Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Categories
In this Discussion
Top Posters
- Arkady 5356
- miss annie 5139
- andy 4506
- Ali 3405
- krappyrubsnif 3208
- tosscat 2291
- David 2179
- ADGS 1875
- kreuzkav 1733
- Mirandola 1618
Comments
<a href="http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/peteroborne/100100708/the-moral-decay-of-our-society-is-as-bad-at-the-top-as-the-bottom/">The moral decay of our society is as bad at the top as the bottom </a>
This is currently one of the most shared links on my Facebook, and interesting that every person sharing it is on the left. Why aren't the wonks from the Guardian and the Labour Party talking more about this? Afraid of taking a moral stand? Interesting that it takes a commentator from a Conservative newspaper to solidly challenge the morality of venal politicians, big business, corporations etc who actually run the show.......
i've since heard adgs that rioting is very hard to prove, as you need to show a common purpose between 12 or more different people, and that is why it hasn't been charged.
I have spent the last 20 years working with deprived and often difficult families, and teenagers in particular, the kinds of families repeatedly mentioned in Cameron's speech today. In the past year service after service has been cut to the point that since April we have not been able to offer much more than tea and sympathy, for example to a sixteen year old who had been thrown out of her home by her mother who had severe mental health problems and who had eaten one meal a day for the past 3 days because she still managed to get herself to school where she got lunch. There seems to be an impression that youth services just provide a few pool tables for a couple of hours in the evening. Youth services did far more than this, but the work they did was not seen by much of the community because why would you? You weren't using the services. It is also true to say these services were always a sticking plaster. They made lives most of us would find unbearable bearable for periods of time and they also acted as a valve to release some of the pressures on families with complex problems.
I have also read The Spirit Level and found the empirical evidence offered on the relationship between inequality and societal problems compelling. The comparison between the immorality of bankers, MPs etc isn't lost on these kids either many of whom have expressed feelings that they are paying for a situation that they in no way created. There is huge anxiety about cuts in EMA and the increase in fees for kids who have been repeatedly told that education is their way out. TIme and again I have heard kids express feelings of despair that doors are closing on them. The combination of unavailable / unaffordable housing, low pay and unemployment makes their future seem insurmountable. This is the one major change I have noticed over the 20 years of doing this work, whereas young people, even those in dire condidtions, used to be generally optimistic that their lives would get better in the future (even if they had no idea how that was going to happen) that optimism is no longer the norm.
And wherever there is communism, there's all of the above in even greater quantities.
Which is one of the reasons why after years of enjoying the Guardian, I really struggle to read it now, as its relentless bias makes it infuriating.
The first paragraph is fundamentally deceptive.
'Ponder, for a moment, the second-most unequal country in Europe. Its prime minister, who failed to win an outright majority, heads a government whose cabinet contains several millionaires, and embarks upon an ideologically driven economic policy against almost all international and professional advice.'
It deliberately sets the first sentence about inequality and almost everything that follows against the wealth of the current cabinet. Highly disengenous. ONS figures show that while wealth rose overall for everyone, the gap between the rich and the middle and the poorest got noticeably bigger under the last Government.
Secondly, 'an ideologically driven economic policy against almost all international and professional advice' - well that depends on your point of view doesn't it. It might be against 'all international and professional advice' of those who are anti-cuts or subscribe to Keynesian economics. But to paint it as a maverick move that no one in their right mind would ever approve of, is simply untrue. There are plenty who back the economic action being taken.
One opinion example, the IMF has given its support to the economic policy. One markets example, UK ten-year gilt yields are at 2.54% (0.28% above German bunds). That's down towards the level of countries considered to have sound finances and no debt problems (and below France) not up there with the debt-ridden economies.
That first sentence - the most important in any article - turns this into propaganda.
Other minor issues are that:
The previous Government was knee deep in not properly investigating phone hacking and fiddling expenses.
The riots weren't political protests against an oppressive regime - they were mass looting and theft.
Beyond that, on the point of the article I agree. Kicking families out of their council homes is wrong.
A global credit boom, yes. But much of it was engineered and encouraged in London* by a laissez faire supposedly leftist Government that spent 15 years sucking up to the City and media barons and failed to put anything aside in all those consecutive quarters of growth - which were often driven by people remortgaging their homes for increasingly high amounts and spending the money on consumer crap - for when things went bad.
I don't think a Cabinet's wealth, earned or inherited, matters and Brown's legacy on banks is cloudy: his personally engineered tie-up of the country's one decent bank Lloyds with its basket case HBOS has been a disaster.
If as is suggested by the comment piece above the riots were about inequality, you cannot simply decide to ignore the fact that someone else was in government while that inequality was being increased.
<a href="http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/1847.htm">*Excerpt Gordon Brown, Mansion House speech 2005</a>
'Take financial services and capital markets: today Britain exports twice as much in business services as we import and four times as much in financial services.
'And I want to congratulate businesses here on their drive, global competitiveness and innovation which have made the City of London alongside New York the leading financial centres of the world - London, the world’s largest foreign exchange market, the largest foreign equity market, the largest bond market - London's success born not out of serving a large domestic economy, but on winning the lion’s share of international business.
...And now the determination of the financial services authority to extend their risk-based approach of financial regulation that is both a light touch and a limited touch. '
Sounds more like the gangster types I see going up and down Birnam Road.
Which pretty much sums up about 40 years of a complete lack of foresight that has plagued this country, despite many of the solutions appearing to be bleeding obvious. (Including the ones to the cursed potholes)