Rockets, Riots And Rich Lists

The news this morning that the authorities intend to put an anti-missile facility (one likes to keep up with the jargon) on top of the disused water tower at what is now a block of residential flats adjacent to the Olympic site in East London could only provoke one response.

Please, please, could we have one?  We have the relevant experience.  This neck of the woods was once the route by which the V1 and V2 rockets of World War 2 tracked aimed at both our many airfields and military sites as well as for central London.  It would not take much retraining for us to become adept at banging off the missiles.

This blog has had something to say about Olympics security and costs going back three years to early in 2009 with added comment since.  It is intriguing now that it is only very recently that we have begun to hear much about it in the media and from Westminster. 

Additionally, around the web what some of the police and related people are saying is that the stripping of provincial forces and other services to meet the needs of London this summer, it is not just the Olympics, is going to create added risks if there is another summer of discontent with riots and the rest in major urban areas.

Given the theories about how these may occur and why with hot weather on long summer days suggested perhaps our clergy and others should be praying for the rain and weather of the last few days to persist until September.  So long as the English asparagus crop comes up nicely it would certainly suit many of us.

But the reason for trouble on the streets should not be attached solely to the events of this year.  This has been building for some time.  It is a matter of too many young men and women with too little to do and for whom work is not an option.  It is not just lack of jobs it is a major economic and cultural shift in our society. 

We are going to find out soon that repression might be the answer from government and the easy going, non-judgemental, avoid the problems policies of recent years can no longer be sustained.  We cannot go back to a better past only forward to a nastier future.

The latest “Rich List”, although the figures need careful analysis seem to suggest that the rich have become richer despite all the problems of recent years.  It is not a surprise since many of these characters have caused the problems.

They have also bought the politicians who strive to funnel money in their direction extracted from the population as a whole and made available to the rich on terms which allow them minimal tax payments.  The Murdoch caper now under scrutiny is one incidental example of all this.

The PBS Channel ran a 2009 programme called “Black Money” a couple of days ago about the extent and nature of corruption in the arms industry over recent decades.  It is not a nice story and London is at the centre of it. 

What is more troubling is that all those countries where these armaments have been used are represented in London by disaffected groups who seek violent answers to their questions.

They have a ready hearing amongst many who are at the bottom of social scale and who are easily persuaded to.  As they look at those who seem to be above the law and free of the ordinary restraints of conduct they do not see why a “rule of law” that serves the few and not the many should not be available to them.

The attrition to the real economy and in the UK the shift to “growth” being seen as money being sloshed around the accounts of the rich and centred on a financial sector heavily dependent on a rigged and state supported London property market is a major factor in the disastrous failures of policy of the last few years.

The block of flats on which the missiles are to be sited are a conversion of a former factory.  This would have provided jobs for hundreds of people and in addition been a part of a London where industry and manufacture was once the major activity. 

Now it is close to an area that is riot prone and being lauded as an opportunity for investment in property because of the Olympics legacy.  Guess who will benefit from this.  Guess who will be under the fall out from any successful anti-missile strikes in the general area.

It is a mad world my masters and the madness is in all of us.