TeaFan Posted August 10, 2011 Share Posted August 10, 2011 A few minutes ago on the news they showed a newspaper photo of a mum taking her 11 year old son into court accompanied by his aunty. Where was his dad? A quote from Tottenham MP David Lammy: "In areas like mine, we know that 59% of black Caribbean children are looked after by a lone parent. There is none of the basic starting presumption of two adults who want to start a family, raise children together, love them, nourish them and lead them to full independence. The parents are not married and the child has come, frankly, out of casual sex; the father isn't present, and isn't expected to be. There aren't the networks of extended families to make up for it. We are seeing huge consequences of the lack of male role models in young men's lives," he said. "There are virtually no male teachers in primary schools." This has long been a problem of the black Caribbean (and particularly Jamaican, I believe) community. I've always felt it isn't discussed enough and I think it's right of people like Lammy and Barack Obama to be talking about it because as we can see it has effects beyond the black Caribbean community. I can understand why people are sometimes reluctant to discuss it, because they worry it will fuel racist attitudes, but I think ignoring it does nothing for good race relations either. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lady Star Posted August 10, 2011 Share Posted August 10, 2011 It's a black mark for his job prospects. At the end of the day, poor peoples can't behave like the Bullingdon boys, as and soon as the lower classes learn that the better. If you haven't the money to pay for your wrongdoings, then you should be marked for life, your employment prospects shall be restricted... What are the chances that the sort of pondlife who've been arsing about for the last four nights have ever had a job??? Let's say have they ever applied for one? Mmm - I doubt it... Made me laugh when the middle class journos spouted how there is a 8.8% unemployment rate in Tottenham - why? It's London, you must have to try really hard NOT to work there!!! The girl in Croydon who jumped from her burning flat last night had lived in the UK since March, yet had managed to find work in Pound Land and have enough income to rent a flat above a shop... No excuses can be made... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
andygardener Posted August 10, 2011 Share Posted August 10, 2011 Amazing that we have people on here justifying the rioters by their whining about the government. Don't you people have anything to say to the communities blighted by the rioters other than your party political rubbish and justifying the unjustifiable? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JFKvsNixon Posted August 10, 2011 Share Posted August 10, 2011 They do have more opportunities but I think a lot of them are the wrong opportunities; the opportunity to spend all day in bed smoking weed, the opportunity to deal drugs, the opportunity to acquire material things which don't actually mean anything, the opportunity to get drawn into gang activity. But let's be honest, some of them are going to be lucky to get the opportunity to work. We'll never have full employment in this country again - full employment means higher wages which means lower profits and shareholder dividends. To avoid this, businesses will move jobs overseas, particularly manufacturing jobs, and this is easy to do now that capitalism is truly globalised. This builds in permanent unemployment for the least skilled and least well educated. It used to be that however daft you were, you would still get a job when you left school and if you wanted to you could stay in that job for life. Your pay might have been buttons but there was a certainty there that gave structure to your life. There's little certainty now and there are too many people at a loose end. It worries me because this problem now feels built-in to our economic system, it's not going to change and its going to give us a lot of problems in the future because there's always going to be people with nothing to lose. I come from a part of the country where that it never was the case that you were guaranteed a job straight from school. It was a large council estate so it carried a fair amount of problems. People still left school into jobs, they may have been rat catchers, labourers, on YTS schemes, shelf stackers, office juniors, shop assistants etc. The problem is today as it's always been that if you do these jobs you cannot afford any aspirational goods or services, but youngsters today seem to believe is a right to own them so a lot of the youngsters are just not interested these jobs. When you tie in the opportunities to earn a good amount money illegally you have to ask whether the people rioting are actually happy to be marginalised from society and freed from the responsibilities that we all have to face day by day. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chem1st Posted August 10, 2011 Share Posted August 10, 2011 What are the chances that the sort of pondlife who've been arsing about for the last four nights have ever had a job??? Let's say have they ever applied for one? Mmm - I doubt it... Made me laugh when the middle class journos spouted how there is a 8.8% unemployment rate in Tottenham - why? It's London, you must have to try really hard NOT to work there!!! The girl in Croydon who jumped from her burning flat last night had lived in the UK since March, yet had managed to find work in Pound Land and have enough income to rent a flat above a shop... No excuses can be made... The youth unemployment rate in Tottenham is over 50%. If it was 8.8% we wouldn't be hearing of riots! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mort Posted August 10, 2011 Share Posted August 10, 2011 (edited) Once again I will point out that we will not tolerate name calling, bickering, or insults. Edited August 10, 2011 by mort Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
andyofborg Posted August 10, 2011 Share Posted August 10, 2011 They do have more opportunities but I think a lot of them are the wrong opportunities; the opportunity to spend all day in bed smoking weed, the opportunity to deal drugs, the opportunity to acquire material things which don't actually mean anything, the opportunity to get drawn into gang activity. indeed We'll never have full employment in this country again - full employment means higher wages which means lower profits and shareholder dividends. full employment doesn't necessarily mean significantly higher wages. part of the problem is that institutional shareholders in particular have a very short term view of their investment. if they took a longer term view then they could grow and develop their business and overall gain more dividends. To avoid this, businesses will move jobs overseas, particularly manufacturing jobs, they might do, but they are not forced too. i can see some comparisons between some modern management and the stereotypical victorian mill owner. perhaps we should be encouraging the equivalent of the great industrial reformers who did care about their workers, the ones who's names we remember today, Joseph Rowntree etc. and this is easy to do now that capitalism is truly globalised. This builds in permanent unemployment for the least skilled and least well educated. It used to be that however daft you were, you would still get a job when you left school and if you wanted to you could stay in that job for life. Your pay might have been buttons but there was a certainty there that gave structure to your life. There's little certainty now and there are too many people at a loose end. It worries me because this problem now feels built-in to our economic system, it's not going to change and its going to give us a lot of problems in the future because there's always going to be people with nothing to lose. even without globalisation, technology and manufacturing advances would have reduced the need for low skilled workers. which means that we should educate and train them better, we've had the rhetoric for 30 years, we need the action. also, for those who lack the ability we need to find a meaningful alternative, not workfare but something which can give a person self respect, a sense of achievement. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TeaFan Posted August 10, 2011 Share Posted August 10, 2011 The youth unemployment rate in Tottenham is over 50%. If it was 8.8% we wouldn't be hearing of riots! Mrs. TeaFan used to work in Tottenham and one of the things her employer did was provide employment-related training to locals. She found that they had all had masses of employment-related training, CV writing, numeracy, literacy, fork truck, you name it, they had it, in part due to money thrown at the problem after the Broadwater Farm riots. And yet they would apply for job after job with their application writing and CV skills and get nothing, again and again. The depressing conclusion was that they weren't getting jobs because they had brown-sounding names and an N15 or N17 post code. Sadly, the rioting is likely to make that worse, not better. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ArchViz Posted August 10, 2011 Share Posted August 10, 2011 Once again I will point out that we will not tolerate name calling, bickering, or insults. The majority of the perpetrators of these riots come from single Mother households. Can we add blatant misogyny to that list. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TeaFan Posted August 10, 2011 Share Posted August 10, 2011 full employment doesn't necessarily mean significantly higher wages. I think it does. If you go to your employer and demand a raise and there's few other jobs around they'll tell you to stick it. If you can walk into another job tomorrow they're more likely to feel they need to give you the raise. Businesses hate this, which is why they love globalisation and mass immigration. Shareholder companies have a duty to maximise value for shareholders and if that means hocking jobs overseas then that's what they'll do. I agree with you that jobs requiring very basic skills have mostly disappeared - I think that's a big problem and makes large numbers of people basically unemployable. That's why the CBI keep complaining that employers are struggling to find people capable of doing the jobs advertised. Successive governments have failed us on education. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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