Posts by Sacha
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Hard News: London's Burning, in reply to Kyle Matthews,
I suspect Western capitalism is probably less in crisis at the moment, than it was just before/at the beginning of the Great Depression.
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And culturally, I don't think anything happening at present is anywhere near the challenge of the late 1960s and early 1970s.I'd say it's a different but significant systemic crisis/challenge, especially if you take in the unrest in other places like the middle east over similar factors like poverty, food prices, youth unemployment and political disengagement. What did you make of the Will Davies article that Stephen linked to?
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Hard News: London's Burning, in reply to Kumara Republic,
Holmes thinks
You're exaggerating
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Meanwhile dim Paul Holmes wails "who could have known?" while describing some of the dots he can't seem to join, including Britain's past glories.
So I'm reading about this entire other world, this world of beautiful dreams and beautiful houses and estates and balls and good manners that Hitler swept away, and then I've turned on the television and seen all week the ugliness of young British thugs tearing the backside out of half a dozen British cities.
Like everyone, I don't understand it. Why are they doing this, smashing the shops and now each other, destroying the livelihoods of decent people in furious rampages organised by the miracle of the text. Are they so disaffected? Do they not feel they have a stake? Are they so badly educated? Is it racist, all of this? How can you tell, with their balaclavas and hoodies? Young hoodlums lighting massive fires simply to watch buildings burn. I mean, it is so catastrophically un-British. Or is it? They've lived for a long time with soccer hooliganism and lager louts in the UK.And of course, the kids are so mobile they're very hard to police.
Mind you, who would have thought the British police would have so much riot gear available to them? I doubt anyone could have foreseen how widespread and tinder dry the hostility in the inner cities had become. Maybe the kids are just bored.
..And perhaps the old ways were the right ways. Perhaps they should shoot the thugs in the city streets.
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It must be hard for people who don't fit the stereotype to read the word "they" used about any group that they're a part of. But we all experience that from time to time, and taking a collective view of human behaviour nonetheless helps us understand what's going on.
Rioting in particular would make little sense to see as an individual phenomenon. And whose collective interests are benefitted by doing so?
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AKT blog touches on the light rail side of the plan, with more info and links in the comments. One of them notes:
It will be interesting to see if the Greens get 10%+ of the vote, then the government of day would have battle with the Greens over any watering down of the proposed rebuild.
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Southerly: One Hundred and Thirty-one…, in reply to Hebe,
violent agreement
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Southerly: One Hundred and Thirty-one…, in reply to Hebe,
Why accept the CCC spin on the building heights?
What am I accepting? I agree with Emma that light is a more compelling motivation than fear. Someone on another thread also explained that high-rise buildings were if anything more eco-friendly than 4-floor ones, so it's not a clear-cut matter.
But I'm mostly struck by the politics of the announcement and the language of the parties opposed to regulations.
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Via Mr Grigg, an inter-generational analysis. Warning: some content may upset boomers.
The UN’s first ever report on the state of childhood in the industrialized West made unpleasant reading for many of the world’s richest nations. But none found it quite so hard to swallow as the Brits, who, old jokes about English cooking aside, discovered that they were eating their own young.
...But what if the behavior of broken British children is less a violent reaction to their inadequate pasts than calculated defiance against their hopeless futures?
...In their Class of 2005 survey, LSE economist Nick Bosanquet, along with Blair Gibbs of the independent think tank Reform, branded Britain’s under-35s the “iPod Generation” – insecure, pressured, over-taxed and debt-ridden. Warning that Britain was at a generational tipping point when it came to quality of life, they argued, “The common perception is that today’s young people have it easy. But the true position of young people is thrown into stark relief when compared to their parents . . . who enjoyed many advantages of which the younger generation can now only dream, including a generous welfare state, free universal higher education, secure pensions and a substantial rise in housing equity which has augmented their lifetime savings.”
Others have called the tripling of housing costs in under a decade the largest generational asset transfer – from young and poor to old and rich – in UK history, and it is almost certainly the key factor contributing to both the nation’s plummeting birth-rate and its record £1.2 trillion in personal debt, a figure that puts even the most voracious American consumer to shame. Debt, whether measured in a natal deficit or angry letters from the bank, is a sure sign that the good times are up, because the only way the pretense of affluence can be continued is if tomorrow’s hardship is used to pay for today’s brief consumer whims.
The first stirrings of major intergenerational conflict are already being noted. The basic rights of the recent past – a safe job, free education and healthcare, secure homes to raise a family, a modest but comfortable old age – have slipped quietly away, all to be replaced by a myriad of vapid lifestyle choices and glittery consumer trinkets.
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Southerly: One Hundred and Thirty-one…, in reply to James Butler,
if you deliberately design the roads and zoning to encourage sprawl
and who do you imagine lobbied for that?
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Southerly: One Hundred and Thirty-one…, in reply to Emma Hart,
It's also what the community said it wanted
And watch that get overturned by lobbying during the next stage of the process. Developer profits uber alles. Just ask Gerry.