Why are people so keen to fight each other?

[Deano!]

Not only are fights becoming more common, the viscousness of the fighting methods is getting very bad.

I was a teenager of the 70's and there seemed to be a general feeling amongst my mates that knives were for chickens who couldn't fight fair and that ganging up on one person was proof you were crap in a one-on-one fair fight. Now, it seems that six 18 year olds bashing one elderly man is considered a big achievement. It used to be an unwritten law that if your opponent fell down, you'd wait until he got up before continuing to pound his nose into mush. Now, if someone falls down it's seen as an opportunity to kick their ribs in. No class.

As for the two blokes you saw outside Maccas, well I too am amazed at how a simple dispute can finish up like that. I've seen punch ups over parking spaces when there were plenty of extra spaces just a few metres away.

Some street drugs turn people into fire crackers waiting to go off too.

[max_tranmere]

Deano, interesting what you say about how there were rules a few years ago to fighting. I firmly believe though that if people are aggressive and wouldnt have an aversion to having a fight then they will find one and have one. Agreesive people always get involved in punch ups, and non-aggressive people rarely do.

You mention the 1970's. I was only a kid then but my understanding of that era, and every previous one, was that most things were resolved by fighting - particularly in the lower-income parts of cities. This happens less now, which is good. I understand that every low-income area years ago had pubs where fighting was just part of the culture, you were gauranteed to see rucks on a Friday and Saturday night. Now there are no pubs like that at all.

Football violence was rife, I remember when I was a teenager in the 1980's every Saturday night on the TV news there were reports about hooliganism at matches. This doesn't ever happen now.

In some ways our society is less violent. Fighting is less of a thing I think, although with so much drugs around now people probably get coked-up and have a punch up. I've never taken it so I dont know what it does to you, but it is very common in London now. In the place I was in on Saturday night, if you went for a pee you would see guys going into the cubicles for a 'snort'.

I am glad of the fact though that if people dont want trouble they are less likely to find it. Rough people who want trouble will always find it.

[videokim]

Living in West Ham for 30 yrs you got to see this quite often but knives & guns were also a favourite tool there so you stayed clear of the gangs & were they hung out, a couple of my old mates done life for murder because like Salford Manchester the gangs rule out of control or pay off the cops.
A club i was running in Canning town had its windows blown out by guns because i wouldn't pay them protection so a little scrap as you mentioned would have been a walk in the park to people living there.
I got into things i should not of done & am now sorry for that but i got out & started a new life in Clacton, Essex which we had to laugh at the time as it had the lowest crime rate in the UK, i knew i done right when the kids said to me 'its not like England is it dad' & i had to explain not all parts of the UK were like where we lived.
I miss not being able to go in the local boozer with a shopping list at Christmas & be able to buy almost anything i needed but the quite life is much better, the way i was going in London i don't think i would have reached 40 but being there & buying the tee- shirt i do now agree its not nice seeing people fight as it don't solve anything.

John (using Kims addy)

[Zorro]

You have to be extra careful with this kind of scuffle, it sound to me like a set up for pick pockets.

The way it works is just as you describe, lots of aggressive noise, creating a crowd, but no action, and more importantly the dispersal before starting again, the dispersal stops the CCTV operators getting the police there, they get told to stand down, and then it all happens again.

It might genuinely have been a drunk scuffle, but my guess a gang of pick pockets were at work, and they staged the whole thing.

[one eyed jack]

Strange how the whole of the West End is covered in CCTV cameras, yet fights start and no Police office arrive.

Yeah thats because the old bill are back at the station with their feet up eating chips having a jolly good belly laugh and placing bets who is going to win the fight until the glint of a knife comes out and they send in the emergency response unit...Unless they think the bloke deserves it and leave it a little while longer fro him to bleed out.

Ok that was a bad joke. Im not anti police in that way but nor am I ignorant to the fact they are people too, screwed up like the rest of us in society and sometimes prone to making judgemnts that someof us might make if it is to our own judgement.