The media have fallen over themselves to offer reasons for the riots in the last week, most have been garbage. Here I look over the best and worst of the week’s coverage.
Riots are always a controversial subject for the media, particularly when they involve the vile looting and criminality we have seen this week. Five people are dead as a result and many more have been wounded, so it only seems fitting to begin this article with a look at the two most honest and dignified responses we have seen all week.
Tariq Jahan and Ashraf Haziq would not have been known to many before this awful week, but they are now household names due to the dignity, grace and calm they exhibited whilst idiots, columnists and politicians showed none of these traits. Losing a 21 year old son is never easy, but Tariq Jahan who lost his son, Haroon, as a result of a senseless and evil murder could have justifiably responded with a furious call to arms. Instead Mr Jahan reacted with an awe-inspiring sense of forgiveness and rationale. He was a poised and overwhelming example the looters, papers, broadcasters and politicians failed to follow.
Similarly Ashraf Haziq, a Malaysian student, admitted feeling “sad” for his attackers. He showed a class and compassion Melanie Phillips, Max Hastings and Katherine Birbalsingh have failed to exhibit in their entire lives and careers. As I have said, I do not believe these riots were legitimate protests; they were reckless, criminal riots that exhibited the worst of British culture. However, the writings of the usual right-wing rags show a startling hatred for anyone who is not the product of a middle-class two-parent family. It is worth noting their status as immigrants, for no other reason than their behaviour is more indicative of immigrant conduct than the mass media generally chooses to present on a daily basis.
I will concede my bias. I am from a lower-middle-class background, my dad left when I was fourteen, in the following twelve years I have not seen him once. That is not my fault or responsibility, it was his decision. I will also point out that my mother and brother are teachers, my aunt is a social worker and I have lived and worked (often for the minimum wage) in a number of difficult areas in my adult life, mostly with my British Indian girlfriend (girlfriend, not wife). I have been unemployed for three months now and at various times in the past. This is not a bleeding heart story. I simply feel I am more qualified than most columnists to talk about these issues, but that does not make me right, just more aware of the complex issues they involve than any Express or Mail columnist. (Rant/defence over).
My feelings about Katherine Birbalsingh have been well documented. But her trolling piece of tripe this week was a predictable mix of single-parent family hatred, teacher-blaming and racial insensitivity. In answer to Birbalsingh’s initial question concerning the riots, Mark Duggan was not black, he was mixed race. Secondly why she continues senseless attacks on Anders Breivik’s father is beyond me. She states that:
Jens Breivik, rather than feeling remorse for having failed as a father, was only interested in his own reputation when the appalling Norway killings took place. But when I criticised him, I was shot down by ordinary readers of this blog. How dare I criticise parents when I am not a parent myself! White readers say that they are unable to speak about black absent fathers because they’re white. Fine. But is Jens Breivik black? Yet no one was willing to be critical of his questionable parenting. Parents teach their children the difference between right and wrong. If they are absent, then the child grows up without a moral compass.
No, I and many others criticised you because you do not know the real circumstances of Anders Breivik’s childhood and it is obvious that right-wing ideology, often spouted by papers like the Telegraph which Breivik quoted ad nauseum in his ‘manifesto’, had a far greater effect than his father’s reported absence. Millions of people come from single-parent families and they do not behave like Anders Breivik or the looters we have seen this week. Are you really suggesting people like Barack Obama are simple criminals, a product of a liberalist-led decline in good ol’ fashioned morality? They had worse riots in Victorian England and slavery in nineteenth century America before liberalism you know?! Read a fucking history book…
If you read the Mail this week you’d be forgiven though for thinking liberalism was the great wrecking-ball of our time. Approximately half of its columns included liberalism in the title, blaming it for the end of the family, the ineffectiveness of the Met, crime and Sam Fox’s music career.
Perhaps writers like Birbalsingh, Max Hastings and Melanie Phillips should look at their work as responsible for the stigmatism of the children of one-parent families rather than blindly state that such children are a menacing product of liberalism, unable to learn basic morality if their fathers are not present. Such stigmatism, which I, like many others, suffered at school within systems unable to address the problems it created for me is a product of this vapid, reactionary bullshit.
Melanie Phillips’ attitude consisted of uninformed stupidity and it has already been critiqued brilliantly here. Her basic premise is that liberalism has killed our society and that if we slap our kids about a bit they’ll fall into line. They won’t. Violence begets violence Melanie, it’s a vicious cycle too many kids are hooked into already. Do you honestly think all parents rationalise with their kids? Many of them hit their kids and they simply learn to retaliate with violence, it’s all most of the kids on our streets last week know.
All of which leads me to Richard Littlejohn’s first piece at the start of the week, which still fills me with trepidation and fear. Why? Because it was actually quite good. Ignore some of his misleading detours and for once Littlejohn is reasoned, pro-Eastern European and not blaming Muslims. He saw a “poverty of ambition” rather than financial poverty.
Of course it didn’t last long and normal service was resumed. Having had a thought though, Littlejohn had decided those aforementioned Eastern Europeans were here because of Labour, everything was the fault of liberalism, absent fathers and daytime television. Littlejohn is such a contentious little cunt I will not waste any more time on him. Suffice it to say if you’re of sound mind and you ever want to work yourself into a frenzy, just read this or this.
In other titbits: Peter Oborne articulates Britain’s collective criminality at either end of the scale in the most intelligent way this week, arguing that “that the criminality in our streets cannot be dissociated from the moral disintegration in the highest ranks of modern British society”. And vapid, attention-seeking celebrity Russell Brand blamed the riots on… well, vapid, celebrity culture:
Amidst the bleakness of this social landscape, squinting all the while in the glare of a culture that radiates ultraviolet consumerism and infrared celebrity. That daily, hourly, incessantly enforces the egregious, deceitful message that you are what you wear, what you drive, what you watch and what you watch it on, in livid, neon pixels.
It’s easy not to like Brand but his and Oborne’s articles were two of the smartest out this week.
On the other end of the spectrum, China’s CCTV bizarrely chose this this as the time to ask whether multiculturalism is in crisis but then promptly failed to back this up in way, shape or misguided form. Similarly Nick Griffin (@nickgriffinmep) apparently broke his television and failed to see any of the white faces amongst the looters, claiming that “Black gangstas” and Islamic men were the “real problem” before bizarrely arguing that multiculturalism “demands child sacrifice”. In between this he suggested that he had predicted all this years ago, without providing any evidence, before asking why no one wanted to interview him. Well I’ve got an answer for you Nick. No one wants to interview you because you’re a sad, little, hateful, boggle-eyed cunt with an imagined sense of influence and intelligence. You have nothing to add but divisiveness and hate and there was already far too much of that about…
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