Dispelling the PC bullshit about Britain's rioting underclass

We are now being inundated by wave after wave of gliberal analysis of the causes of the riots that swept the UK last week. The problem is that British society is "broken". The "social contract" has been breached. And guess who's responsible? Certainly not those rampaging through the streets! Heavens no! They're victims, dontcha know...

That's bullshit, as most of us know but few of us have the courage to say. As I wrote earlier this morning, the truth is that the rioters are underclass scum -- black gangstas and chavs behaving like black gangstas because it's "cool". In an earlier post I called them hoodlums and hooligans, for that's what they are.

I'm pleasantly surprised to find the lamestream and resolutely politically correct Globe and Mail agreeing with me. [Or you could say you find yourself in agreement with the Glob! Ed.] Here's the lead paragraph from their editorial, "No excuses for British hooligans":

There is an emerging analysis that while on the one hand there is “no excuse” for the wave of rioting, looting and wanton violence that swept London and other British cities last week, on the other hand there really is an excuse: social exclusion and systemic discrimination. Accordingly, the hoodlums are really victims, their violence and mayhem only a plaintive cry for help. They are not depraved but deprived. It is a ludicrous suggestion, one that flies in the face of two decades worth of massive expenditures in poverty-stricken areas designed to improve the opportunities, particularly, of inner city youth.

Putting it another way, British taxpayers have spent billions of pounds doing what the liberals tell us is "the progressive thing", "the right thing", namely doling out money to the "disadvantaged" and hoping they'll stay in their place, not cause any more trouble...and vote for the government of the day. So how's that working out? Film at seven!

There is a lesson in that for governments on the western side of the Atlantic. Even now, we keep hearing cries from the guilt-ridden (because they're white) dogooders that we should spend even more money "helping the disadvantaged". Build them special schools, we're told. Bring your peanut butter and mac & cheese to the food bank. Give them better housing and don't worry about collecting the rent.

I'm reminded of the song "Gee, Officer Krupke", from West Side Story....
Dear kindly social workers
They say go earn some dough
Like be a soda jerker
Which means like be a schmo
It's not I'm anti-social
I'm only anti-work!
Gloryosky, that's why I'm a jerk...

Jerks, hoodlums, hooligans... that's what they are. And it's not the rest of us who made them that way! The rest of us work to provide ourselves with the necessities of life. And if there's money left over for a TV, we go and buy it; we don't break into the Source!

How about we shut up about "social exclusion" and "systemic discrimination". Instead, let's try applying a little old-fashioned discipline, to make these poor "disadvantaged" youths shape up or face real consequences.

"Whites behaving like blacks"

Quick, what's the most politically incorrect thing you could say about last week's riots in the UK? Looking at the video clips, you could say that you saw blacks behaving like blacks -- burning, looting, trashing everything in sight. And you could say that you also saw whites behaving like blacks.

So said London historian David Starkey, during a debate on the origins and causes of the riots which rocked London and other English -- not Scottish or Welsh, just English -- cities. Predictably, Mr. Starkey's extremely politically incorrect remarks have caused cries of outrage from the usual progressive right-thinking liberals throughout Britain and around the world.

The row erupted after Dr. Starkey spoke on BBC's Newsnight on Friday, opposite leftie author Owen Jones, who wrote Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class. You may remember seeing Walt's note on chavs, referencing this book, on July 18th.

Here's what Dr. Starkey had the courage to say: "I think what this week has shown is that profound changes have happened. There has been a profound cultural change. I have just been re-reading Enoch Powell. [The reference is to Mr. Powell's 1968 "Rivers of Blood Speech", quotes by Walt on August 10th.]

"[Powell's] prophecy was absolutely right in one sense: the Tiber didn’t foam with blood, but flames lambent wrapped around Tottenham, wrapped around Clapham. But it wasn’t intercommunal violence; this was where he was completely wrong.

"What has happened is that the substantial section of the chavs that you wrote about have become black. The whites have become black. A particular sort of violent, destructive, nihilistic gangster culture has become the fashion.

"Black and white, boy and girl operate in this language together. This language, which is wholly false, which is this Jamaican patois that has intruded in England. This is why so many of us have this sense of [living in] a foreign country."

Dr. Starkey said there had been "a profound cultural change" and added that the disturbances and accompanying looting were not riots in the traditional sense, but simply "shopping with violence".

Strong stuff, and of course reaction from the usual suspects has been equally strong. Dr. Starkey has been called a "classist" (by Mr. Jones, of course) for looking down his educated patrician nose at the scum ["chavs", surely! Ed.] doing the rioting.

Others, such as David Lammy, Labour MP for Tottenham (where the rioting began) and, errr, a gentleman of the coloured persuasion, had to admit that, yes, the rioters and looters were chavs, but "those who engaged in criminal behaviour came from all races".

Mr. Lammy, called Dr. Starkey's comments were "misleading" as well as "dangerous and divisive". Ah yes..."divisive". That and "unhelpful" are this year's code words for "You may be right but you're not allowed to say these things because our disadvantaged minorities might be offended."

However, Dr. Starkey has his defenders. Author and commentator Toby Young told the Daily Mail that Dr Starkey was not criticising black culture in general but a "particular form of black culture, the violent, destructive, nihilistic, gangster culture associated with Jamaican gangs and American rap music". [My emphasis. Walt.]

Young added: "Had he been talking about these qualities as if they were synonymous with African-Caribbean culture per se, or condemning that culture in its totality, then he would have been guilty of racism. But he wasn’t. He was quite specifically condemning a sub-culture associated with a small minority of people of African-Caribbean heritage.

"Rather than being racist, he was merely trotting out the conventional wisdom of the hour, namely, that gang culture is to blame for the riots. In addition, Starkey wasn’t linking this sub-culture to people of just one skin colour, but condemning working-class white people – chavs, as he put it – who embraced it as well."

In his blog "If David Starkey is racist then so is everybody", the Telegraph's James Delingpole said: "The cultural point he is making is indisputable. Listen to how many white kids (and Asian kids) choose to speak in black street patois; note the extent to which hip-hop and grime garage and their offshoots have penetrated the white mainstream; check out how many white kids like to roll like pimps or perps with their Calvins pulled up to their midriffs and their jean waistbands sagging below their buttocks. Is anyone seriously going to try to make the case that this isn’t black culture in excelsis?"

Walt's answer to Mr. Delingpole is no. Of course no observant person will try to shift the blame from where it obviously belongs. We have eyes and ears. We can see and hear. We know who the perps are and what they represent. The only reason we can't say so plainly -- and take the appropriate corrective action -- is that people like Mr. Jones and Mr. Lammy find telling the truth "divisive" and "unhelpful".

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2026043/UK-RIOTS-David-Starkey-backed-furore-whites-black-culture-claim.html#ixzz1V6YYc35I

"I told you this would happen!": Enoch Powell

Earlier today, I wrote about the riots which are spreading across England like wildfire. (Pun intended, of course.) What we are seeing, I said, is class warfare. Karl Marx would not have been surprised, but he would have been astonished, I'm sure, by the degraded nature of the revolting underclass.

Marx foresaw warfare between the rich upper class and bourgeoisie and the lower class of workers and peasants. He didn't imagine that there would be a still-lower class of NEETs and chavs -- see previous post for definitions -- biting the hand of the nanny state that feeds them.

The other element Marx didn't factor in was race. He lived and worked in 19th century England, which had yet to admit millions of immigrants from its former colonies.

The tide of black and brown wannabe-Britons didn't reach flood proportions until the UK started winding up its empire in the 1950s. Marx was long gone by the time more dark faces than white were seen in the streets of London, Birmingham, and Leeds.

One man who saw it -- or them -- coming, and predicted disaster, was Enoch Powell, a Conservative member of the British parliament. On April 20, 1968, Mr. Powell made what he always called "the Birmingham speech", better known then and now as "the Rivers of Blood speech".

The speech caused a political firestorm, for Mr. Powell had the courage to say what had already become politically incorrect. He said that Britain would rue the day when it opened the doors to 1000s of third-world immigrants who would not or could not be assimilated into British society. The phrase "rivers of blood" does not appear in the speech. However, it includes the line, "As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see 'the River Tiber foaming with much blood.'"

Powell quoted a letter he received about the troubles of an elderly woman living in a Wolverhampton street where she was the only white resident. "We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependants, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre."

Powell argued that although "many thousands" of immigrants wanted to integrate, the majority did not. Some, he said, had vested interests in fostering racial and religious differences "with a view to the exercise of actual domination, first over fellow immigrants and then over the rest of the population".

He went on to say that those who were urging the government to pass anti-discrimination laws -- this was in 1968, remember, at the height of the "civil rights" movement -- were blind to the rising peril which would ensure. Powell said that such legislation would be used to discriminate against the indigenous population and that it would be like "throwing a match onto gunpowder."

Mr. Powell described the position to which he thought the indigenous -- meaning white -- population would be reduced:

"For reasons which they could not comprehend, and in pursuance of a decision...on which they were never consulted, they found themselves made strangers in their own country.

"They found their wives unable to obtain hospital beds in childbirth, their children unable to obtain school places, their homes and neighbourhoods changed beyond recognition, their plans and prospects for the future defeated; at work they found that employers hesitated to apply to the immigrant worker the standards of discipline and competence required of the native-born worker; they began to hear, as time went by, more and more voices which told them that they were now the unwanted.

"On top of this, they now learn that a one-way privilege is to be established by Act of Parliament; a law which cannot, and is not intended to, operate to protect them or redress their grievances, is to be enacted to give the stranger, the disgruntled and the agent provocateur the power to pillory them for their private actions."

Enoch Powell said all of this and much more at Birmingham in 1968. His speech is worth reading in its entirety, for it paints a deadly accurate picture of the future of once-great Britain, after half a century of largely unrestricted immigration and reverse discrimination.

The rioting in progress today has its origins in the class war, sure enough. But it is also about race. As in Watts and other American riots of the `60s and `70s, it began (in Tottenham, a poor and blighted section of north London) when a white cop shot a person of colour. Minutes later, the gangstas and looters were burning, smashing and grabbing for all they were worth. "Police brutality" and "discrimination" makes it all right, you see.

The Brits are wringing their hands now, trying to figure out what to do, since it's obviously impossible to send them all back home. Powell advocated "voluntary repatriation", but that was over 40 years ago. Most of the boyz in the hoodz we see today were born in the UK. Which is where the class aspect of the problem manifests itself.

The mobsters intent on wrecking anything and everything are not only black or brown, but white too. What they have in common is being part of this huge underclass, the NEETs and chavs and scum which constitute a rapidly growing cancer in the body of our society.

How can this cancer be cured? Don't expect me to write "to be continued", for honestly, I have no printable ideas. We were warned. We didn't listen. We're still not listening, even though the disease is now endemic. In due course, I fear, our society will die. And, from wherever he is, Enoch Powell can rightly say, "I told you so."

"I didn't see this coming!": Marx

On July 18th, I wrote about "The new oppressed minority", and introduced to you the British neologism "chavs", standing (possibly) for "Council Housed And Violent". I was looking for an example and came up with just one picture. Since this weekend, though, you've been able to see hundreds of pictures and videos of chavs in action, in the riots that have spread from a largely black area of London to several English cities.

Who are the chavs -- the hooded hooligans we see burning, looting and pillaging their own neighbourhoods? Where do they come from? Why are they doing this? In "More about chavs", I tried to show how Britain's welfare statism -- relentless even during the government of Margaret Thatcher -- has produced a large and growing underclass of uneducated, unemployed and generally useless young people, parasites sucking on the tits of the British taxpayers. It is that scummy underclass -- on this side of the water we would call them "white trash" -- who are revolting. And no, I'm not making a cheap joke.

Karl Marx saw class warfare as inevitable. He predicted a revolution of the proletariat -- meaning workers and peasants -- who would rise against the upper classes, the landlords, capitalists and gentry who (he claimed) held the lower classes in poverty and servitude.

Marx had the general idea, but he never imagined that the upper classes would create and nurture the drunken mob which roams the streets of British cities even as I write.

For the hoodlums you see kicking in windows and robbing the wounded are not workers, peasants or students. They are NEETs -- another new word for you -- Not in Employment, Education or Training. In other words, they are idlers and layabouts, who would be starving and homeless but for the largesse of the nanny state which provides them with public housing ("council houses"), free healthcare, and "allowances" for being unemployed or unemployable.

Marx would doubtless approve of all these socialistic -- OK, communist! -- programmes. However, it was the British electorate which voted for one government after another -- not excepting that of Margaret Thatcher -- which instituted these "measures for the assistance of the less fortunate and disadvantaged". "Progressive" thinking, "progressive" thinkers and "progressive" politicians have sowed the wind. And now Britain reaps the whirlwind.

But before we say it can't happen in America, let us remember the so-called race riots of the `60s and `70s: Detroit, Harlem, and of course Watts. While there were racial overtones to those riots, they were just as much about class as about race. In the USA, "progressive" civil rights, welfare and criminal justice policies have spawned a huge underclass which just happens to be comprised largely of brown and black people. Those are the ones who take to the streets and steal TVs to get even for "police brutality" and other real or imaginary injustices.

Marx, it seems, was colour-blind. Perhaps it was because most of the citizens of his native Prussia and of Britain, where he did most of his thinking and writing, were white. The UK had not yet been inundated by wave after wave of South Asian, Caribbean and African immigrants.

And in the 19th century, when Marx wrote, Britain had not yet tried putting his theories into practice. It's a pity Marx didn't live to see how his vision of Utopia played out. What happened to the Great Britain of the Victorian era? "Progressive" policies turned it into the mongrelized anti-society that is collapsing tonight.

More about chavs

According to Wikipedia, the word "chav" (see previous post) probably has its origins in the Romani word "chavi", meaning "child" or "chavo" meaning "boy", or "chavvy", meaning "youth". The word may have entered the English language through the Geordie dialect word "charva", meaning a rough child.

Many urban legends have sprung up around the etymology of the word. These include the backronym "Council Housed And Violent" or "Council House Associated Vermin". Though widely known and believed, these are definitely recent after-the-event inventions as attempts to explain the word.

The widespread use of the "chav" stereotype has come in for some criticism as amounting to no more than simple snobbery and elitism. Critics of the term have argued that its users are "neo-snobs", and that its increasing popularity raises questions about how British society deals with social mobility and class.

In a February 2005 article in The Times, Julie Burchill argued that use of the word is a form of "social racism", and that such "sneering" reveals more about the shortcomings of the "chav-haters" than those of their supposed victims. The writer John Harris argued along similar lines in a 2007 article in The Guardian. And that is the premise of Owen Jones's book, referred to in my last post.

Do we have chavs in North America? Your comments are invited.

The new oppressed minority

Rednecks. Trailer trash. White trash. Or...a little more gently...poor whites. There's millions of these "ordinary people" out there. I shop with them at Walmart. And I listen to the stories of their pathetic lives every day on Judge Judy. (Yes, yes. I know a lot of the "litigants" on Judge Judy represent the black underclass, but those aren't the ones we're talking about.)

In Britain they have another word for the young, "disadvantaged" louts you see hanging out at the malls and the welfare office. The word is "chav". Here's a picture of the female of the species.

A chav is a stereotype of certain people -- aggressive teenagers, of working class background -- who repeatedly engage in anti-social behaviour such as street drinking, drug abuse, rowdiness and other forms of juvenile delinquency. Although the term is most often used to describe teenagers, today's teen chavs are tomorrow's adult chavs. "Chavhood" is forever, it seems, and represents a huge social problem in today's Britain... and America... and Canada.

What do we do for... or with... the chavs? That's the theme of a new book by Owen Jones: Chavs: the Demonization of the Working Class. Jones says that looking down on, and putting down poor whites has now become completely acceptable to urban liberals. On the other hand, the poor from other ethnic groups are trated with respect, assumed to be the victims of racism, and showered with welfare and special programs to help them become, errr, not chavs.

This phenomenon has interesting political ramifications. The "elite" view of poor whites is one of the reasons for the populist backlash against the liberal parties of the USA, UK and Canada. These parties used to be the champions of the common man, the defenders of the poor, of families, of "ordinary people". Now the liberals have abadoned the white lower classes in favour of hipper minorities. (Hello refugees!)

Will the liberals get away with neglecting the man and woman on the 113 bus? Probably, because no matter how much the Tea Partiers might wish otherwise, the poor white minority doesn't vote.