Harry's Place

I’m not a toxicologist, a criminologist or a statistician (and I’d be interested to hear from anyone with expertise in these fields). But I think Kevin Drum at Mother Jones makes a compelling case for a causal relationship between the rise and fall of violent crime rates in the US and other countries and the [...]

Here’s the latest wrinkle in Hugo Chavez’s “Bolivarian Socialism”: a state-owned private security company.

Meet Corposervica (Corporation of Services of Vigilance and Security), the new organization in charge of protecting homes, offices, and government premises.
So having utterly failed to manage Venezuela’s out-of-control violent crime via the police, the National Guard, etc., the Chavez government has decided [...]

Jack of Kent did:
It is a Saturday morning last June.
I am at a suburban train station seeing my friend off. The train doors begin to shut, and I step back, ready to wave.
To my left, with the corner of my eye, I see someone sprinting from the front of the train.
“That’s funny,” I thought, [...]

Harriet Sergeant, author of ‘Wasted: the betrayal of white working class and black Caribbean boys’ (Centre for Policy Studies, 2009) [PDF], writes at The Spectator:
On the third day of the London riots I received a telephone call from Mash, a member of a Brixton gang who I befriended three years ago. He was [...]

A group calling itself “Coalition of Resistance: Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay” is organising an event called “Riots, Recession, Resistance” at the University of London. From the title they appear very keen to re-brand the criminal riots blighting London and other cities around the UK as “resistance” and somehow a reaction to “recession” and thus lending [...]

Laura Johnson, the daughter of a millionaire was charged with stealing £5000 worth of electronic goods from a Comet in Charlton.  Micha Livingstone and his brother Icha, both college students were charged with looting a Curry’s store in Brixton.
The three were part of a riot by the disposessed and disenfranchised section of society protesting exclusion [...]

We have been told by a phalanx of left-wing pundits that these riots are a symptom of the ‘underclass’ lashing out against a society that excludes them by offering no opportunities to escape from their ’situations’.
The truth is much scarier than that and indicates how much the moral fabric of this country is torn and [...]

Sunny Hundal in sensible mode:
Laurie Penny says, “Violence is rarely mindless.” – but in this case it has become exactly that. And if you’re going to assume that most violence isn’t mindless, then you may soon find yourself trying to make excuses for for violence against women
To assume that people will [...]

Update:
There is nothing ‘justified’ or ‘understandable’ or ‘inevitable’ about EDL thuggery. There is equally nothing ‘justified’ or ‘understandable’ or ‘inevitable’ about what’s going on now. I hope all who recognise the former will also recognise the latter. I doubt it.
The SWP affiliated Lenin’s Tomb blog is currently listing what are supposedly right-wing views on the [...]

David Lammy MP has described the rioting as ‘totally unacceptable’ and ‘mindless’, as well as ‘a disgrace, as many of my constituents have said to me as I have talked to them’. He also rightly notes:
This was an attack on Tottenham, on people, shopkeepers, women, children who are now standing on the streets, homeless.
Meanwhile, Lee [...]