I am horrified (yet fascinated) to hear that first hand account of the student protests. It looked unforgiveable in the press, esp to kettle on a bridge!

I have also had some deeply unpleasant experiences with the Met as a victim of crime and like you and like the kids who get stopped all the time, that has coloured my judgement quite quickly and left a real mark. I have had to work really really hard not to become bitter upon discovering the police aren’t going to help me and keep me safe. If they’d managed to slap a criminal record on me in the process that might screw up my life forever, I doubt I’d be so benevolent…

Anecdote about the Met: I was kettled in Parliament Square on the day of the tuition fees vote despite having been totally peaceful, and the policing there was DISGRACEFUL. We were held without cause for 7.5 hours, with no access to food, water or toilets. And contrary to what the police claimed, almost all of the destruction on the Square – graffiti, broken windows, fires etc. happened AFTER the kettle was in place, when people found themselves cooped up with nowhere to go (I had determined to leave at the first sign of trouble – unfortunately the first sign I saw was riot police marching up Whitehall, and it was already too late). I think the kettling was both a provocation to violence, and a cruel means of trying to stop people from coming out and protesting again.

They then also pushed us onto Westminster Bridge, at 9 PM on a December night, and I was really worried that there could have been a Hillsborough-type disaster. Nowhere to go, too many people in a small space.

That was a real wake-up call to me in terms of policing, since before that I had had little contact with police and most of it on the level of asking-a-friendly-cop-for-directions.

NessieMonster and Holly

I’m really glad you made those points. Someone on the lunchtime news was saying most of the kids he knew who had been involved in the trouble in Brixton on Sunday had parents who were working. But the problem is that wages are so low and prices so high that they are working three jobs just to keep their head above water and have to time to parent. Some also don’t want to claim benefits because of the rhetoric about ‘scroungers’ that is common these days. So you end up with poor kids who are angry and envious of those who can afford iPods and new trainers.

But the fact they were looting the pound shop shows how modest some aspirations are. These are the rates for the National Minimum Wage for young people:

*£5.93 – the main rate for workers age 21+
*£4.92 – the 18-20 rate
*£3.64 – the 16-17 rate for workers above school leaving age but under 18
*£2.50 – the apprentice rate, for apprentices under 19 or 19 or over and in the first year of their apprenticeship

Job Seekers Allowance is only for 18s and over and the rate for under 25s is £53.45 per week. Income Support is also not payable to the under 18s unless they are parents. Housing Benefit is massively restricted to under 25s (aside from the forthcoming change in the Single Room Rent Allowance to 35 which means you can’t live alone) and Council Tax Benefit is only payable to over 18s. Add in the new vogue for zero hours contracts that mean you are technically employed but you might not get any hours or pay that week and how do you survive? Because they aren’t getting cushy off the Department of Work and Pensions*…

I utterly condemn burning and looting. It’s callous and stupid especially when it damages what good there is in your community. But I can see why these kids have done it. I think we need to employ carrots to bring them away from that mindset, only using sticks if there is repeated misbehaviour.

And we need to address the problems with our police, especially the Met. Their corruption, piss poor community relations and bureaucracy played a large part in this too.

But yes, more than ever we need education to be relevant, more available better paid jobs and for our young people not feel washed up and jaded by the age of 16.

Though we have a different culture here in America, what with social welfare being a dirty phrase, I think many of the same base problems are happening here. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer and gateways are being thrown up between the two (for example, rising costs of college).

I believe the most effective way to solve community- and nation-wide problems is for communities to band together, help each other, and make their cases heard in one voice, amplified by many. Violence is a mistake and a trap. Once you resort to violence, it can be used as a weapon against you.

You have to be blind or priviledged (middle class and up) not to see the inequality in these communities. People are saying that these folks don’t count as part of society but is it not exactly that attitude that contributes to their disaffection in the first place? They ARE a part of our society whether or not we like it, and we as a whole have to answer for it.

Middle class folks, whose only encounter with the benefits system is child benefit (previously universal, now not,) say that the impoverished are handed enough by the state as it is, they’ve got it cushy, compared to the poverty they would face if they lived in (developing county of choice), and completely fail to see how our society as it is contributes to the violence. The lack of low paid, yet respectable, jobs must be contributing somewhere…

*gets off soapbox*

Also, thank you for summarising some of this year’s politics. I didn’t know that 23 out of 29 cabinet ministers are millionaires!!!