Peter Oborne 55

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An extremely good article on the riots by Peter Oborne in the Telegraph.

Indeed, I believe that the criminality in our streets cannot be dissociated from the moral disintegration in the highest ranks of modern British society. The last two decades have seen a terrifying decline in standards among the British governing elite. It has become acceptable for our politicians to lie and to cheat. An almost universal culture of selfishness and greed has grown up.

It is not just the feral youth of Tottenham who have forgotten they have duties as well as rights. So have the feral rich of Chelsea and Kensington

I really am quite a fan of Oborne, whose books are well worth reading.

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55 thoughts on “Peter Oborne”

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  • Jonangus Mackay

    Hidden cost of Blatcherism continues to rise by the well-paid hour. Three wagon loads of police from Wales just came cruising down Kilburn High Rd.
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    Side-doors wide open, feet up in the afternoon sun; all smiles. They appeared visibly high on overtime.

  • wendy

    First rioter given eviction notice
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    A council tenant whose son has appeared in court charged in connection with Monday night’s disturbances in Clapham Junction will today (Friday) be served with an eviction notice.
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    The tenant is believed to be the first in the country to now be facing the prospect of losing their council-owned home as a result of Monday night’s rioting and looting.
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    The notice is the first stage in the legal process of eviction. The notice gives warning that the council will be seeking possession of the property and that an application will be made to the courts seeking the tenant’s eviction. The final decision will rest with a judge sitting at the county court.
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    Neither the tenant nor their son can be named at this stage for legal reasons.
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    http://www.wandsworth.gov.uk/news/article/10626/first_rioter_given_eviction_notice

  • Methuselah Now

    Hi,

    When the muslims had a little disruption early last decade, and then a few “other” things in the middle of the decade, the government spent an extraordinary amount of time, marketing and money launching social engineering and indoctrination maneuvers which are still on-going (in addition to multiplied punishment for the same crime to white people and where such laws haven’t been applied to non-muslims), with little parallel subsequent coverage or actions in consequence to the Norway Murder Spree by an ideology with a well of support from far larger parts of society and the establishment, I now wonder what our politicians, media and police will initiate against the lost and hopeless who have taken part in the last weeks actions, no doubt completely missing the diagnosis for the symptoms and pretending it was minor disturbances by non-entities in a years time.

    Kind regards,

    MN

  • deepgreenpuddock

    Suhayl – no intention of issuing a rebuke- my tongue was firmly in cheek. Morris dancers ARE quite funny-there is no getting away from it. I was not in the least offended.
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    I’d recommend listening to the album. It is all very rustic but I always thought it was a minor work of genius. It combines a number of readings and recitations and musical interludes. ( I let some people listen to it a few years ago and they couldn’t make anything of it and thought I was mad for liking it).

    Ashley Hutchins is an interesting guy with some unusual talents and a keen understanding of tradition and its importance, without being slavishly attached to it. He was in at the beginning of Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span, who created a great deal of excellent material, with people like Richard Thompson,still producing some superb music.

  • deepgreenpuddock

    just read Wendy’s post about eviction. I wonder how clever this action might be. This kind of victimisation is likely to unleash more riots. I am not sure that punishing relatives of offenders comes under the jurisdiction of the council, or conforms to any justice system. Punishment without conviction? By non-judicial organisations? If we are going down that road I think there be serious repercussions.

  • mary

    Well strike a light!
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    IPCC admits it may have misled media over shooting
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    http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/blog/2011/aug/12/uk-riots-day-six-aftermath#block-39
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    Analysis of media coverage and queries raised on Twitter have alerted to us to the possibility that we may have inadvertently given misleading information to journalists when responding to very early media queries following the shooting of Mark Duggan by MPS officers on the evening of 4th August.
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    The IPCC’s first statement, issued at 22:49 on 4th August, makes no reference to shots fired at police and our subsequent statements have set out the sequence of events based on the emerging evidence. However, having reviewed the information the IPCC received and gave out during the very early hours of the unfolding incident, before any documentation had been received, it seems possible that we may have verbally led journalists to believe that shots were exchanged as this was consistent with early information we received that an officer had been shot and taken to hospital.
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    Any reference to an exchange of shots was not correct and did not feature in any of our formal statements, although an officer was taken to hospital after the incident.

  • de Quincy's Ghost

    Suhayl and ‘puddock – try also “Morris On”, and “Son of Morris On”
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    and, re: evictions. On the one hand, “they” are all banging very hard on the drum about how this is all “just” criminality and there’s nothing to do except suppress it, no political implications to think about, and on the other … is eviction a normal punishment ? The son of the family (age not given) “appears in court” and the entire family is promptly turned out of doors ? The council notice Wendy posted is remarkably incomplete; it doesn’t say whether the son was found guilty, and if so what of; it leaves room to speculate that they’ve done this even in advance of a verdict. Even without that, for what crimes is this a normal punishment ?
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    It all seems very frighteningly irrational and out-of-control, on all sides. I begin to wonder if the government ever had any idea what they’re doing. Sounds like the topcoppers are pretty pissed off at them, too. In fact, it almost begins to sound as though the coppers are the only ones with any sense in them at all.
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    If anybody hasn’t seen this already, http://motowns.blogspot.com/ is a good report of what it was actually like, at least in one place.

  • mary

    We have had Patrick Cockburn’s view. Here is his brother Alexander’s.
    He takes a historical view of rioting, includes an interview with Darcus Howe in 1981 and tells us of the American experience. He ends
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    ‘Emergency laws, rushed through by panicked politicians, are always bad. It will take America many decades, if ever, to restore civil liberties, approach crime rationally – and this will only come with courageous and inventive political leadership in the poor communities. Britons should study carefully the lessons of Americans’ 40-year swerve.
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    Back in 1981 Howe put the right questions on the agenda. We’ve got further away from answering them, and in fact the left rarely asks them at all, bobbing along in the neoliberal backwash that began in the early 1970s.’
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    http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn08122011.html
    Riots and the Underclass
    By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

  • Jonangus Mackay

    ‘Britain’s annus horribilis.’ — The Economist wades in and, in telling contrast to most of Britain’s self-deluded commentariat & political class, wastes no ink merely slagging off the chavs:
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    http://econ.st/nyW6xp

  • Roderick Russell

    Nothing can justify the criminal behavior of these hooligans: mugging, burning and looting their way through their own communities. And yet the Italians do say that “a fish rots from its head”. So it may be that Peter Oborne has a valid point when he writes in The Telegraph that “the criminality in our streets cannot be disassociated from the moral disintegration in the highest ranks of modern British society”.
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    And what is this example of moral decay set by Britain’s elites: MPs fiddling their expenses, police accepting bribes, multi-millionaire bankers baled out by taxpayers, widespread tax avoidance by the rich, a feeling that in the UK the wealthy operate above the law with impunity and with assistance from the security services. This is closet fascism. Indeed it cannot be said that today’s Britain is a liberal democracy. Liberalism requires Rule of Law, as a precondition, all of the time; even when it is inconvenient for a country’s elites.
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    As my own story demonstrates what we have is a growing element of fascism in British society: where elites operate above the law with impunity, and are supported in this by the UK’s own security services. As former Police Chief, John Alderson, said 15 years ago “MI5 … Infiltrate organizations, people’s jobs and lives. They operate almost like a cancer. At the moment the acorn of a Stasi has been planted”. The reality is that amongst British elites today there is a heedless unconcern about any form of justice.
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    So what is the lesson that these hooligans learnt from the example of Britain’s elites, and indeed of MI5. It certainly isn’t that rule of law or merit matters, or that common decency or fair play count at all; it is that power counts and power alone. As Mr. Oborne writes – “Something has gone horribly wrong in Britain”. Perhaps the Italians have a partial answer when they say “a fish rots from its head”

  • Courtenay Barnett

    @Jonangus,
    I read the Economist article. It goes in a circle – bad conditions – riots – anti-social behavior – so sad – animus horribilis . The writer has a position ( status quo) but tries to appear as not taking a position and has to insert lines to try and convey balance. He ultimately doesn’t quite accomplish much in what he says – he goes in a circle.
    When he says:-
    “England has seemed a nation almost at war.”
    I wanted to correct the sentence:-
    “ England is seeming a nation at war – in Afghanistan – Iraq – Libya – and wherever next the establishment can find the casus belli to attack.”
    Consider how the Economist had reported the French riots and contrast that with this report. They are not honest and consistent in their reporting and set out to gloss with slick journalistic “slide lines”:-
    “”Yet not all the miscreants are obviously downtrodden. One up before the Highbury magistrate’s court on August 10th for looting, for example, was a 31-year-old teaching assistant. ”
    So – in all truthfulness he can’t be one of the “downtrodden”?
    If the writer went beyond the usual divides of victims/opportunistic lootiing/socio-economic dislocations – and actually touched on something perceptive and tangible – the article might have said something original and insightful.
    Compare the Economist’s language on Greece and contrast the writer’s perspective about the streets in the rioting cities in England.
    Horrible at home? – tens times more horrible for what has been done abroad! Assess the situation in the round – If you want to be true and honest:-
    “The worst rioting in decades will cost the country more than money” –and – what do you think the funding of the foreign wars are costing and shall not “ in decades will cost the country more than money” ?

  • Suhayl Saadi

    Yes, the media keeps hauling out this ‘Teaching Assistant’ as though he were proof that the riots arose from nothing but plain criminality and had nothing to do with social factors, economics, etc. and as a Right-wing battering-ram against ‘teachers’ and public sector workers, the concept of state education in general.
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    First of all, he is likely to be the exception, rather than the rule. But if they want to make him into a salutory icon, perhaps the MSM ought to be conveying concern that it was not just ‘hoodies’ and that other sections of the populace are becoming restive and ask, why.
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    Secondly, are teaching assistants, millionaires?
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    Thirdly, the riotous and irresponsible, organised criminal actions of the financial institutions in collaboration with the Government, have resulted in the eviction of many thousands of people from their homes. Why does no-one wonder about why such well-dressed, educated people can act like gangsters and about the disproportionateness of all this?
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    Instead, we get facile iconisation and propaganda a la ‘Daily Mail’.

  • larry Levin

    There is a saying, “you should try everything once, except incest and morris dancing” I believe Morris dancing is a sexual satanic ritual act, the act of people(usually men) dancing around a pole (phallic symbol) and making jingling sounds( to someone satanic demons into their bodies) Is not to be treated lightly.

  • Parky

    Judging by the twenty or so “officers” it needed to break into an offenders house, after battering the door down of course for maximum shock and awe effect and the five or six needed to restrain another dozy offender, it would seem that the Met police are very over-manned (or personed if PC) and the hatchet really needs to go deeper than already planned.
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    In one farcical episode it looked like they were doing the Hokey Cokey as they piled into a small council type flat, don’t know how they all fitted inside ! There was one riot copper on the other day almost in tears that he had been using the same riot gear for over fifteen years and Big Govt hadn’t seen fit to update it. Tut-tut they have been spending all the tax-lolly on helicopters, fast cars and whiz bang technology to catch joe public not taxing and insuring their cars.

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