Yeah but you have to understand that that crazy gleam is a make it or break it thing. And most people break it. Making it across the river in that sort of situation is like winning the lottery and putting it into a college fund for your kids. It happens - but it's by no means the average outcome. And as opposed to wasting the cost of a lottery ticket, if Grammy hadn't beaten the odds, she'd have killed her entire family. In terms of British work ethic - Brit's tend to have a ludicrous protestant work ethic. It's much more common than the underclass slacker thing. It's just that working hard while calmly and quietly carrying on doesn't make nearly as interesting a news bite as '2 million on unemployment payments!' The unemployment/welfare system in the UK is ludicrously easy to scam if you want to live outside of London and have a quiet life without a lot of money. If you have a partner who'll contribute to your costs - you can have a pretty nice lifestyle in a cheaper area without working. You can also generally live cheap and nasty in London on welfare - you'll share a 4br coffin with a single bathroom with 9 other people and struggle for money to do more than subsist - but you can do it. The Austerity measures in the UK have lead to a lot of very wealthy people in finance getting pay days, and a lot of people who have relied on government, and who believed that paying their taxes meant that their kids would be able to go to university are getting a very rude shock, while 500 billion pounds went to bail outs, and executive performance bonuses at companies that received bail outs accounted for something like 85% of that money. There's a lot of people who blame the financial sector for the economy downturn in general, and are pretty pissed that they're unemployed, while more than 400 billion pounds was paid in performance bonuses to executives at companies that received bail out money. There's a lot of very loosely directed anger at 'the man' that's been caught up in the riots.
Dying along with her kids trying to better her situation is better than the alternative and staying back there and dying a slow death. How is it not the average outcome? Hundreds if not thousands of people do this same thing everyday. How that isn't good odds I don't know. I don't really know much about what it's like to live in the UK, but I do know it's a first world country. Unlike somewhere say in Africa, there is ALWAYS options. The options may suck for a while, but they are always there. As I kid I used to be on food stamps and on occasion still went to sleep hungry. As an "adult" I flipped burgers and worked cement in the 100+ degree Texas heat at the same time. Believe me when I say I know first hand how much those options suck.
I obviously realise this is anecdotal, but then again I don't see what you're basing sweeping generalisations of the work ethic of two entire nations on, so...recent employment histories of myself and me three closests friends (university graduates, one from the top university in the UK, rest of us from top 10's for our subjects)? Petrol station till-jockey, supermarket worker (x2) and farm laborer. The bulgarian did have a better work ethic than me, I'll give him that. At least I got a nice tan.
I don't have any citation, but I heard on the news this afternoon that English courts have started handing down some sentences on criminals involved in the riots. A couple of guys who used Facebook to incite riots have been jailed (or, more accurately, gaoled - it is England) for four years. This caused a bit of an uproar. PM David Cameron rightly came out and said it's up to the courts to make the decision on sentences without pressure from the legislature. Fuck 'em. Four years? They got off lightly.
You didn't mention it, so I'm assuming you're unaware that they were unsuccessful at inciting anything? Call me a pinko (I'm not), but four years seems just a little fucking harsh for trying and failing to get people to riot. What sentences are actual rioters going to get, based on that? Also reports of a student whole squeezed into a supermarket through damaged shutters and stole 4 bottles of booze getting 16 months.
And are you aware that, for the most part, under the Westminster legal system it's often not whether you succeed, it's the attempt? Whether or not a riot was incited was beyond their control - that's up to the rioters. What's punishable is the inciters' actions and their intent.
It is my impression - and I got this impression from an english law student who spelled this out for me - that while the charge itself is the same whatever the success or failure of the crime, the success/failure (and the extent of that success/failure) can be a significant mitigating factor in the sentencing, depending on how extreme the success/failure is. Like "nothing happened" vs. "shops got burnt out, stock lifted and people attacked by a mob" significantly different.
As is inciting a riot when everything is calm and peaceful, and no one has an axe to grind, as against when the country is on the verge of dissolving into widespread chaos.
Yeah, definitely, it's a more serious crime when there is already significant rioting going on, but to make the jump from 'significant rioting' to 'the country is on the verge of dissolving into widespread chaos' is just the kind of hyperbole that gets thrown around to justify flg-'em-and-hang-'em arguments. There was serious rioting in a minority of boroughs in London, along with rioting in a minority of mostly city-centre areas in about half a dozen other English cities*, which is obviously a minority of English cities (although it is just a majority - 6/10 - of the 10 largest cities). I grew up in Belfast, so I do have an idea of how disruptive, terrifying, dangerous, damaging etc., large-scale rioting is, and I still think (along with a lot legal professionals, but not the public, about the same % of which - 32% - thought the sentences are too soft as thought live ammunition was a good idea) that for a first-time offender who tried and failed to incite any kind of disturbance, 4 years is dispproportionately harsh (they were the very first people publically sentenced, so I wonder if that had any impact at all on the decision...) and more importantly for the rest of society, impractical as those two men will leave prison with an even stronger conviction that the system is just going to bend them over and ass-fuck them at any opportunity and that they're justified in lashing out against it (and even more importantly, a whole lot of other people who see this sentence are going to feel the same way). *Manchester, Livepool, Nottingham, Leister, Bristol. EDIT: There has obviously also been a lot of concern in the UK recently about the cost of the prison system, overcrowding and so on, and excessively lengthy sentences are doing the exact opposite of helping with that problem. /sidenote
I haven't seen Solaris around lately. I wonder if he was one of these folks that have been sentenced to prison? *crosses fingers*
Wasn't he from Belfast as well? Crossing the Irish Sea just to riot would be some serious dedication...