Comment on riots and policing in Tottenham

Rangjan has left a new comment on your post "Nick Clegg 'I predict a riot' silent over Tottenha...":

An alleged gangster was shot dead by police during an operation to arrest him. Police say they fired back, after the gangster shot at them. A witness claims to have seen the young man being shot while held down on the pavement. Either way the police operation, that went wrong which ever way you look at it, is now being investigated by the IPCC.
Last night 300 members of the public marched to the police station to complain. There were further reports that police brutality at the protest (against a 16 year old woman) triggered the riots that followed.
What I would like to see is police training in how to deal with angry people that doesn't involve violence but involves empathy and listening and acknowledging grievances (whether the police think the grievances are real or imagined is not relevant).

Nick Clegg 'I predict a riot' silent over Tottenham

Nick Clegg predicted riots if Tories elected. His prediction has come true not because voters elected the Tories, perhaps they took note of his fears of major social unrest, but because he put them into power.

More cuts, more unemployment, more misery.

Well we could cut Trident and foreign wars and fund education and create jobs, but that would all be too radical for the powers that be.

The police also need reform, I am not really in a position to discuss the situation in Tottenham but clearly the police in London have been more willing to serve Rupert Murdoch than reach out to the youth of North London.

More misery and more repression is likely and likely to lead to more rioting. Welcome to Condem Britain.

Is Brighton Green Party attacking the unions?

This is about 3 weeks old, it has been sorted since then. [union] reps had a meeting with directors, HR, and Councillors a few weeks ago and raised our concerns about this news. One of the UNISON reps present had already got a letter telling him his facility time was being stopped. To be fair, the Greens were pretty outraged by this, (apparently they hadn't known about it) and Bill Randall (Leader of the Greens) issued instructions to the Head of HR to ensure no more of these letters were sent out, and that the ones that already had been were retracted, and facility time restored. He assured us that they will NOT be looking to remove any of our facility time. So don't panic, nowt changing :)

"All Kitcat pledged to do was to answer the question about how we compared to other authorities with regards to our facility time. This article is misleading in that it sounds like the Greens were going to conduct some massive review of it, with the aim of lessening facility time. That was never the case. All elected members are entitled to enquire about spending levels, he simply said he would find out. Even with the extra facility time granted to the unions for the single status issue, we still came out with less time than some other authorities, which shut the Tories up. And we have an agreement from the Greens that they will certainly not be looking to attack our facility time. So this is pretty much a non-story."

Is from a Brighton union rep.

Brighton and Hove GP is doing good, Labour and Tories are keen to stop them doing good.

Anonymous targets Monsanto

MAM ZAID SHAKIR on GREEN RAMADAN

IMAM ZAID SHAKIR on GREEN RAMADAN

A video of Imam Zaid Shakir promoting the idea of an environmentally friendly Green Ramadan. He gives some useful tips and shares his own experiences of how to make ramadan a little greener.

Watch this video here: http://vimeo.com/24966455

How they stole the land in England!

Great history lesson do read and take note!

The process of forcible expropriation of the people received in the 16th century a new and frightful impulse from the Reformation, and from the consequent colossal spoliation of the church property. The Catholic church was, at the time of the Reformation, feudal proprietor of a great part of the English land. The suppression of the monasteries, &c., hurled their inmates into the proletariat. The estates of the church were to a large extent given away to rapacious royal favourites, or sold at a nominal price to speculating farmers and citizens, who drove out, en masse, the hereditary sub-tenants and threw their holdings into one. The legally guaranteed property of the poorer folk in a part of the church’s tithes was tacitly confiscated. [7] “Pauper ubique jacet,” cried Queen Elizabeth, after a journey through England. In the 43rd year of her reign the nation was obliged to recognise pauperism officially by the introduction of a poor-rate. “The authors of this law seem to have been ashamed to state the grounds of it, for [contrary to traditional usage] it has no preamble whatever.” [8] By the 16th of Charles I., ch. 4, it was declared perpetual, and in fact only in 1834 did it take a new and harsher form. [9] These immediate results of the Reformation were not its most lasting ones. The property of the church formed the religious bulwark of the traditional conditions of landed property. With its fall these were no longer tenable. [10]

Even in the last decade of the 17th century, the yeomanry, the class of independent peasants, were more numerous than the class of farmers. They had formed the backbone of Cromwell’s strength, and, even according to the confession of Macaulay, stood in favourable contrast to the drunken squires and to their servants, the country clergy, who had to marry their masters’ cast-off mistresses. About 1750, the yeomanry had disappeared, [11] and so had, in the last decade of the 18th century, the last trace of the common land of the agricultural labourer. We leave on one side here the purely economic causes of the agricultural revolution. We deal only with the forcible means employed.

After the restoration of the Stuarts, the landed proprietors carried, by legal means, an act of usurpation, effected everywhere on the Continent without any legal formality. They abolished the feudal tenure of land, i.e., they got rid of all its obligations to the State, “indemnified” the State by taxes on the peasantry and the rest of the mass of the people, vindicated for themselves the rights of modern private property in estates to which they had only a feudal title, and, finally, passed those laws of settlement, which, mutatis mutandis, had the same effect on the English agricultural labourer, as the edict of the Tartar Boris Godunof on the Russian peasantry.

The “glorious Revolution” brought into power, along with William of Orange, the landlord and capitalist appropriators of surplus-value. [12] They inaugurated the new era by practising on a colossal scale thefts of state lands, thefts that had been hitherto managed more modestly. These estates were given away, sold at a ridiculous figure, or even annexed to private estates by direct seizure. [13] All this happened without the slightest observation of legal etiquette. The Crown lands thus fraudulently appropriated, together with the robbery of the Church estates, as far as these had not been lost again during the republican revolution, form the basis of the today princely domains of the English oligarchy. [14] The bourgeois capitalists favoured the operation with the view, among others, to promoting free trade in land, to extending the domain of modern agriculture on the large farm-system, and to increasing their supply of the free agricultural proletarians ready to hand. Besides, the new landed aristocracy was the natural ally of the new bankocracy, of the newly-hatched haute finance, and of the large manufacturers, then depending on protective duties. The English bourgeoisie acted for its own interest quite as wisely as did the Swedish bourgeoisie who, reversing the process, hand in hand with their economic allies, the peasantry, helped the kings in the forcible resumption of the Crown lands from the oligarchy. This happened since 1604 under Charles X. and Charles XI.

Communal property — always distinct from the State property just dealt with — was an old Teutonic institution which lived on under cover of feudalism. We have seen how the forcible usurpation of this, generally accompanied by the turning of arable into pasture land, begins at the end of the 15th and extends into the 16th century. But, at that time, the process was carried on by means of individual acts of violence against which legislation, for a hundred and fifty years, fought in vain. The advance made by the 18th century shows itself in this, that the law itself becomes now the instrument of the theft of the people’s land, although the large farmers make use of their little independent methods as well. [15] The parliamentary form of the robbery is that of Acts for enclosures of Commons, in other words, decrees by which the landlords grant themselves the people’s land as private property, decrees of expropriation of the people. Sir F. M. Eden refutes his own crafty special pleading, in which he tries to represent communal property as the private property of the great landlords who have taken the place of the feudal lords, when he, himself, demands a “general Act of Parliamen

t for the enclosure of Commons” (admitting thereby that a parliamentary coup d’état is necessary for its transformation into private property), and moreover calls on the legislature for the indemnification for the expropriated poor. [16]


MORE HERE

Who is the real leader of the opposition?