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Tim Newman

The biggest surprise for me about the riots and looting which are spreading around British cities is that anyone is surprised by it.  This maybe because these days I am an outsider looking in, but to me the sight of deliquent youths running about the streets destroying property, stealing, and attacking people is hardly something new or shocking.  I suppose I first noticed it when I moved to Manchester in 1996, before which I lived in rural west Sussex and before that in rural Pembrokeshire.  Much though I liked Manchester when I was living there (I stayed until 2003), I still consider it the most dangerous, violent city I have ever been to (a list which includes Beirut, Moscow, and Lagos).  True, somebody might whack you around the head in Gorky Park and pinch your wallet so he can buy drugs or vodka.  But you’re not going to get a gang of youths wearing $500 outfits kick the shit out of you so they can video it on their $700 phones and send it to their mates.  And nor is a policeman in Lagos going to cower in his van and try to remember his diversity training if he spots a youth trying to set fire to a shop.  Lagos policemen don’t have vans for a start.  And their diversity training extends only as far as avoiding whacking somebody from a connected family.

Yes, when I lived in Manchester I was staggered by the sheer volume of wanton destruction visited on the city by an underclass of welfare dependents aged between 13 and 25.  Bus stops were smashed on a weekly basis, the buses themselves had the windows scratched, the chairs torn or burned, and the drivers and passengers abused or assaulted.  Nobody would insure property in M14 against theft of household items, and twice I got burgled (once in M14, the other time in M20).  Every student I knew in Manchester got burgled at one point or another.  The streets on a Sunday morning looked as bad as anything I’ve seen in Lagos (though still didn’t smell as much of piss as Paris), and there were easily half a dozen blokes standing outside any given boozer at 2am looking for a ruck.  The newspapers were full of stories of deliquent youths from Manchester’s sink estates, and the courts were stuffed full of the same people. I once had to attend Manchester magistrates’ court for failing to pay a speeding fine (case dismissed with an exasperated wave following the words “I am a student and…”) and the waiting area resembled the ape enclosure in Bristol zoo.  If anything, I’m insulting the ape that wasn’t throwing shit about the cage.  Motor insurance shot up year on year due to thefts and vandalism (leading me to insure my car in Pembroke, hence the speeding notice went to an empty home…), and houses in an area which was not a complete shithole went for a premium of £200k and upwards.  It isn’t only cheap credit that fuelled the house price bubble, it is anybody with any prospects buying their way out of the shitholes which make up most of Britain’s cities.  Me being on about £23k per year at the time, emigration looked an attractive option.  Attractive enough, in fact.

So, the only thing I see different on the news now is that these same delinquents are by pure chance – having spotted an opportunity to do what they do anyway on a grand scale – all acting in unison.  There is no step change in character which has turned the perpetrators into respectable members of the community into rioters and looters, they were always rioting and looting only on a much smaller scale and in a more spread out fashion.  Does anyone other than the dickhead politicians being interviewed on TV really think bins are not set on fire, shops looted, and people duffed up for fun by feral youths every night of the week in each and every one of Britain’s major cities?  The insurance premiums might tell you otherwise.

If you subsidise something you get more of it.  In Britain, delinquent, feral behaviour is subsidised.  What’s more, people will queue up to make excuses for delinquent, feral behaviour to the point that those acting in such a manner will never be held responsible for their actions and never suffer any consequences.  The behaviour you see on the TV now has been actively encouraged in multiple ways for long enough that three or possibly four generations have known nothing but a life of subsidised idleness punctuated with random acts of sex, violence, substance abuse, and criminality.  How is anybody surprised by this mayhem, and struggling for explanations? We had Diane Abbot, some idiot Labour MP, being interviewed last night, speaking in the annoying octave-too-high whine which seems to accompany the self-righteous, waffling on about how these people are struggling in desperate times.  Desperate times?  Life in the UK is so fucking easy that you have a complete underclass able to walk about in designer clothes all night breaking into shops to steal not loaves of bread but iPads, and spend the whole of the next day in bed safe in the knowledge that the roof over their heads and their next 1,000 meals is being paid for by some other mug, probably the bloke whose shop they’ve just looted.  My mother in law told me stories about Russia in the early ’90s, and those were desperate times.  She told me how she had to hold down three jobs, one of which was standing in the road selling Bic lighters for some local mafia thug, in order to provide for her 15 year old daughter.  I never heard about my wife responding to such desperate times by dressing up in an Adidas shell suit, shagging the first retarded herbet who would buy her cigarettes, and proceeding up Nevsky prospekt to put the window of a sports store through and making off with a pair of trainers.  But maybe she neglected to tell me.

I would perhaps be expected to say I give two hoots about what is happening in the UK now, but to be honest, I don’t.  I couldn’t give a stuff.  Enough British people voted for the idiotic policies which have resulted in this mess, and they can bloody well live with it.  I’m glad I left the damned place eight years ago and can say it is nothing to do with me.  At least it eases the embarrassment of having a Nigerian asking me what the hell is wrong with my country.