Author: William Wall (Ice Moon Blog)

We are delighted to say that this post has been translated into Portuguese, Turkish,Russian and Croatian.

One of the many things that we hear repeated ad nauseam in the context of the present rioting in London is that the rioters are ‘feral’, ‘yobs’, ‘thugs’ or more generously ‘disaffected youth’. All the talk from Cameron and his cohorts is of crime and punishment and ‘the full force of the law’ – as if these young people did not encounter the full force of the law on a daily basis. We are told variously that there is no political context, no political motive, no political enemy – it is ‘criminality pure and simple’. This is because violence against the police (and therefore the state) is not considered in itself to be political. It is because the envy of, the desire for and the acquisition of luxury goods such as plasma TVs and jewellery is not considered political. The political class and the commentariat cannot conceive of themselves as enemies of the people who live in areas like Tottenham where Tory cuts are closing youth centres, which suffer massive unemployment even while the City is booming, and which are the objects of legislation designed to disadvantage them even further. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re tempted to listen to BBC5 this morning for some coverage of the London riots, don’t. I made that mistake and was barraged by racist callers spouting off false facts and being moderated by a patronising school ma’am announcer who consistently referred to those involved in the riots as ‘the hooligans’.

When I was reading the Guardian’s initial reports on the tottenham riots late friday night, what struck me was that they referred to Mark Duggan, the man who police shot dead the night before, simply as ‘a father of four’. Had Mark been on the other side of a lethal gun shot there is no doubt the media would have been reporting that a black man had shot someone dead on the high street, but in this case I had to independently research to confirm my strong suspicion that he wasn’t white. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Elena Loizidou*

 http://www.criticallegalthinking.com

In Nicholas Ray’s 1955 Rebel without a cause¹ we follow the protagonist Jim Stark (James Dean) into delinquency. In this film, Nicholas Ray and the scriptwriter, Stewart Stern, set out to portray the life of the contemporary American teenager. The story is organized around Jim, recently arrived with his parents in a Los Angeles suburb in the hope that their son will conform and lose his rebellious streak and take ‘a right step in the right direction’. Read the rest of this entry »