egafd.com

I find it speaks volumes about the current political debate concerning this subject that very few, if any, politicians (from all the main parties) will stand up and unequivocally condemn the perpetrators of these hideous attacks.

I'll meet you halfway Dibbs.

In retrospect, Thatcher wasn't evil- Thatcherism was. But that wasn't what she intended it to be. She thought that by cutting taxes, people would become more philanthropic. Instead, their new gains went up the nose, in the arm, down the throat and on foreign goods.

It tends to be English, rather than Celtic. With some notable exceptions, Celts just tend to get pissed and sing, not fight. Craic and hwyl are both expressions from Celtic languages, not English.

Cricket and rugby crowds get pissed and sing too. Soccer crowds turn up sober to fight and be racist/Nazi. Why?

OK, the guy was a chav, a thug and a fool- and deserves his sentence. But the last thing you do to a guy is wind him up and deliberately create a public spectacle...


http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/7243174.stm

I grew up in the 1960s too, and I can recall gangs of intimidatory thugs hanging around outside shops, and how our police often took 30 minutes or more to respond to calls involving mob violence. Usually, the panada car was around the corner and its inhabitants waited for the groups to disperse and move on before they made their official entrance.

Spoke to an old school friend a few years back, and she told me about being approached by men on three separate occasions when she was under 10 and on her own in broad daylight on a busy street; not to mention the time she almost ended up under a lorry running away from a flasher.

All that's new is the hype and hysteria of the media, and the microscope the papers use to examine the pond life that has always existed.

"All that's new is the hype and hysteria of the media"















Officer Dibble







Officius Dibblus est amplus amor deus

Some good links there Officer.

I was actually looking at some 'court reports' within the Sheffield area from the late 1800's online a few months back. There were quite a few murders, let me tell you.

What got the biggest laugh out of me though was 3 men in a single month (totally seperate incidents) were fined for bringing their horse into a public house! One was fined 5 whole pounds for letting his horse drink ale!

Another poor sod got 20 lashes for stealing a sack of carrots!

I'll try and find that link again and post it.

Yes, and what about that Charlie Peace dude? Wasn't he a Victorian master criminal who gained national notoriety? He put Sheffield on the map, so he did.







Officer Dibble







Officius Dibblus est amplus amor deus

Sounds about right, colonel.


Officer Dibble







Officius Dibblus est amplus amor deus

jimslip wrote:

>>>

Quite so, Jim.

As a Brit living in Germany for the past 20 years, I can attest to that being true.

Obviously you get the occasional moron, and there's a bit of a Neo-Nazi problem in places like Cottbus and Dresden over in what used to be the GDR.

But what you don't are get packs of feral hoodies roaming the streets of Germany's towns and cities on Saturday night, and there's no general undercurrent of menace that pervades UK town centres after dark - just normal folk, young and old, going about their business of relaxing and having a good time, but not treading on each other's toes (or brawling, glassing each other or attacking people with knives).

Apart from two or three I've missed, every April and every October for the past 20 years I've been going to Stuttgart's twice-yearly beer festival (Germany's second biggest after the Munich Oktoberfest), and in all that time I've witnessed one fight. ONE in 20 YEARS!!! Plenty of folk pissed-up as you might expect - but only one single, solitary scrap.

I did hear of some bloke being stabbed one year, but the reaction was one of shock-horror, it made the national press and everyone was asking themselves "how can such a thing possibly happen".

Whereas if it had been the UK, the amazing thing would have been if at least one person HADN'T been stabbed at such an event.

All anecdotal evidence I know, but the UK does seem to have this unique and long-standing problem of endemic loutishness that's never affected the rest of Europe.

- Eric