this more than just a tricky operational problem that will interest electoral anoraks of the future? Because the answer is quite simple: the people doing the seven-bells-knocking aren’t the same people who are in the Cabinet. Granted, this is pretty obvious – but the coalition arrangement has thrown the disconnect between the professionalised political classes and the interested amateurs into sharp relief, and it’s not a problem that’s going to go away under a majority government.
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The Tweeted #PMQs on Welfare Reform Bill Day
So it was the big day for Welfare Reform Bill, with plans of cutting benefit to disabled children, cancer patients and families living in adequate accommodation. Labour had a big chance to show whose side they were on and… well read it for yourself.
Farrely (Lab): You are cutting front line officers. Stop that shit
PM: Labour support the cuts and we’re sacking police pen pushers
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