Inequality

[Arniepie]

1 hour ago, Anubis said:

Unfortunately, it’s how a lot of people think.

 

 

I dont know if its rose tinted glasses but in the past,didnt they actually pretent not to be a shower of evil fucking cunts?

Now they are quite brazen about it..yep we imposed austerity but if you are not wealthy,fuck you,and if you are old and in a care home ,fuck you, and the great British public have said..yep that sounds like my type of party

 

[Kepler-186]

They’ve never been any different. I read Stuart Maconie’s book retracing the Jarrow march after Brexit. In the 30s, before the March when they closed the shipyard at Jarrow, the town’s only source of employment, the Lord or Sir appointed to the enquiry retorted Jarrow “should look to its own salvation”, that is no help from us. 
 

They’re wicked, clever, devious cunts who have managed to destroy any meaningful opposition, right down to even mildly questioning their non existant  economic policies are seen as pure Communism,  while making the country AS A WHOLE poorer economically, socially, and culturally, but they get a lot of help from the media to avoid scrutiny. 

 

 

[Anubis]

15 minutes ago, Arniepie said:

I dont know if its rose tinted glasses but in the past,didnt they actually pretent not to be a shower of evil fucking cunts?

Now they are quite brazen about it..yep we imposed austerity but if you are not wealthy,fuck you,and if you are old and in a care home ,fuck you, and the great British public have said..yep that sounds like my type of party

 

The Conservatives have morphed into something you’d normally expect to see from the UKIP end of the spectrum. Quite open and brazen about fucking you over now. 

[Arniepie]

1 hour ago, Anubis said:

The Conservatives have morphed into something you’d normally expect to see from the UKIP end of the spectrum. Quite open and brazen about fucking you over now. 

The emasculation of the unions has certainly played a part.Wheress in the past you would have a degree of collectivism,now it's a thatcherism wet dream of every man for himself.

Then.of course a crises comes along and there is outrage in the media when people act like selfish cunts whilst politicians refer to the dunkirk spirit.

[Bjornebye]

4 hours ago, Anubis said:

Unfortunately, it’s how a lot of people think.

 

 

Fucking hell they get worse. Who even is that horrible twat? Fair play to the fella grilling him, madeley would have been clapping his hands like a pissed up seal 

[Jairzinho]

Quentin Letts. Has been a professional cunt for the Mail, News of The World etc for decades.

[AngryOfTuebrook]

The UK now has 2.4m millionaires and 171 billionaires.

https://www.mirror.co.uk/money/how-five-million-people-became-24383336

 

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/may/21/number-of-billionaires-in-uk-reached-new-record-during-covid-pandemic 

 

Meanwhile, cases of malnutrition have trebled and scurvy doubled since the Tories came to power.

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/return-scurvy-under-tory-rule-25396035

[Kepler-186]

This article from the new start up news site The Post focuses on Bootle, but could describe a lot of the areas it borders in the north of the city.

 

Good long read. 

 

https://www.livpost.co.uk/p/bootle-retains-optimistic-air

 

 

[Section_31]

No shit.

 

Nazi Germany’s elite schools, which were set up to train future leaders of the Third Reich, used British private schools such as Eton and Harrow as their models, a new book reveals.

[Arniepie]

In the past couple of years the have been stories about people freezing to death,and there was that horrendous story about the fella from liverpool  who looked like he had just walked out of Auschwitz, after his benefits stopped.

Meanwhile Jacob reece mogg spends £7m on interior design.

It's almost dickensian.

[VladimirIlyich]

9 hours ago, Arniepie said:

In the past couple of years the have been stories about people freezing to death,and there was that horrendous story about the fella from liverpool  who looked like he had just walked out of Auschwitz, after his benefits stopped.

Meanwhile Jacob reece mogg spends £7m on interior design.

It's almost dickensian.

It is Dickensian,purposely so.

[Kepler-186]

From The Post. A snapshot of the city. It’s pretty bleak. 
 

An academic studies how Merseyside's crime gangs lure their young recruits

By Mollie Simpson 

“Who are these young people in our communities, and why don’t we know about them?” asks a speaker. It’s something I had wondered too when scrolling through endless stories about crime in the Echo.

On my way to the Liverpool Medical Institute, where a conference on youth gangs and crime groups is being held, I walk past graffiti of postcodes and names I don’t recognise. There are birds in the birch trees making sharp, screeching sounds. I sit at the back of the conference hall, a grand Georgian room with high ceilings, as experts on youth crime share their ideas. There are disagreements over how to police youth violence. There are carefully laid out graphs.

The crime groups on Merseyside are estimated to control 80% of the drugs market in the north west. Everyone knows about the rivalry between Liverpool and Manchester, but at the top echelons of organised crime, this doesn’t exist. There are allies, agreements about territory, exchanges of firearms.

Before the conference, I come across Rob Hesketh’s thesis online. In 2018, Rob — who lectures in advanced policing studies at Liverpool John Moores — interviewed 44 young people across Merseyside who grew up in marginalised areas where gang activity was rife. He wanted to understand their lives, and how they got involved with gangs. 

All the participants in the research were under 25 and their information was anonymised to protect their identities, so we don’t know which gangs they were in, or what crimes they committed. As a reader, sometimes that’s frustrating — and yet the study still manages to be exceptionally revealing. It’s a rare window into a murky world, and helps to answer the question posed at the conference: Who are these young people? 

‘I wanted to become one of the boys’

Steve was 20 years old when the violence began. He spoke to Rob in a safe location when he was around three months into gang life. He had moved to a new estate in his mid-teens, and found it hard to settle in. “They would know you were a new person on the estate, everyone knew each other,” he said. Respect had to be earned. He was an only child to a single mother and hated school. But he eventually found popularity through “messing around, being the class clown and being aggressive towards the teachers”. 

When he began to make friends, some of the people he connected with were in and out of prison. He seems to have longed for an authority figure and told Rob about a teacher he looked up to — his head of year. “He was dead strict, but he liked me for some reason and he was probably my favourite teacher,” he said. Ultimately, Steve left school with no qualifications and was unemployed. There was a void. And one thing gangs can provide is an authority figure and a sense of belonging and purpose.

Youths play football in the street in Liverpool, photographed at the time that David Cameron was launching his "big society" in 2010. Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images. 

Den was involved with drug dealing in a gang in Croxteth. When he was seven, his dad was convicted of murder and he moved in with his grandparents. They argued over what to do with him and his gran didn’t seem to want him around. So he spent more and more time out on the streets with his friends, taking drugs. “There is nothing else to do around Crocky,” he said, “it’s a shithole.” His main vice was cannabis. Although he was a young adult, Den could still remember the drink and the smell of his weed when his dad smoked it. “That’s the impact he had on my life. Although,” he said, “a few years ago from jail he managed to sort out all the equipment I needed to start my own cannabis farm for my birthday.” Which was how he got caught.

“I wanted to become one of the boys because that’s the big thing around where I live, and it’s the only thing,” says Frankie, a 19-year-old, who got involved with anti-social gang behaviour. “There is nothing else.” “I just thought, get in that crowd, but they were the wrong crowd,” Paul, also 19, told Hesketh. “I didn’t know that until it was too late.”

How did these young men end up revealing so much about their inner worlds? Many had little left to lose and Rob also thinks his background lent him some credibility with them. “A lot of academics find it really hard to engage with young people in terms of obviously coming from a different social class or a different background. They come across as not really understanding the issues,” he says. “But they seemed to realise that I experienced marginalisation the same as they did — social exclusion, that sort of thing.” 

The researcher and lecturer Rob Hesketh. Photo: Screenshot from YouTube.

Rob moved to Cantril Farm when he was four, his parents being part of the deal to relocate 200,00 people to one of six new residential areas on the outskirts of Liverpool. It was the early 70s, and by then it was an infamous estate, a sixties overspill and a mixture of tower blocks and terraced houses on the edge of Croxteth. There was a stigma to living there — it was famously nicknamed Cannibal Farm. But while some of his peers were drawn into gangs and crime, Rob was not. This nagged at him — he “always wondered why I never turned out the way others around me did?”

‘I want to get away’ 

It’s a question that hangs over the thesis and also over the conference. Rob’s interviews with young people from the same estates who didn’t get involved with gangs offer some answers. Barry also grew up as an only child, brought up in Anfield by his mother. He never met his dad, and assumed it must have been “a casual thing, an accidental one night stand thing.” “Anyway I don’t really care,” he adds. She was attentive and loving, and he never wanted for anything. He grew up well-fed and healthy. “That’s why I want to go on and do well, get a decent job and look after her,” he said.

Karl, a 24-year-old plasterer, says he saw the things going on in Everton — drugs and dealing and petty theft — and decided he wanted no part of it. “There is nothing around here,” he said, “but you just have to soldier on and find a way of earning a crust. I sat down with my dad and thought what could I do? What was I good at? I was always good with my hands so I thought about a trade as a plasterer. It is good money and that’s the thing that counts if you want to get away, which I do.” He moved on, made friends from different areas. Sometimes he would look back at the streets where he grew up and realise he had nothing in common with his old friends anymore.

Back at the conference, Andy O’Connor, organised crime and criminal intelligence lead for Merseyside Police, likens the gang recruitment process to grooming and sexual abuse — which elicits a sharp intake of breath in the conference hall. It starts with debt bondage. Maybe the gang buys the young person new trainers or a North Face jacket. Then they say they owe them for it. Gang leaders will tell them to do some work — carrying drugs across county lines, or stabbing a rival gang member — to pay it back. “Of course, they never actually pay it back,” Rob tells me.

Moss Eds graffiti. Photo: Rob Hesketh.

“They’re looking for profitable markets, wherever there is an area with high levels of unemployment, poverty, antisocial behaviour, school exclusion. That’s where you see your footprints of criminality exploiting the vulnerability of people. That’s the abusers,” Andy says. And sometimes there’s the traditional allure of gang culture — the status, the money, the shared identity. Rob’s research noted the girlfriends of gang members seemed attracted to the danger of it all.

Lifelong debt 

It’s rare that young people will rise up in the ranks of gangs. Normally, they’re the fall guys. More often than not, it ends with them being arrested, and then replaced. “I walk around thinking I am hard! It is the little lads that are making the money, but it’s the big fellas out there who are really making the money,” a gang member Tony, 25, told Rob. 

The most harrowing interviews are with young people who clearly realise they are trapped, but know it’s too late to turn back. Like Ian, a 22-year-old father. “I want to be working,” he says. “I would like my own house and my own mortgage. Stuff like that. I want to have my kid living with me. Haven’t got a plan for that really, am still working that out at the minute… It’s just fucked ‘innit? My whole life is fucked at the minute.”

Mike Barrett, a former police inspector who served during the 90s, finds it hard to feel sympathy. “I see many that don't go away,” he told me on a call. “I can see maybe why they've gone down that route. But as Rob said, you know, his studies show probably 50% that didn't go down that route. So I don't have sympathy.” But still, he wonders, looking back, if putting them away made any difference. 

Hillside Edz graffiti. Photo: Rob Hesketh.

The tunnel near Stockbridge Village. Photo: Rob Hesketh.

Rob’s research argues that inequality is a huge factor fuelling gang culture. He also notes that increased social activities for young people can have a huge impact — creating a sense of engagement with the people around them and forming links with other communities. It made them feel more connected while also helping unbind them from the values of just one neighbourhood. Social groups also reduced their feelings of isolation and sated a need for belonging, diverting them away from the lure of gangs.

“These communities need real change,” Rob says. “They don’t need community resilience and mental toughness — that’s just preparing them for more inequality. They need real change. And that can only be brought about through more investment.” He concedes of course — and how could he not given his own life story — that the conditions that create youth crime don’t make joining a gang inevitable. “I’m not saying it’s totally around inequality because obviously some people don’t get involved,” he says. 

Now in his fifties, he still lives near his hometown. He sees how a 2010 round of regeneration made Cantril Farm appear more modern — gone are some of the tower blocks and dimly lit subways, and the name is gone too. But he still sees the same problems of social exclusion and deprivation which have a tight grip over the community. Sometimes he walks through a tunnel about four minutes from his home. It’s narrow, and the walls wrap around you like arms. Covering them is graffiti from the notorious rival gangs the Hillside Edz and the Moss Edz. “The territoriality is fierce between these two,” he says. “And it just highlights the sadness, that these kids are prepared to get injured over a dirty piece of land.”

 

[Arniepie]

As a young person it must be so easy to fall into that lifestyle especially if your only option is working in the likes of maccies.

They must see the grafters driving round in 50k cars and the latest clobber and think I'll have some of that.

[AngryOfTuebrook]

On 27/10/2021 at 09:18, AngryOfTuebrook said:

This is an important front in their class war. They want to reassert, for generations to come, a national culture that dictates that good and worthy art* (and acceptable interpretations of art) comes from the elite classes, while the working drones know their place and remain in the gutter without even looking at the stars. Their class will be the creators and the curators. The rest of us will get the daily message that nothing we have to say is worthwhile.

(* Including literature - where it will be posh twats who decide what gets published - drama, TV, cinema, the lot.)

 

There's a reason why art critics and art historians tend to talk more like Brian Sewell than Brian Johnson.

 

Unless your parents are wealthy enough to fund your studies and connected enough to make sure you land on your feet, you will be effectively excluded from anything creative. The country will be spiritually poorer as a result.

Interesting article about working class people trying to make careers in the arts.

https://www.artscouncil.org.uk/blog/kicking-back-door#

 

 

[Bruce Spanner]

I am shocked, shocked I tell thee!

 

 

[VladimirIlyich]

1 hour ago, Bruce Spanner said:

I am shocked, shocked I tell thee!

 

 

Turkeys voting for the oven.

[Kepler-186]

The North forgot…..

[Section_31]

The North didn't vote for levelling up though, nobody who put an X in the box up here seriously thought in a million years it'd bring good times, they did it because they knew instinctively that Johnson and his clown posse were a little bit racist and otherwise hateful like them, and that the only small crumbs of dwindling happiness they get these days is seeing 'their man' make other people unhappy, much like the rust belt voting for Trump, and doubling down regardless of what he did. 

 

Johnson will always have that core support, even if he took a flamethrower to their houses,  they fundamentally like him because they'd rather see their social opponents unhappy, than be happy themselves. They're the Evertonians of politics. 

[Kepler-186]

1 hour ago, Section_31 said:

The North didn't vote for levelling up though, nobody who put an X in the box up here seriously thought in a million years it'd bring good times, they did it because they knew instinctively that Johnson and his clown posse were a little bit racist and otherwise hateful like them, and that the only small crumbs of dwindling happiness they get these days is seeing 'their man' make other people unhappy, much like the rust belt voting for Trump, and doubling down regardless of what he did. 

 

Johnson will always have that core support, even if he took a flamethrower to their houses,  they fundamentally like him because they'd rather see their social opponents unhappy, than be happy themselves. They're the Evertonians of politics. 

Depressingly accurate summary, although they’re using some of the levelling up funds to consolidate in Tory voting areas while starving the rest, like Sunak going to Yarm near Middlesbrough. Just wish the opposition would put a few Derby day challenges in on the cunts. 

[Bruce Spanner]

Interesting quirk in the new ONS employment stats popped up...

 

 

So we are still down on pre-pandemic levels of employment considerably, with firms being unable to find labour, or more likely not be able to pay the going rate as in care and hospitality currently where shortages are worse.

 

But the number of people inactive in the economy has gone up significantly, these can't all be trust fund kids, so what the fuck is happening.

 

This alligned with the report yesterday about industrial costs shooting up and being unsustainable and having to 'pass the costs on to the consumer' it's looking very odd out there with jobs that people don't apparently want, or can afford to take, and employers not being able to afford staff as costs shoot up.

 

Looking like a bleak winter.

 

 

[Section_31]

England could fit an air purifier to every classroom for half the price of the new royal yacht, a move which scientists and campaigners say would significantly reduce the spread of Covid in schools.

[Creator Supreme]

13 minutes ago, Section_31 said:

England could fit an air purifier to every classroom for half the price of the new royal yacht, a move which scientists and campaigners say would significantly reduce the spread of Covid in schools.

Don't talk sense!

[Bruce Spanner]

8 hours ago, Section_31 said:

England could fit an air purifier to every classroom for half the price of the new royal yacht, a move which scientists and campaigners say would significantly reduce the spread of Covid in schools.

They could, if they opt for the available ones, but nope, they have a contract already with a significant mark up on price, surprisingly Dyson.

 

Services to Brexit an’ all that…

 

https://schoolsweek.co.uk/dfe-buy-air-purifier-covid-cleaning-unit-dyson-camfil/

[Scooby Dudek]

8 hours ago, Section_31 said:

England could fit an air purifier to every classroom for half the price of the new royal yacht, a move which scientists and campaigners say would significantly reduce the spread of Covid in schools.

Yes, but where would the money come from to help people ? *

 

 

* Trying, badly, to make some sort of point of whenever you mention actually helping people there is no "magic money tree" but when it comes to helping themselves, money is always available. Basically Cunts

[AngryOfTuebrook]

In one of the richest countries on Earth, there is a charity to provide beds for children who would otherwise have to sleep on the floor or on bean bags.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leeds-59772599