Quantitative easing (QE) – the Bank of England’s recession-busting policy of buying up billions of pounds of bonds – may have contributed to social unrest by exacerbating inequality, according to one City economist.
As the Bank of England considers unleashing a fresh round of QE, Dhaval Joshi, of BCA Research, argues the approach of creating electronic money pushes up share prices and profits without feeding through to wages.
“The evidence suggests that QE cash ends up overwhelmingly in profits, thereby exacerbating already extreme income inequality and the consequent social tensions that arise from it,” Joshi says in a new report.
He points out that real wages – adjusted for inflation – have fallen in both the US and UK, where QE has been a key tool for boosting growth. In Germany, meanwhile, where there has been no quantitative easing, real wages have risen.
As the Bank waded into the financial markets to spend its £200bn of newly created money, mostly on government bonds, the price of many assets, including shares and commodities such as oil, was driven up.
That helped to boost companies’ revenues, but Joshi argues that with the labour market remaining weak, employees have had little hope of bidding up their wages. “The shocking thing is, two years into an ostensible recovery, [UK] workers are actually earning less than at the depth of the recession. Real wages and salaries have fallen by £4bn. Profits are up by £11bn. The spoils of the recovery have been shared in the most unequal of ways.”
Tariq Jahan has been hailed as a voice of reason. Only hours after holding his dead son in his arms, the grief-stricken father has provided hope for a peaceful resolution to a most horrific tragedy. His voice, full of pain, urged his community to stay away from any reprisal attacks for the killing of his son Haroon and two fellow young Muslim men.
If Jahan’s is a voice of reason then his message is of patriotism. Jahan is of my late father’s generation. They belonged to the first generation of Pakistani Muslims who migrated in large numbers during the 60s, 70s and 80s to find economic prosperity in the land of their once masters. For many, the plan had been to seek the riches that they could only dream of in the villages back home and return as made men to a life of bliss.
Of course, it never quite worked out like this. While in Britain, these men saw beyond the short-term gain that a return to village life with relatively vast sums of money would bring them and their expanding families. Britain offered stable jobs, relative prosperity, healthcare and the freedom as a minority to practice their faith openly by allowing the building of mosques and community centres. Their children had a chance to gain education and attend universities – a dream for many village and even city folk in Pakistan.
My father also told me that subconsciously there was also a great appreciation of the law and order that Britain had. It was a far cry from the endemic police corruption and unpredictability that is a hallmark of a Pakistani villager’s life.
Having seen both sides of the proverbial coin these men are fiercely protective of their adopted homeland. They cherish the stability and the peaceful lives they are able to live. It makes them proud to be British. In some instances, more so than their children who are born here. It is noticeable that the actions of some hardline young Muslims who turn to fundamentalist teachings are almost always at odds with the views of their parents, many of whom have seen less fortunate times.
I experienced this personally when as a conflicted teenager I adopted a deeply anti-British stance, much to the disapproval of my father. My dad would often say: “You’ll realise one day how fortunate you are that this is your home.”
Community leaders in Birmingham are working all-out to calm intense anger in the city’s British Asian community over the deaths of three young men who were rammed by a carload of suspected looters.
West Midlands police arrested a man near the scene and recovered a vehicle, which forensics experts are examining. They later launched a murder inquiry.
Groups of residents in Winson Green, the inner-city area where the men were killed as they tried to protect local businesses in the early hours of Wednesday, openly warned of inter-communal violence if the murder inquiry fails to produce rapid results.
Their anger was passed on by the local Labour MP for Ladywood, Shabana Mahmood, and the Bishop of Aston, Rt Rev Anthony Watson, who joined a meeting at Dudley Road mosque, which locals claimed was on looters’ hitlist of targets where money might be found. The victims, brothers Shazad Ali and Abdul Mussavir, 32 and 30, and Haroon Jahan, 21, were among some 80 young men who turned out after a gang tried to ransack the nearby Jet petrol station on Monday night.
In Eltham, south-east London, around 200 people gathered to protect people and property from rioters on Tuesday evening.
On July 31, The Guardian reported that after Haringey council shut eight of its 13 youth clubs, local teenagers feared boredom would fuel violence between young gang members on the streets of north London.
In February 2007, before becoming Britain’s prime minister, David Cameron said:
Sometimes a piece of research is published which goes straight to the heart of the national debate – it holds up a mirror to the whole of society and makes us see ourselves as we really are.
That happened this week. On Wednesday, Unicef published a report entitled “An overview of child well-being in rich countries”. It brings together comparative research on the material, educational and emotional state of childhood in 21 developed nations.
Britain comes bottom of the list.
Of course we can argue about methodology and the timing of statistics, but to do so is to miss the big point. This report shows that our society is deep trouble.
I am an optimistic person. I love this country. It’s a great place to live, a great time to be alive, and I am enormously positive about the future. But sometimes I simply want to despair – and this is one of those moments.
Ten years after the current Government was elected on the promise to end child poverty and make education its number one priority, Britain comes 18th out of 21 rich countries on material wellbeing, and 19th out of 21 on educational wellbeing. According to the report, British children are among the poorest and least educated in the developed world.
But that is not the worst of it. We come at the very bottom – 21st out of 21 – on three other measures which, to me, are even more important.
First, we come bottom on ‘subjective wellbeing’ – how children themselves rate their lives. Put another way, we have the unhappiest children in the developed world.
In The Guardian, David Lammy, Tottenham’s Labour member of parliament, notes the absence of fathers and other adult men to serve as role models in young men’s lives and asks:
“How do you find your masculinity in the absence of role models? Through hip-hop, through gang culture, through peer groups. It is hugely problematic. Teenagers are in school until 3.30, and then MTV, Facebook, the internet, kicks in with a set of values that comes with it. It is not clear to me that parents are equipped to deal with that. There’s an inability to delay gratification, alcohol, sex, drugs – this is presenting real challenges, and as always it hurts the poorest hardest. Why? Because if you have money you can bring in other things – ballet, football classes.”
Lammy knows the subject of weak parenting is so politically explosive that he was momentarily reluctant to discuss it at such a tense juncture.
The Conservative narrative of a broken Britain, championed by Cameron and the work and pensions minister, Iain Duncan Smith, which identifies poor parenting skills as the root of most social problems, had been broadly rejected by the left, he said. “The right have a lot to say about parenting, but no one on the left wants to talk about this. A void has emerged around it. It’s a profound problem.”
He laments the closure of a number of local youth clubs as a result of funding cuts. “These were some of the people who could talk to these young people, and they’ve lost their jobs.”
Last year, he proposed the introduction of the national civic service, to help instil an ethic of service in young people, but the proposal got little traction. He would like government parenting programmes to move beyond focusing on the first few years of a child’s life. “I’ve opened so many adventure playgrounds for under fives, but what about the teenagers? Sure Start is fine, but you need it to continue until the age of 18.”
As well as maternity leave, he thinks parents of teenagers should be allowed to take chunks of time off to look after their children at difficult moments in their development. “We need to move away from a narrative that is just about the early years.”
“If we’re fighting for a cause, let’s fight for a fucking cause,” shouts a woman in Hackney venting her contempt at kids on the rampage. What do the rioters want? New sneakers?
Prize for the wittiest tweet goes to “Sally Can’t Dance” who wrote facetiously: “Turkish and Asian groups have stood up to & chased off rioters. Bloody immigrants. Coming over here, defending our boroughs & communities.”
Turkish and Kurdish business owners between Hackney’s Stoke Newington High Street and Kingsland Road in London have been fighting to defend their properties from days of rioting across the United Kingdom.
“It was between about 9 or 10 at night,” said Yılmaz Karagöz, sitting in his coffee shop next to a jeweller’s shop that has been shuttered since Sunday when the rioting began and a pharmacy that closed a day after.
“There were a lot of them. We came out of our shops but the police asked us to do nothing. But the police did not do anything, so, as more came, we chased them off ourselves,” Karagöz said.
The staff from a local kebab restaurant ran at the attackers with döner knives in their hands. “I don’t think they will be coming back,” Karagöz said.
In other parts of London, local groups have come together to engage in similar ad hoc community policing.
Months of conjecture will follow these riots. Already, the internet is teeming with racist vitriol and wild speculation. The truth is that very few people know why this is happening. They don’t know, because they were not watching these communities. Nobody has been watching Tottenham since the television cameras drifted away after the Broadwater Farm riots of 1985. Most of the people who will be writing, speaking and pontificating about the disorder this weekend have absolutely no idea what it is like to grow up in a community where there are no jobs, no space to live or move, and the police are on the streets stopping-and-searching you as you come home from school. The people who do will be waking up this week in the sure and certain knowledge that after decades of being ignored and marginalised and harassed by the police, after months of seeing any conceivable hope of a better future confiscated, they are finally on the news. In one NBC report, a young man in Tottenham was asked if rioting really achieved anything:
“Yes,” said the young man. “You wouldn’t be talking to me now if we didn’t riot, would you?”
“Two months ago we marched to Scotland Yard, more than 2,000 of us, all blacks, and it was peaceful and calm and you know what? Not a word in the press. Last night a bit of rioting and looting and look around you.”
Eavesdropping from among the onlookers, I looked around. A dozen TV crews and newspaper reporters interviewing the young men everywhere.
There are communities all over the country that nobody paid attention to unless there had recently been a riot or a murdered child. Well, they’re paying attention now.
Tonight in London, social order and the rule of law have broken down entirely. The city has been brought to a standstill; it is not safe to go out onto the streets, and where I am in Holloway, the violence is coming closer. As I write, the looting and arson attacks have spread to at least fifty different areas across the UK, including dozens in London, and communities are now turning on each other, with the Guardian reporting on rival gangs forming battle lines. It has become clear to the disenfranchised young people of Britain, who feel that they have no stake in society and nothing to lose, that they can do what they like tonight, and the police are utterly unable to stop them. That is what riots are all about.
Riots are about power, and they are about catharsis. They are not about poor parenting, or youth services being cut, or any of the other snap explanations that media pundits have been trotting out: structural inequalities, as a friend of mine remarked today, are not solved by a few pool tables. People riot because it makes them feel powerful, even if only for a night. People riot because they have spent their whole lives being told that they are good for nothing, and they realise that together they can do anything – literally, anything at all. People to whom respect has never been shown riot because they feel they have little reason to show respect themselves, and it spreads like fire on a warm summer night. And now people have lost their homes, and the country is tearing itself apart.
If this is a war, the enemy, on the face of it, are the “lawless”, the defenders are the law-abiding. An absence of morality can easily be found in the rioters and looters. How, we ask, could they attack their own community with such disregard? But the young people would reply “easily”, because they feel they don’t actually belong to the community. Community, they would say, has nothing to offer them. Instead, for years they have experienced themselves cut adrift from civil society’s legitimate structures. Society relies on collaborative behaviour; individuals are held accountable because belonging brings personal benefit. Fear or shame of being alienated keeps most of us pro-social.
Working at street level in London, over a number of years, many of us have been concerned about large groups of young adults creating their own parallel antisocial communities with different rules. The individual is responsible for their own survival because the established community is perceived to provide nothing. Acquisition of goods through violence is justified in neighbourhoods where the notion of dog eat dog pervades and the top dog survives the best. The drug economy facilitates a parallel subculture with the drug dealer producing more fiscally efficient solutions than the social care agencies who are too under-resourced to compete.
The insidious flourishing of anti-establishment attitudes is paradoxically helped by the establishment. It grows when a child is dragged by their mother to social services screaming for help and security guards remove both; or in the shiny academies which, quietly, rid themselves of the most disturbed kids. Walk into the mental hospitals and there is nothing for the patients to do except peel the wallpaper. Go to the youth centre and you will find the staff have locked themselves up in the office because disturbed young men are dominating the space with their violent dogs. Walk on the estate stairwells with your baby in a buggy manoeuvring past the condoms, the needles, into the lift where the best outcome is that you will survive the urine stench and the worst is that you will be raped. The border police arrive at the neighbour’s door to grab an “over-stayer” and his kids are screaming. British children with no legal papers have mothers surviving through prostitution and still there’s not enough food on the table.
It’s not one occasional attack on dignity, it’s a repeated humiliation, being continuously dispossessed in a society rich with possession. Young, intelligent citizens of the ghetto seek an explanation for why they are at the receiving end of bleak Britain, condemned to a darkness where their humanity is not even valued enough to be helped. Savagery is a possibility within us all. Some of us have been lucky enough not to have to call upon it for survival; others, exhausted from failure, can justify resorting to it.
The Guardian attempts to answer what might sound like a simple question: who are the rioters?
Take events in Chalk Farm, north London. First the streets contained people of all backgrounds sprinting off with bicycles looted from Evans Cycles. Three Asian men in their 40s, guarding a newsagent, discussed whether they should also take advantage of the apparent suspension of law.
“If we go for it now, we can get a bike,” said one. “Don’t do it,” said another. Others were not so reticent; a white woman and a man emerged carrying a bike each. A young black teenager, aged about 14, came out smiling, carrying another bike, only for it be snatched from him by an older man.
They were just some of the crowd of about 100 who had gathered on the corner; a mix of the curious and angry, young and old. It was impossible to distinguish between thieves, bystanders and those who simply wanted to cause damage.
A group of about 20 youths were wielding scaffolding poles taken from a nearby building site. They used their makeshift weapons, along with bricks and stolen bottles of wine, to intermittently attack passing motorists or smash bus shelters. A man in a slim suit stood on the corner recording the violence on his mobile phone.
Most of those he was filming had covered their faces. One had a full balaclava with holes cut out only for the eyes and mouth. “Is that you, bruv?” an older man, aged about 30, hands in pockets, asked the man in the balaclava. Recognising his friend, he laughed and added: “Fuck. Don’t stand near me – you’re going to get me arrested.”
Seconds later there was a smash as the minicab office around the corner was broken into. Teenagers swarmed in, shouting: “Bwap, bwap, bwap.”
The arrival of a line of riot police from Camden, where a branch of Sainsbury’s and clothing stores had been looted an hour earlier, signalled it was time for everyone to move on.
But there was no rush; the group knew from experience that police would hold back for the time being. “Keep an eye on the Feds, man,” said one youth.
Overheard snippets of conversation gave an insight into how the disparate groups were deciding where to go.
One man said: “Hampstead, bruv. Let’s go rob Hampstead.” Another, looking at his BlackBerry, said: “Kilburn, it’s happening in Kilburn and Holloway.” A third added: “The whole country is burning, man.”
And as multi-ethnic areas from London to Birmingham, Liverpool and Bristol burned, a myth was being dispelled: that so-called “black youths” are largely behind such violence.
While cappuccino-drinking property owners in Notting Hill suggested it might be time to bring in the army, similar calls were not be made by the residents of riot-torn Hackney.
“I am having a look to make sure we don’t get caught by any rioters tonight,” said Neil Clifford, who is chief executive of the shoe chain Kurt Geiger but, for now, was sipping a cappuccino outside the Joseph store in Notting Hill. “It’s pretty shocking. We look an embarrassment to the world. I think we probably either should have a massive influx of police or the support of the army to deal with this.”
Pat Burn, a retired social worker who has lived in west London for 30 years, said she heard the sirens and feared for her and her elderly husband’s safety.
“I think everybody around here is very worried. It feels as if things are out of control.” She too thought military support might be needed. “The police should get the water cannon out and use the army if they can’t cope.
“I’m not sure how it will all end. This area will be a target because it is wealthy. The problem is that in this country we live in extremes of rich and poor. We need to live in the middle, like they do in Scandinavia.”
No one in Hackney was calling for the army. On Clarence Road, scene of some of the most dramatic and frightening rioting of the night, many said they felt the police had been alarming enough. All along the street, neighbours gathered in threes or fives, some talking discreetly among themselves, some debating noisily the cause of the disturbances. A few teenagers on low BMX bikes wheeled slowly along the street, looking at strangers with suspicion. No one was talking about anything else.
“The police were hanging at the bottom of the road, hundreds of them, waiting for trouble,” said one man in his early 40s, who had stood on his doorstep until 2am to protect his front windows. Like most people on the street he would not give his name.
“Their priority was to protect Mare Street … the banks, the post offices. That’s what their priortity is. Not us. Taxpayers are supposed to serve and protect the community. It’s a joke.”
But the young rioters’ grievances with the police, he and his friends agreed, were much more deep-seated. “When you have police officers jumping out of vans, calling 18-year-olds bitches and niggers; I’m a youth worker, I see it all over.
“That’s what’s happening. They are thinking, who the fuck are you? And so it starts,” he added.
“You have a generation of kids now that don’t respect their parents or the police,” chipped in his friend. “When we were youngsters we were made to have respect for the olders. Now if an older was to slap a youth that kid is going to pick up a hammer.
“I was one of these kids but it’s bloody hard for them. There’s nothing to do at all. University fees have gone up, education costs money. And there’s no jobs. This is them sending out a message.”
The same depressing picture – a mixture of alienation, anger at the police, boredom and mischief – was reiterated by locals across the Pembury estate. “They just want to be heard,” said a young black woman. “This is the only way some people have to communicate.”
Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, eager to return criticism at those governments who were two years ago condemning the crushing of the Green Movement, asked: “What kind of country treats its own people like this? The ugliest treatment is the police’s unacceptable attack on the people, who have no weapons in hand.”
If the Iranian leader’s accusations were predictably opportunistic, he did employ one rather persuasive rhetorical device: to suggest that Britain’s economy had already been savaged by looters — not ones dressed in hoodies, but those wearing pin-stripe suits: the bankers.
What began as a gathering of around 200 protesters demanding answers over the death of Mark Duggan, who was shot dead by police on Thursday, culminated 12 hours later in a full-scale riot that saw brazen looting spread across north-London suburbs.
[…]
The crowd that gathered outside Tottenham police station at 5.30pm were by all accounts peaceful. The protesters consisted of local residents, community leaders, and some of Duggan’s relatives, including his fiancee, Semone Wilson.
Protesters complained that police and the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC), which is investigating Duggan’s death, were not communicating with them.
Wilson, they said, had been forced to call the IPCC to identify the body; other relatives first discovered Duggan had been killed when they saw his photograph on the news.
With apparently limited communication, the vacuum filled with rumour.
There were stories of Duggan having been shot after being handcuffed; others said he had sent a message to friends 15 minutes before he was killed, saying he had been cornered but was safe.
There were chants of “we want answers” but those present said the protest was good-natured. The demonstration, which organisers expected to last no more than an hour, was initially fronted by women, who surrounded Wilson, who had three children with 29-year-old Duggan.
What happened over the next four hours is subject to debate, but what is clear is that tensions gradually escalated, as police made only limited attempts to talk to the demonstrators.
Channel 4 News spoke to Duggan’s partner:
Since Thursday, rioting and looting has spread to many parts of London and now other cities in Britain.
Some residents of Hackney, in north London, describe how the Metropolitan police discriminate between blacks and whites:
Shop owners in east London defend their businesses from looters:
London’s mayor, Borris Johnson, gets a skeptical response from Londoners frustrated by the police’s inability to control the rioting and looting that has taken place over the last few days.
At the New York Times, Robert Mackey gathers some of the responses from Egyptians interested in but perplexed by what’s happening in London:
As the riots in London continued for a third night on Monday, Egyptian bloggers, watching events unfold on live television, debated the meaning of the violent confrontations between young people and the police, which reminded some of them of their own pitched battles on the streets of Cairo a few months ago.
Just a few minutes after one CNN correspondent, Dan Rivers, was forced to scurry behind police lines — as bottles were thrown at him and his cameraman in the south London neighborhood of Peckham — the reporter suggested that the riots had seemed to gain a kind of “momentum” through social networking. The dynamic, Mr. Rivers said, reminded him of the way protests had built and spread through cities in the Middle East earlier this year.
Watching Mr. Rivers report from Peckham, an Egyptian blogger and activist who writes as Zeinobia commented, “The CNN reporter in London is acting as if he is in war zone.” Moments later, she added, “Oh, God, they are attacking the CNN crew in London and it was a live action.”
Trying to get her head around the mayhem, Zeinobia — who took part in the protests that forced Hosni Mubarak from power — asked her followers on Twitter to explain what was happening. A Cairo radio anchor, who writes as LinaNileFM on the social network, responded, “Riots broke out in North London over a police shooting, started peacefully then turned violent with cars and buildings burnt down.”
As she switched between coverage of London’s riots on CNN and Al Jazeera, Zeinobia wrote, “To be honest I do not understand why protesters would set shops and houses on fire.”
As a dual British-Egyptian citizen 2011 has been an interesting year to say the least. The inevitable comparisons are being drawn between the revolution and the riots. There has been annoying smugness from some Egyptian commentators about how civilised the Egyptian revolution was compared to the barbarians in London, and how well Egyptians responded to the security situation compared with Londoners.
Firstly, the majority of protesters who took to the streets in January were motivated by a cause and outnumbered opportunist looters. Secondly, who relies on the police in Egypt anyway? They’re a bunch of useless murderers. In London the police are more trusted despite also killing people with alarming regularity. People have little experience of defending themselves (interestingly, and perhaps supporting this theory, Turkish-Kurdish shop owners in north London fought off looters. I know very little about community-policing relations in Kurdish areas of Turkey but I suspect that the police aren’t on speed dial).
In summary I’m confused, and I wish I was in London so I could ask the kids what the fuck they’re doing and why. The media is showing us hour after hour of Outraged Upstanding Citizen all saying the same thing because Upstanding Citizens tend to hit journalists less. There is an echoing void when it comes to the other side of the story, a void that is being filled with image after horrible image and calls for looters to be flogged in public squares and theorising about the legitimate social political grievances that drove them to commit inexcusable acts. Both camps are as bad as each other.
Martin Luther King said that a riot is the language of the unheard, but Ralph Waldo Emmerson said what you do speaks so loudly I can’t hear what you’re saying. The media is not even trying to listen.
Journalists covering the riots also face challenges.
Photographers covering the London riots appear to be bearing the brunt of violence against journalists, with several serious incidents of beatings and muggings over the last three days.
Photojournalists covering conflict and civil disorder often find themselves in the worst danger, as they have to get close to the story to do their job and stand out because of their equipment.
One war reporter, who has just returned from the frontline in Libya, was mugged by three hooded looters outside Currys in Brixton on Sunday night with £2,500 of video equipment stolen.
Another photographer was kicked to the ground and beaten by four youths on the Pembury Estate in Hackney on Tuesday, while in Birmingham two photographers were mugged, one suffering a vicious attack by an angry mob of more than a dozen.
As always with urban riots, Tottenham and its aftermath have produced political rock-throwing. A familiar polarisation can be witnessed in mainstream and social media alike. From the right comes condemnation of the criminality, uncritical support for the police and a snorting contempt for any attempt to diagnose the events with reference to their wider social and economic context: unemployment, poverty, historic tensions with the Met and so on. From the left comes, yes, an insistence that the events cannot be truly understood without reference to that wider social and economic context, an insistence that the police must be held to account, and so on.
I’m in the latter camp, but do I also condemn the burning and looting? Yes, stupid, I do. I find it hateful, depressing, selfish, contemptuous, vicious and frightening. My, possibly paranoid, sense that delinquent youths all across the inner city are emboldened by the current mood has ratcheted up my parental anxiety an unwelcome notch or two.
I have no problem with condemnation, only with condemnation in isolation. That is because condemnation on its own is far too easy – so easy, in some mouths, that it becomes a sort of narcissistic vigilantism: my condemnation is bigger than your condemnation; your smaller condemnation condemns you as a secret non-condemner and therefore a closet excuser and justifier, etcetera. The other problem with condemnation unadorned is that it’s a dead end. You condemn. Then what? You have to look for some solutions. Condemning alone is not enough.
Gavin Knight says the riots are not the work of organized gangs:
Following the London riots, the media have been quick to say the looting was the work of an organised gang of thugs, even a network of gangs working together. The truth is more complex. Mark Duggan was a member of the Star gang. Made up of less than 10 members, it had a notorious reputation for being armed, dealing Class A drugs and intent on making money. It was affiliated to larger, older gangs in the area known as the Tottenham Man Dem or the Farm Boys, with around 30 members each from different generations.
Given the cut-off nature of Broadwater Farm Estate, the gang members there are close-knit. They do not attack members of their own community. They all grew up together and remain in touch with previous generations. They also protect the estate like a fortress against rivals like Edmonton in the north, the Wood Green “Mob” to the west.
In Tottenham, as in other parts of inner cities in the UK, one of the key trends is the lowering of the age group involved in gang activity. Younger and younger kids are becoming involved. It is likely that young kids from outside the area, alerted by BlackBerry instant messages, arrived to loot the shops. One eyewitness from the community told me how he was driving in the area with his family and could see young kids he recognised but they were “so angry and emotional” he decided not to engage with them. “They saw the burning car and it gave them an adrenaline rush. They were spurred on by a chance to put one over on the police, maybe for the only time in their lives.”
Some kids who looted Foot Locker later boasted about the boxes of trainers they had in their house. They do not fit the profile of organised senior gang members. A source close to the gang community, with a background in armed robbery, told me: “If senior gang members were involved, they would not be interested in just trainers and TVs. They’d take out the bank, the safes and tills from H&M and Foot Locker. They would break into the bookies.”
While Britain’s political leaders struggle in finding an effective and meaningful response to the last few days unrest, ordinary Londoners have decided to arm themselves — with brooms.
Watching London burn. That’s something that my grandad, a Peckham boy, would never have expected to see again. Having worked with communities in Brixton and Kilburn with the Empty Shops Network, it’s not something I’d ever expected to see. London’s not that kind of place any more.
I’d spent the weekend at Adhocracy in Bethnal Green, an event all about standing up, taking control and building a DIY culture. After that, doing nothing wasn’t an option. So I tweeted the most practical thing I could think of: let’s get brooms, bin bags and a dustpan and brush. Let’s start the clean-up ourselves.
This was late on Monday evening, and I was at home in Worthing. I still am. I haven’t left the laptop for more than a few minutes, and the phone has been ringing without a break. I’ve been up most of the night, surfing a wave of London pride and helping people team up, find the resources and get on to the streets. It started with singer-songwriter Emmy The Great at 8.30am in Westbourne Grove. Musicians have been busy all day – Sam Duckworth, aka Get Cape, set up the Twitter account @riotcleanup (70,000 followers last time I looked) and Kate Nash and the Kaiser Chiefs’ lead singer, Ricky Wilson, have been on the streets of Clapham. Out there, right now, hundreds of people are waving brooms in the air. Boris Johnson has visited. Government ministers have phoned me to see how they can help. People have created websites, Facebook pages, their own small local groups.
The action has changed things. People have said they woke up this morning feeling fear, but they now feel optimistic. There’s talk of reclaiming the streets from violence just by being there and talking. The broom, raised aloft, and cups of tea carried on riot shields have become today’s iconic images. How British. How beautifully British. And how very, very London. People have even produced “Keep Calm and Clear Up” posters. It’s a movement.
Britain is to open negotiations at the UN to unfreeze assets running into hundreds of millions of pounds to be funnelled to the Libyan rebel council that was recognised by the UK on Wednesday as the “sole governmental authority” in the country.
As the foreign secretary, William Hague, announced the expulsion of the Libyan chargé d’affaires and the eight remaining Libyan embassy staff in London, British diplomats in New York were drawing up plans to unfreeze assets covered by UN sanctions.
Britain has frozen £12bn of Libyan assets since the conflict began in February this year, the vast bulk of which will remain frozen until the regime of Muammar Gaddafi loses power. But a proportion of the assets can be released if Britain can prove that they will only be used by the Benghazi-based National Transitional Council (NTC).
The push by the UK, which has temporarily closed its embassy in Tripoli, will raise questions about whether the funds will be used to buy arms. Foreign Office sources said assets would remain frozen if there is any evidence or suspicion that they were being used to pay for arms, even for the Libyan rebels. Arms sales of any description to any quarter in Libya are banned by UN sanctions.
But a source close to the NTC said funds may be used to buy weapons. “We can’t,” a source close to the NTC told the Guardian when asked how it would make sure funds are not used to buy weapons.
The source added: “We are militarily engaged in removing Gaddafi. Therefore it would be a bit strange to say that we are happy for you to have the no-fly zone, but rather that you didn’t buy arms.
“They [the NTC] haven’t been able to meet their payroll, which is their biggest problem to keep going. They also desperately need money to buy arms, particularly in the western mountains where there is often one weapon between two fighters, who go into battle hoping to get one from the enemy or a fallen comrade.”
Anders Behring Breivik had extensive links to the far-Right English Defence League, senior members of the group have admitted.
Breivik was understood to have met leaders of the EDL in March last year when he came to London for the visit of Geert Wilders, the Dutch Right-wing politician. Daryl Hobson, who organises EDL demonstrations, said Breivik, who told police there were “two more cells” ready to follow him, had met members of the group.
Another senior member of the EDL said Breivik had been in regular contact with its members via Facebook, and had a “hypnotic” effect on them.
Scotland Yard was investigating Breivik’s claims that he began his deadly “crusade” after being recruited to a secret society in London, and that he was guided by an English “mentor”. David Cameron, who was being kept updated on developments, said Breivik’s claims were being taken “extremely seriously”.
Breivik wrote of having strong links with the EDL, saying he had met its leaders and had 600 EDL members as Facebook friends.
Mr Hobson said in an online posting that: “He had about 150 EDL on his list … bar one or two doubt the rest of us ever met him, altho [sic] he did come over for one of our demo [sic] in 2010 … but what he did was wrong. RIP to all who died as a result of his actions.”
Another senior member of the EDL, who spoke to The Daily Telegraph on condition of anonymity, said he understood Breivik had met EDL leaders when he came to Britain to hear Wilders speak in London last year.
“I spoke to him a few times on Facebook and he is extremely intelligent and articulate and very affable,” said the source. “He is someone who can project himself very well and I presume there would be those within the EDL who would be quite taken by that. It’s like Hitler, people said he was hypnotic. This guy had the same sort of effect.”
Many angry victims of the News of the World’s journalism used to try their hand at suing, and the paper’s battle-hardened lawyers were good at seeing them off. Still they regularly paid out £1.2m a year on a variety of libel claims.
But in May 2008, Tom Crone, the paper’s veteran head of legal, got a nasty shock. His opponents in one lawsuit against the paper suddenly appeared to have got hold of a smoking gun.
It was a piece of evidence that seemed to guarantee that the complainant in question, Gordon Taylor of the Professional Footballers’ Association, could virtually write his own cheque in privacy damages and blow a major hole in the tabloid’s budget.
Worse, much worse, was the fact that this single document, later christened the “For Neville” email, was capable of wrecking all the previous NoW efforts to cover up its hacking scandal. In the end, this piece of evidence would not only cost Crone his own job, but also help destroy the entire newspaper for which he worked, the flagship of Rupert Murdoch’s British fleet.
News of the “For Neville” email originally arrived on Crone’s desk at Wapping, in the form of an “amended particulars of claim” from Taylor’s lawyers, dated 12 May 2008. It used dry legal language, but Crone immediately saw its force.
It detailed the contents of one of the documents seized in the raid on Glenn Mulcaire, the News of the World’s private detective who had recently been jailed for phone hacking along with “rogue reporter” Clive Goodman. What it revealed was the way senior staff at the NoW had been involved in systematic hacking – the very thing the paper had been strenuously denying all along, not only to Taylor’s lawyers, but to its readers, parliament and public. The legal pleadings said: “Prior to 29th June 2005, Mr Ross Hindley acquired a transcript of 15 messages from the claimant’s mobile phone voicemail and a transcript of 17 messages left by the claimant on Ms Armstrong’s [a business associate of Taylor] mobile phone voicemail. At all material times, Mr Hindley was a journalist employed by NGN working for the News of the World.”
“By email dated 29th June 2005, Mr Ross Hindley emailed Mr Mulcaire a transcript of the aforesaid 15 messages from the claimant’s mobile phone voicemail and 17 messages left by the claimant on Ms Armstrong’s mobile phone voicemail. The transcript is titled ‘Transcript for Neville’ and the document attached to the email was called ‘Transcript for Neville’. It is inferred from the references to Neville that the transcript was provided to, or was intended to be provided to, Neville Thurlbeck. Mr Thurlbeck was at all material times employed by NGN as the News of the World’s chief reporter.”
Taylor’s lawyers had obtained a copy of the “For Neville” email, with its lists of carefully transcribed hacked private messages, from the police under a court order. It was one of the 11,000 files seized from Mulcaire that were mouldering in bin bags since Scotland Yard had been persuaded to drop their pursuit of a case so potentially embarrassing to their tabloid journalist friends. Crone must have been shocked to realise the incriminating nature of the information the Metropolitan police possessed which could be used in future against his own employers.
Faced with such a crisis, Crone decided he had to consult his new boss, who was to authorise a huge, secret payout which buried the “Neville” dossier. He went to see the abrasive and self-confident younger son of the proprietor, 36-year-old James Murdoch.
Andy Coulson, the prime minister’s former director of communications, is being investigated by police for allegedly committing perjury while working for David Cameron in Downing Street.
The development renews pressure on the prime minister over his judgment in hiring the former News of the World editor and represents the third criminal investigation Coulson faces, adding to allegations that he knew of phone hacking while in charge of the tabloid and authorised bribes to police officers.
Strathclyde detectives confirmed that they had opened a perjury inquiry centred on evidence Coulson gave in court last year that led to a man being jailed.
The phone hacking scandal in Britain claimed another high-profile casualty on Monday when John Yates, the assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police in London, resigned his post. His departure comes a day after the country’s top police officer quit and Rebekah Brooks, the former chief executive of Rupert Murdoch’s News International, was arrested on suspicion of illegally intercepting phone calls and bribing the police.
Such is the severity of the crisis swirling around the Murdoch empire and Britain’s public life that Prime Minister David Cameron cut short an African trip on Monday and, bowing to opposition pressure, called a special parliamentary session on Wednesday to debate the widening scandal.
Mr. Yates is a well-known officer who had been involved in an earlier and inconclusive police review of the scandal. He and other officers have been under scrutiny by lawmakers who are trying to determine why the Metropolitan Police decided in 2009 to strictly limit the initial phone-hacking inquiry, dating to 2006.
Shortly after the Metropolitan Police announced his resignation, Mr. Yates made a defiant public statement: “I have acted with complete integrity,” he said. “My conscience is clear.”
Kiran Stacey notes that the resignation of Met Commisioner, Sir Paul Stephenson, puts the British prime minister in an even tighter corner. If Stephenson had to resign for appointing Neil Wallis, shouldn’t Cameron resign for appointing Andy Coulson?
Sir Paul Stephenson’s resignation yesterday was a significant moment in the phone hacking affair: not only because of the fact of his resigning but because of what he said afterwards.
He made two subtle but important criticisms of the prime minister:
1) He said he had resigned in part for having employed Neil Wallis, the former deputy editor of the News of the World, who has since been arrested, but did not have to resign from the NotW for his part in the scandal. He compared this to Andy Coulson, who had been forced to resign, but was also given subsequent employment – by the prime minister.
2) Sir Paul also said he did not want to “compromise the prime minister” by telling him about Wallis’ involvement either with the Met or the fact that he was a suspect in the hacking affair, given Cameron’s “close relationship with Mr Coulson”. This came close to, without doing so directly, saying that Cameron could not have been trusted with such information, and may have jeopardised the operation (or at least been accused of jeopardising it) by telling Coulson. It’s an extraordinary claim, which [Labour MP and shadow Home Secretary] Yvette Cooper was quick to highlight…
Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson has resigned following the phone hacking scandal.
Britain’s most senior police officer has faced criticism for hiring former News of the World executive Neil Wallis – who was questioned by police investigating hacking – as an adviser.
Sir Paul said his links to the journalist could hamper investigations.
He said there were lessons to be learned from the affair, but he was leaving with his integrity intact.
Sir Paul Stephenson, the Metropolitan police commissioner, had social drinks on up to four occasions over the past two years with the former News of the World deputy editor who was arrested and then bailed last week.
Stephenson already faces a grilling this week by a parliamentary select committee over his recruitment of Neil Wallis as a public relations consultant last year. Wallis, known as “Wolfman” on Fleet Street because of his fiery temper and his beard, worked at the NoW between 2003 and 2009, a period when the phone hacking by reporters on the newspaper is alleged to have taken place.
Now it has emerged that on top of 18 business meals he took with Wallis and other News International executives between 2005 and 2009, which were acknowledged on the gifts and hospitality register, the commissioner also socialised in his own time with the former tabloid journalist.
The development is of particular concern because it is understood that Stephenson accepted a personal assurance from Wallis that he had nothing to do with phone hacking at the paper.
It is also understood that during a 12-year friendship, the Met’s assistant commissioner, John Yates, enjoyed dozens of social drinks with Wallis, including several occasions over the past two years when the officer was involved in reviewing the phone-hacking investigation. A source said: “They are close friends and know each other well.”
The revelations will concern the home affairs select committee, which has called Stephenson to attend a hearing on Tuesday. Scotland Yard was forced to respond to further allegations which may now also be raised during the hearing.
On Saturday night, it emerged that earlier this year Stephenson, who earns £276,000 a year, accepted a free five-week holiday at Champneys, in Tring, Hertfordshire, a spa resort promoted by the Outside Organisation, a public relations firm for which Wallis is managing director.
Scotland Yard insisted that the holiday, estimated to be worth £12,000, was a gift from the managing director of the resort, who has been a friend of Stephenson’s for 20 years.
Rebekah Brooks has been arrested by police investigating allegations of phone hacking by the News of the World and allegations that police officers were bribed to leak sensitive information.
The Metropolitan police said a 43-year-old woman was arrested at noon on Sunday, by appointment at a London police station.
Brooks, 43, resigned on Friday as News International’s chief executive. She is a former News of the World editor and was close to Rupert Murdoch and the prime minister, David Cameron.
Brooks was due to give evidence before MPs on the culture select committee on Tuesday.
An arrest by appointment on a Sunday by police is unusual.
Unusual because the police generally only schedule appointments for arrest during regular business hours, or because most people getting arrested aren’t offered an opportunity to schedule their arrest in advance?
Apparently Brooks was notified about her impending arrest on Friday. Maybe she had a dinner party she needed to attend yesterday evening and so couldn’t turn herself in until today.
Her PR spokesman said: “Rebekah is assisting the police with their enquiries. She attended a London police station voluntarily.” And if she hadn’t volunteered?
The MP who will lead the attack on Rebekah Brooks and Rupert and James Murdoch this week over their roles in the phone-hacking scandal has close links with the media empire, it is revealed today.
John Whittingdale, the Conservative chairman of the Culture, Media and Sport committee, admitted he was an old friend of Mr Murdoch’s close aide, Les Hinton, and had been for dinner with Ms Brooks.
The Independent on Sunday has also learnt that Mr Murdoch’s daughter Elisabeth, seen as the future saviour of the company, has also met Mr Whittingdale a number of times. Among her 386 “friends” on Facebook, the only MP she lists is Mr Whittingdale. He is also the only MP among 93 Facebook “friends” of Mr Hinton.
The arrest of Rebekah Brooks in relation to phone hacking and corruption drags News Corporation deeper into crisis.
It must surely mean that the police investigation is edging closer to James Murdoch, who has been head of all News Corporation’s businesses in Europe and Asia since 2007. He personally approved payments to civil litigants against the News of the World in settlement of their cases – deals that involved gagging clauses that appears to have prevented them discussing potential criminal activity in public.
There are two other important things to note from the arrest of Brooks. It is a personal blow for Rupert Murdoch, who had invested so much in the career of Brooks, promoting her though the Wapping ranks at lightening speed and describing her as the “daughter he never had.” (he actually has four).
It must also set nerves on edge in Downing Street – only on Friday, it was revealed that David Cameron had hosted Brooks twice at Chequers, the only guest to be granted a second visit in his premiership. They also met socially over Christmas.
Ed Miliband has demanded the breakup of Rupert Murdoch’s UK media empire in a dramatic intervention in the row over phone hacking.
In an exclusive interview with the Observer, the Labour leader calls for cross-party agreement on new media ownership laws that would cut Murdoch’s current market share, arguing that he has “too much power over British public life”.
Miliband says that the abandonment by News International of its bid for BSkyB, the resignation of its chief executive, Rebekah Brooks, and the closure of the News of the World are insufficient to restore trust and reassure the public.
The Labour leader argues that current media ownership rules are outdated, describing them as “analogue rules for a digital age” that do not take into account the advent of mass digital and satellite broadcasting.
“I think that we’ve got to look at the situation whereby one person can own more than 20% of the newspaper market, the Sky platform and Sky News,” Miliband said. “I think it’s unhealthy because that amount of power in one person’s hands has clearly led to abuses of power within his organisation. If you want to minimise the abuses of power then that kind of concentration of power is frankly quite dangerous.”
The scale of private links between David Cameron and News International was exposed for the first time last night, with the Prime Minister shown to have met Rupert Murdoch’s executives on no fewer than 26 occasions in just over a year since he entered Downing Street.
Rebekah Brooks, who resigned yesterday as chief executive of Mr Murdoch’s Wapping titles over the escalating scandal, is the only person Mr Cameron has invited twice to Chequers, a privilege not extended even to the most senior members of his Cabinet. James Murdoch, News Corp’s chairmanin Europe and the man responsible for pushing through the BSkyB bid, was a guest at the Prime Minister’s official country residence eight months ago. And the former NOTW editor Andy Coulson – who was arrested this week in connection with police corruption and phone hacking – was invited by Mr Cameron to spend a private weekend at Chequers as recently as March
No 10 bowed to pressure over Mr Cameron’s handling of the phone-hacking scandal last night and released details of all his contacts with senior staff at the company since he became Prime Minister. Mr Cameron has held more than twice the number of meetings with Murdoch executives as he has with any other media organisation. There were two “social” meetings between Mr Cameron and Ms Brooks, one of which was also attended by James Murdoch, and in return they invited the Prime Minister to a succession of parties.
Mr Cameron and Ms Brooks, who are neighbours in West Oxfordshire, met over Christmas – including a get-together on Boxing Day – just days after Vince Cable was relieved of responsibility for deciding the fate of News Corp’s BSkyB bid. Downing Street has always refused to discuss what they talked about, but officials insist that the subject of the BSkyB takeover was never raised.
While James Murdoch met Mr Cameron twice over the period, on both occasions he avoided the spotlight of Downing Street. That was not a qualm shared by his father, who was invited to visit Mr Cameron at Downing Street days after the general election.
This has not looked like a revolution. There have been no crowds massed overnight in Trafalgar Square, no tanks or water cannon deployed on the streets of London. And yet, in their own bloodless way, these have been the 10 days that shook Britain and shocked the world. Quietly and without violence, we have witnessed a very British revolution.
Yes, the government remains in place and Buckingham Palace is safely unstormed. Our official masters still rule over us. Nevertheless, these wild, dizzying days have carried a distinctly revolutionary echo.
One of the most famous images of the revolutions that swept eastern Europe in 1989 came from Romania, when Nicolae Ceausescu addressed a crowd in Bucharest’s main square. Suddenly, someone started booing. Then another, and another began jeering and whistling.
No one had ever heard such a noise before, least of all the dictator himself, who stared at the crowd, utterly baffled by such a show of dissent. The revolution was under way within hours, the regime toppled within days.
What happened in that moment was that the Romanian people lost their fear, instantly but completely.
Of course, Rupert Murdoch is no murderous despot. But he was feared by the very people many would have assumed were too powerful to be intimidated. From the moment late on 4 July that the Guardian reported that the News of the World had listened to, and deleted, messages left on the phone of a missing schoolgirl, Milly Dowler, that fear, accumulated over three decades, began to melt away.
This website or its third-party tools use cookies, which are necessary to its functioning. By closing this banner, you agree to the use of cookies.
