Eric Neal
Conservative Party
County Councillor for Aldershot East (2005 - 2013)
Councillor Eric Neal PLEASE CLICK LINKS BELOW Home News Aldershot 2015
A town that deserves better
August Riots 2011 Who To Talk To My Manifesto 2009 County Election
2009 (Analysis)
Contact Useful Links Actions & Comments Achievments 2004-2009 Westminster Report Articles/Letters
from Local Press
Who says Tories can't do Comedy
If any of the images used on my website have been used without rights, please contact me, and I will happily remove them.
August Riots - 2011
I have taken some quotes from Max Hastings excellent article which appeared in the Daily Mail on Wednesday 10th August concerning the riots. I agree with everything that Max Hastings said. The problem that all of us now face, is what do you do with these young people?

I have taken some quotes from Max Hastings excellent article

1. Lock them up and throw away the keys? Regretfully at some stage they would have to be released.

2. Put them in the army, regretfully our modern day army would not wish to have them.

3. Give them each a youth or social worker?

  riot-01
The Liberal elite will tell you that this would work, yet they never seemed to produce any evidence it would? As we will see some of the looters were opportunists and may not have been involved in the riots but we must have no sympathy for them, they should have known better.  
As Max Hastings said: "Years of liberal dogma have spawned a generation of amoral, uneducated, welfare dependent, brutalized youngsters"   Rioters on the streets August 2011 "That sword wasn't an accident
 
riot-02 Rampage: We are told that youths roaming the streets are doing so because they are angry at unemployment, but a quick look at an apprenticeship website yields 2,228 vacancies in London.

Top of Form - by Max Hastings
I am sure that is what many of the young rioters, black and white, who have burned and looted in England through the past few shocking nights think today.

It was fun. It made life interesting. It got people to notice them. As a girl looter told a BBC reporter, it showed ‘the rich’ and the police that ‘we can do what we like’.


Behind bins: Rioters in Hackney stand in front of a makeshift barricade

If you live a normal life of absolute futility, which we can assume most of this week’s rioters do, excitement of any kind is welcome. The people who wrecked swathes of property, burned vehicles and terrorised communities have no moral compass to make them susceptible to guilt or shame.

Most have no jobs to go to or exams they might pass. They know no family role models, for most live in homes in which the father is unemployed, or from which he has decamped.

They are illiterate and innumerate, beyond maybe some dexterity with computer games and BlackBerries.

They are essentially wild beasts. I use that phrase advisedly, because it seems appropriate to young people bereft of the discipline that might make them employable; of the conscience that distinguishes between right and wrong.

They respond only to instinctive animal impulses — to eat and drink, have sex, seize or destroy the accessible property of others. Their behaviour on the streets resembled that of the polar bear which attacked a Norwegian tourist camp last week. They were doing what came naturally and, unlike the bear, no one even shot them for it. A former London police chief spoke a few years ago about the ‘feral children’ on his patch — another way of describing the same reality.

The depressing truth is that at the bottom of our society is a layer of young people with no skills, education, values or aspirations. They do not have what most of us would call ‘lives’: they simply exist. Nobody has ever dared suggest to them that they need feel any allegiance to anything, least of all Britain or their community. They do not watch royal weddings or notice Test matches or take pride in being Londoners or Scousers or Brummies. Not only do they know nothing of Britain’s past, they care nothing for its present.

They have their being only in video games and street-fights, casual drug use and crime, sometimes petty, sometimes serious.

The notions of doing a nine-to-five job, marrying and sticking with a wife and kids, taking up DIY or learning to read properly, are beyond their imaginations.

Max Hastings

 
Comment from a reader of MailOnline on Max Hastings article.

"I completely agree.

I can't believe these young people have the nerve to say the police are too hard on them because they are racist. If anything, the police are way too soft and have their poor hands tied behind their back. They then blame the Government for not doing enough for them, even though the Government has provided them with free shelter, food, education and healthcare and they have so much more then they deserve considering their lack of contribution to society. They blame immigrants for taking their jobs, but in reality they don't even want to work and no one wants to employ them. If I was an employer I would hire an Eastern European before these yobs any day. I don't care if we are technically from the same country, I feel no loyalty to these people, and as far as I am concerned we are not even the same species. I put most the blame on their parents, who have completely failed at raising these children. They should be heavily penalised. Name them and shame them."
- Camilla, London, 10/8/2011 00:55
 
The views expressed in the content above are those of our users and do not necessarily reflect the views of MailOnline.
 
People in public life who should know better.
This is what Ken Livingstone told the BBC News Channel:-

“A lot of these young people, they are criminals, yes, but there’s a disengagement – they feel no-one at the top of society, in government or City Hall, cares about them or speaks for them.
livingston Then on Newsnight, Ken described the riots as a “revolt” against Government cuts. He said: “If you’re making massive cuts, there’s always the potential for this sort of revolt against that”

He went on to tell the News Channel:
“We got police numbers up to 32,000, and we thought that would cope. But the Government’s going to have to review the policy of cutting. They’re planning to cut almost 2,000 police in London…When I was elected Mayor, we only had 25,000 police… The police have got to be confident the Government stands behind them, and the Mayor stands behind them, and when you’re cutting 2,000 police they don’t feel that….

“You can’t just be a mayor when you’re opening fetes and doing charity performances. You’ve got to be a mayor when it’s going wrong…. What people need is the reassurance. What I did when I came back from Singapore after 7/7, I was on London’s tubes and buses, I was meeting the victims. It’s that reassurance.” ......Ken Livingston.
Ken Livingston
Regretfully Ken Livingstone was just electioneering while London burned!

It is obvious these young people do not fear or respect the police in fact they only respect a force greater than themselves - which is not our police.

They have little concept of what Government does, I doubt if any of them know who Ken Livingstone is or what a London Mayor is about, these young people are mostly illiterate with no respect for anybody.

Ken Livingstone is just another Labour politician who will not recognize reality – he cannot accept his elk is responsible for much of this mess.

What none of us should forget, this is a very small minority of young people who are causing all this mayhem;
The vast majority of our kids are decent and hard working.
  riot-03
Electioneering whilst London burns