The ‘Maroons’ Are Everywhere
Reading the BBC article, Cameron’s law: PM planning crackdown on rioters, the first thing that came to mind was ‘unintended consequences’. If you have rioting, isn’t it possible that some people wouldn’t be organizing looting, but might need an ambulance, the fire service, or other emergency responders? If someone dies because they can’t get help due to the communications shutdown, whose fault is that?
CNN is reporting that Cameron is talking to former NYC and LA chief of police, Bill Bratton, about dealing with gangs. I can’t imagine why, as Bratton is going to tell him that the police have to improve relations in the community and earn the respect of local people. Cameron wants to throw people in jail to prove he’s ‘tough on crime’.
The oddest thing I’ve encountered regarding the riots is this BBC video featuring historian David Starkey. The man claims that the riots prove that Enoch Powell‘s 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech predicted these riots.
The guy should have been wearing white robes and a hood for his appearance. Even though the only common characteristic of the rioters was class, he still wants to make it a race war, with whites as the victims. He claimed that the white rioters were subsumed in ‘the black culture’ which is somehow connected to the Jamaican form of English. Apparently if the people in the communities spoke with a ‘Received Pronunciation’ [RP] accent, the riots wouldn’t have occurred, or some such general silliness.
Most readers would be unfamiliar with Enoch Powell, but he was George Wallace with an upper-class British [RP] accent. He was using the turmoil in the United States in 1968 to justify racial discrimination in Britain.
4 comments
It truly was train wreck tv. I can’t see Starkey getting to do another series on Tudor history any time soon
I was in the Air Force when Enoch Powell made that speech, and my squadron was flying to Britain on a regular basis. I was concerned with a different mission and didn’t go to the UK until later from a different unit. We got a general warning about flights to the UK due to the possibility of racial protests. This was 1968 with all of the assassinations and riots in the US, and the Air Force was worried enough about that speech to issue a warning.
I grew up in Okaloosa County, Florida, where I now live. and am all too familiar with that type of language and its real meaning, even when there is an RP English accent saying it. Starkey should disappear back under the rock he slithered out from.
The news here the past few nights have been reporting on all this. A reporter in London spoke with some senior Met Police officers, and their anger and frustration with their Gov, and Cameron in particular, were obvious! Bringing in American *advisors* may well be the last straw for them.
Yeah… What a Maroon!! He’s obviously lost whatever politician’s survival instinct he ever had!
Yeah, I just posted on that. The worst part, from Cameron’s point of view, it that Bratton is going to tell him that he needs more coppers, and he needs them walking on the streets in the communities. so they aren’t treated like foreign invaders. You need officers who have local connections to head off problems before you have riots.
The organization of neighborhood patrols proves that they don’t have enough officers.
If cops go into an Islamic neighborhood and start ‘unmasking’ women, there will be religious riots along with the class riots they already had.
One of the lessons they taught in riot control at the police academy was to call out anyone you recognize in a mob. When people aren’t anonymous, they behave a good deal better. The only way you can do that is if you are on the street and walking the neighborhood.