Dave's Broken Government

An apt pair of comments from the Telegraph that I thought deserved a wider audience:

Question:

6 months for stealing £3.50 worth of bottled water.

18 months for being in possession of a stolen television

48 months for calling for riots via Facebook.

How much for hacking into the mobile phones of hundreds of people, including the mobile phone of a murderd child, and then undertaking a conspiricy to cover up this fact by lying, with others, to both the police and parliament?

Answer:

A senior position in the Tory government.

The Standards of a Country Are Set at the Top

I just thought I'd remind readers of my 2007 post on the Bullingdon Club - it's pertinent because we have a Bullingdon government - Cameron, Osborne, and Boris Johnson were all members.

Here's some choice bits from this article in the Oxford Student of what this club got up to:

Last December[2005], images of snivelling Bullingdon members were splashed all over the tabloids after all 17 members were arrested for wrecking the cellar of the 15th century pub, the White Hart, in Fyfi eld.

17 bottles of wine were smashed into the walls of the pub after the civility of a gourmet meal descended into a brawl, leaving a trail of debris that was compared by eye-witnesses to a scene from the blitz. The inebriated members started fighting, leaving one with a deep cut to the cheek, and the landlord recalls attempting to pull apart the fi ghting parties, only to have them set on each other once more, exclaiming, “Sorry old chap, just a bit of high spirits".

.........‘At another infamous Bullingdon garden party, the club invited a string band to play and proceeded to destroy all of the instruments, including a Stradivarius.

.........Cameron was member of the club at a time when it was de rigeur to engage in the ‘man of the people’ pursuits of washing down “a cocktail of drugs with an honest, working class box of chips and a five pound bottle of wine”.

Now compare to this blogpost, which was quoted in the Guardian, giving a live account of the 2011 riot.

It sounds stupid to say it, but the atmosphere amongst everyone else seemed like carnival – I actually saw a girl getting chirpsed (chatted up). There were plenty of people (my estimate is maybe as many of 50% of people there) hanging around, fascinated by everything and enjoying watching the 'entertainment'. They didn't seem to be in the wrong place, they wanted to be there and to see what was going on.

I got the feeling that they wouldn't get involved in smashing any shops in, but if there were goods dropped by looters, they wouldn't hesitate to pick them up and I actually witnessed this later on. Lots of these onlookers were females and young kids (10-13) and they came from ALL races. I didn't notice any racial tension, Walworth is a very diverse area and white and blacks were mixing together whether that was in watching or in looting.

Very similar, no?

Tory apologists for the Eton mafia's Bullingdon behaviour kept saying "they were young" and "it was just larks" and accused Labourites of being too dour and "Presbyterian" about it.

But what happens when you put someone at the top of the country who has taken part in this vandalistic behaviour for "larks" and it's dismissed as something that's allowed because they were young? Why, people who are young think it's OK for them to do it too - if the Prime Minister can have larks smashing restaurants in his youth and get away with it, why can't they?

Why are the riots happening now? Why not in 2008 after the financial crash? It's because the tone at the top has changed. We've gone from the dour Gordon Brown advising people to "try their utmost", to the "let's smash property for larks" Boris and "Leave Tuscany to deal with public disorder? You must be joking" Cameron.

Can Cameron really tell the nation with a straight face that this type of behaviour cannot be tolerated, when he was doing exactly the same thing at that age, and got away with it? He didn't even have the decency to turn himself in and serve his time. In his mind he deserved to get away with it scot free. And the rioters think the same way as he does.

They say fish rots from the head. We're going to have a continuous stream of disturbances till the Bullinngdon mafia are kicked out.

Shocked by what is happening in London

Back on December 10th, I wrote a post titled Why have the Con-Dems lost control of the street?, where I made this comment:

When the first student protest got violent, the feeling was that the Met had been caught off guard - they simply didn't have enough police on hand to deal with it. But now it's the fourth protest, and they still haven't got a grip. Have they cut their budget so much they can't afford the overtime for extra officers? Are the police deliberately holding back in order to make a protest of their own?

Yes, we have a careless Tory government (what's new?), headed by a prime minister who sends for his personal tennis coach to be flown out to Tuscany while London riots. Yes, there is a lot of tension on the streets as the under-classes feel the pinch of cutbacks in education allowances, high inflation and no prospect of work thanks to Osborne taking an economy growing at a fast 1.1% per quarter at the election and hammering it wilfully into the ground.

It still does not add up to a burning capital city, unless you throw in a third toxic element - and that is the Met. They've handled it astonishingly badly, they failed to call for swift assistance from outside police forces, they've messed up at every turn.

The chattering classes are now nodding and saying "well they won't cut 2000 officers from the Met now, will they?".

Leave aside whether you agree or disagree with the cuts to the police force (I think the cuts are a bad idea).

The serious issue is that the police have won their "protest" with their rather unusual strike, where they've worked to rule and watched from the sidelines rather than taking full control of the situation. And at what a terrible cost. I shudder to think they'll feel emboldened to do it again - holding both communities and governments to hostage, because they've discovered they have the power to let the capital burn by simply doing nothing.

The weak Tory leadership and their clown Clegg deputy haven't helped either.

This would not have happened under either Tone or Gord. Tone's antennae would have been twitching on day 1 and he'd have been putting tremendous pressure on all concerned to get a grip. John Prescott would have done his deputy job and been all over the airwaves telling the rioters off (or as someone on twitter put it "I can't help but wonder that if John Prescott was in charge he would be out on the streets punching the hoodie feckers himself"). And in Gord's era, the chief of the Met would have been woken up at 4 a.m. to ensure he was up in time to do his job properly, and he might have been encouraged with a bit of shouting.

The Met wouldn't have dared to allow things to get this out-of-control under the Labour government.

But no one is in the least bit in awe of Cameron, not the rioters, and not the police. So London burns.