England – Page 21 – Slugger O'Toole

Ackroyd on London riots.

Dewi on August 23, 2011, 1:43 am

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http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/peter-ackroyd-rioting-has-been-a-london-tradition-for-centuries-2341673.html Ackroyd always wonderful – if you ain’t read his books start with Hawksmoor – an astonishing first novel. Buy it on Amazon: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Hawksmoor-Peter-Ackroyd/dp/0140171134 From his Indie interview: “Rioting has always been a London tradition. It has been since the early Middle Ages. There’s hardly a spate of years that goes by without violent rioting of one kind or another. They happen so frequently that they are almost part of London’s texture. The difference is that in the past the …

Morgan to captain England for historic Dublin game

Pete Baker on August 22, 2011, 4:05 pm

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Cricketing maestro Sachin Tendulkar narrowly missed, again, his century of centuries [lbw for 91] in the fourth, and final, test match against England as India failed to avoid a fourth defeat in the series. And, on Thursday 25 August, the One Day version of the new top ranked Test side will play Ireland in Dublin for the very first time. Former Ireland batsman, Dublin-born Eoin Morgan has been named as captain. For England. England National Selector Geoff Miller said: “The squad we’re looking to take to Ireland involves …

Guido: Met’s failure to investigate #Hackgate is a ‘private matter’…

Mick Fealty on August 20, 2011, 9:26 am

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Strange piece from Guido yesterday. Ordinarily, I’m a fan. Despite his reputation for bumptiousness and arrogance, I generally find his judgement to be precise (and he has some impressive scalps (not all of them Labour) swinging from his blogger’s belt). But I don’t ‘get’ what he clearly wants the rest of us to see here. For instance, he accuses the Guardian editor of, erm, not going through the Met’s Press Bureau in breaking its #Hackgate stories; which is odd coming …

Those English riots and the ideological conclusions that followed…

Mick Fealty on August 19, 2011, 12:15 pm

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Hands up, I’ve no idea what caused the English riots of a few weeks ago. Partly because I was in North Wales, intentionally as far from t’Internet as I could bearably go. But also, there was nothing evidently causal you could point to, as you could in the early eighties, when union versus government ideology was to the fore. I hesitate to make the comparison, or to give any false impression that I know more than I do about any …

Slugger’s guide to A level results day and the best degrees still available through Clearing

Siobhan Fenton on August 18, 2011, 6:17 pm

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Welcome to Slugger’s guide to the best degrees in the UK still available through the Clearing system. All of which start in Autumn of this year. We’ve tried to tailor the following list to the topics most discussed on here- politics, law, journalism, economics, and philosophy. If there are any others you’d like us to keep an eye on for you feel; free to comment below or email me at [email protected] In a day dominated by emotions and photos of …

The riots, the ‘sick society’ and modern conservatism

Lorcan Mullen on August 18, 2011, 6:06 pm

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A great deal of skilled and thoughtful analysis of the causes of the recent English riots has already emerged, and I don’t wish to dwell too much on that subject. Instead, I’d like to examine the government’s response. The prognoses and prescriptions of David Cameron are particularly interesting, delivered as he gazes upon a society he describes as “frankly sick”. What Cameron has said on the riots and looting, and what he proposes to do to stop such events happening …

‘The broken society tops my agenda’

vanhelsing on August 15, 2011, 8:53 pm

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David Cameron has said tackling the “broken society” is back at the top of his agenda following last week’s riots. This is indeed good news as clearly there are some underlying issues to deal with. In his speech today he also highlighted the fact that he would ‘turn around’ the lives of 120,000 of the most troubled families. In fact he said he will put “rocket boosters” under the families the efforts to turn round these difficult social units …

Spare us a phoney row about racism, we’ve got enough on

Brian Walker on August 13, 2011, 3:31 pm

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A silly media row about racism just had to figure in the riots’ post mortem. Was the Tudor history expert David Starkey racist on Newsnight when he said: The whites have become black. A particular sort of violent, destructive, nihilistic, gangster culture has become the fashion. And black and white, boy and girl, operate in this language together, this language which is wholly false, which is this Jamaican patois that’s been intruded in England, and this is why so many …

It’s now about police v politicians

Brian Walker on August 12, 2011, 12:21 pm

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A dust storm is blowing up over the riots but not entirely along conventional party lines. It’s much more like a stand-off between the police and politicians. With the police taking a second political battering in almost as many weeks, you’d have thought they’d be bound to emerge as losers. They still might, if the politicians have useful answers. But have they? ConservativeHome does a great roundup of reaction to the riots and the recall debate. What strikes me is …

Northern Ireland has lessons on police governance for England

Brian Walker on August 11, 2011, 2:16 pm

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David Cameron was very lucky he wasn’t addressing the recalled Commons after a fourth night of serious violence. But government fortunes still greatly depend on what happens now on English streets. MPs were able to unite around the quickly accepted wisdom that the police went in too lightly for at least two nights, without making a tiresome and unhelpful political crisis over it. Of course if the rioting returns, the crisis atmosphere will return. The champion of localism Simon Jenkins used …

Cool hand Hugh

Brian Walker on August 10, 2011, 8:39 pm

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What game is Hugh Orde playing, other than that of the cool statesmanlike top policeman who has got the best grip of any police chief on the rioting since it went nationwide? One day, he’s popping up on TV to tell us how he’s fixing the deployment of outside forces into London, the next day he’s rejecting media and politicians’ calls for plastic bullets ( baton rounds) and water cannon from Belfast to be used on English streets. Careful to remind us he attends …

Thoughts on the politics of the riots

Turgon on August 10, 2011, 2:23 pm

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Riots are not common in mainland GB. Every time one occurs there is handwringing by the media who seem torn between denouncing it all as “mindless violence” and trying to understand why it has happened. The same occurs in Northern Ireland of course though previously during the Troubles there seemed more emphasis on understanding and nowadays there is more emphasis on condemning. Politicians are similar to the media in their reactions with the exception that any politician who attempts to …

Northern Ireland lessons for British policing

Allan LEONARD (Mr Ulster) on August 10, 2011, 11:19 am

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I could comprehend when the peaceful protest against the lethal shooting by a policeman of a black youth in Tottenham turned violent — a local community’s frustration at a disconnect with policing in the area. The first comparison that came to my mind were the 2005 Paris riots. But within 24 hours I was disabused of that, as groups of youths set upon other parts of London and beyond, utilising SMS texting on Blackberries (Facebook and Twitter being far too public). A PSNI friend, who …

London riots Day 3. Met tactics come under increasing scrutiny

Brian Walker on August 9, 2011, 1:01 pm

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The picture of burnt out cars may not be the most dramatic of the day, but it is my own and it is very local. I experienced last night in ways all too familiar to old Troubles hands. It was all happening five minutes away but I didn’t hear a thing. I was busy tut-tutting at the TV showing long lingering shots of infernos in Croydon and Enfield. …

Can we find the tipping point when protest becomes riot?

Brian Walker on August 8, 2011, 12:57 pm

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When some people have a serious grievance like an alleged (don’t foreget that “alleged”) wrongful fatal shooting, they rise up in their just wrath and – trash the place. A hideous non sequitur to you and me, a “protest” to many in places where we don’t live. 30 years ago I covered the Brixton riots which were sparked – not caused – by a minor misunderstanding and false rumours. When I and my crew were packing up in a side street …

Sunday Supplement

Martin Mooney on August 7, 2011, 10:00 am

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It being Sunday, we’ve all got time to consider and ponder things at greater length than during the working week, yes? If it’s good enough for the Sunday papers, it’s good enough for this guest blogger. So here’s the review section… Actually, it’s my introduction to a book published last year, Goin’ Down Slow: selected poems of Brendan Cleary. But the book has received no attention here in the north of Ireland and little enough in the poetry press in …

Hackgate: “This may be a story for years to come…”

Mick Fealty on July 22, 2011, 11:59 am

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So says the FT media editor Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson. It’s a good conversation, but it’s also the kind of thing we all say when we really don’t know what’s going to happen next. And there’s a good deal of impatience around this story. Last night saw an ill-tempered spat on Twitter last night, between the Labour MP Tom Watson who’s been driving a lot of the political force (in initial defiance from his party leader), and the BBC’s Robert Peston, because …

A religious view of tablets (the computing kind)

Alan Meban (Alan in Belfast) on July 18, 2011, 8:26 pm

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destroy all onions banner

Other than space, we don’t get a lot of technology on Slugger. Time to redress that balance. A local blogger who found himself at the top of a viewing tower in Tokyo when the earthquake hit turned his attention to tablet computers in a recent post on Destroy All Onions. Umberto Eco famously wrote that fountain pens were protestant, and ballpoints were catholic, because of the universality of ballpoints versus the maintenance and finickiness of fountain pens. That got extended …

In July 1981 people were rioting in Toxteth, Liverpool … can we learn, or do better?

Alan Meban (Alan in Belfast) on July 15, 2011, 9:20 pm

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Doing the dishes and listening to a Radio 4 podcast of this week’s Thinking Allowed, I heard a discussion about the riots in Liverpool more than 30 years on. July 1981 was the first time the UK police used CS gas outside Northern Ireland. Wikipedia sums up the scale of the rioting that lasted nine days: one person died after being struck by a police vehicle trying to clear crowds, 468 police officers were injured, 500 people were arrested, and …

Another case of another police force ‘looking the other way’?

Mick Fealty on July 13, 2011, 6:28 pm

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There’s a striking similarity between the strange behaviour of Gardai, in three cases in which were just forgotten, or in which no serious inquiries were commenced and the behaviour of John Yates, who in 2009 dismissed within eight hours the suggestion that there were any further evidence of wrong doing in the case of the News of the World: Yates was asked by the commissioner to “establish the facts”. It is clear that he failed to do so. On Tuesday, …