British Chinese and the England riots: South China Morning Post

Here's my South China Morning Post column from 28th August, on the British Chinese take on the England riots and why Tiger Mom's efforts are irrelevant. (Click on pic above for larger version.)

What makes you want to riot?

What is it that makes you want to riot?

Could it be this?

The bizarre case of the pregnant woman sentenced to three years in prison for reporting a violent rape certainly hit a button when I read about it this morning. Police treated her as guilty despite her injuries: gashed knee and back of head, black eye, bleeding vagina. Vital evidence either not collected or destroyed, such as the male public hair lost in the lab. I mean, THREE YEARS?! Sure, that'll encourage us to report sex crime. Stick us in a burqa and tell us to shut up, why don'tcha.

Or could it be the woman about to be evicted from her Conservative-led Wandsworth council flat because her son was charged — and not convicted — in the riots? I've heard of soldiers wiping out a whole village because some of them were insurgents, or all the men of a town being shot because a soldier had been killed, but since when did that warped justice take hold here, a world bastion of decency and democracy? Punishing the innocent due to a mere association with the accused is the mark of an authoritarian regime serving the few, not the many.

I've read that David Cameron is consulting the Chinese government about shutting down the internet social networks. Now that is a riot.

We're going back to a time when children were hanged for stealing a loaf of bread. Remember the opening scene in Pirates Of The Caribbean III where the pirates are being hanged en masse? Including the little boy? We didn't cheer the hangings: they were disturbing. The knowledge that this disproportionate mass punishment was barbaric, from our enlightened modern western perspective, is under attack. People in power now, as then, have as little sense of themselves as the rioters do — how else would you fail to see the damaged humanity in these lost youths? If you can't feel yourself as human, you can't see others as such, and the only thing dividing you from the "scum" is that you have social power and they don't.

Not all these rioters are hardened criminals who killed and torched. Five months prison for accepting a pair of nicked knickers is not setting a good example.

Brecht asked: Who is the bigger criminal? The person who robs a bank? Or the person who founds one. We can now ask who has done the most damage: the RBS, Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs bankers who started the recession and are continuing to damage society? Or the spiritually and materially impoverished rioters?

Madam Miaow on Looting & the UK riots: as above, so below.

Madam Miaow's mash-up video to The Bermondsey Joyriders' "Society Is Rapidly Changing".

Rap responds to the riots.

Looters move into Downing Street: Cameron returns

So, wappnin' today?

Firstly, people accused of rioting have been rushed through the magistrates' courts which have been sitting all night to process them like sausage-meat.

How easily we're slipping into martial law with nary a by your leave.

Six months jail for electrical student Nicholas Robinson — no previous record — for stealing bottled water worth £3.50 when he was caught up in the heat of the moment. An 11-year old girl in foster care given a nine-month referral order for breaking a window. Sixteen weeks for one guy who cheeked a copper with, "I'd smash you if you took your uniform off". Not nice but I hear worse in my latex maid's outfit. Almost all of the accused kept on remand without bail. Some of the accused might have been scooped up and convicted merely because they were in the vicinity. We'll never know because ordinary standards of justice have gone to the wall as everyone's losing their heads.

These aren't the nasty hardened criminals who burnt, beat and maimed — and who will have to learn that destructive anti-social actions have consequences. These are angry children (73% of the rioters were aged between 18 and 24).

Considering the youth of Haringey have each lost an average of £75 of spending with the ending of EMA, youth clubs and outreach workers before the cuts have even begun to bite, I'd say we owe them.

No cause and effect, no understanding, just "crush, kill, destroy" bellowed by the same politicians who claimed thousands, tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands in "expenses" off the tax-payer.

And the bankers who kicked off this cycle of misery? Laughing like a drain on the economy all the way to their bonuses, I dare say.

OK, where'd I put my flaming torch and pitchfork ...? "Off with their heads ... to Wembley stadium ... we shall take them on the beaches ... stringing up's too good for them ... use the Plastic Ono bullets ... "

Um, which mob am I with, again?

Madam Miaow on Looting & the UK riots: as above, so below.

Madam Miaow's mash-up video to The Bermondsey Joyriders' "Society Is Rapidly Changing".

Peter Oborne making good sense.

David Harvey: feral capitalism hits the hight streets.

Nick Clegg — cactus killer by Harpy Marx.