vikingTON

In what way is that comparable to posting aphobic bigotry?

In what way are red dots i) unacceptable and ii) comparable to open, aphobic bigotry being posted on the forum? I'd probably stop digging here if I were you.

Speaking of losing the run of yourself, have you reconsidered the final part of your post?

Davies has no best position, unless it's some sort of 'Welsh pub league position', with sandcastles, buckets and spades. There's no game that we 'should' be winning in this division right now - both teams will see this as a big indicator of how the rest of the season will go. I'm hopeful of a home win though.

Interesting context on Bangladesh, where the government has been emptied: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/aug/07/the-question-for-bangladesh-can-it-break-the-spell-of-its-bloodstained-history

I was actually referring to the fat loser podcaster who ran around trying to grass up other football clubs to the SFA, rather than the equally contemptible Open Goal 'bantz' merchants.

The lead cars were running ridiculously close together for most of the race at Spa, and that wasn't down to the specific track. There was about 10 seconds between the top 8 until Ferrari and co. decided to make a roaring c**t of their strategy calls. The level of overtaking was also appropriate - not the daft overtake button that they used to have before sector 1 ended. The only issue with the racing is that the cars are nowhere near their limit on pace, thanks to gubbins tyre management and the (completely inefficient) refuelling ban. It's not as bad as it was a few years ago, but get the lead cars running around 5 seconds a lap (Spa) quicker and we'd see far more mistakes and opportunities to exploit them.

None hopefully. Is their weirdo podcast 'fan' still slithering around and pretending that they're shaking up Scottish football?

How did Labour's 'rhetoric on immigration since 1997' - your causal factor - trigger the previous set of racially motivated riots in May 2001? Given that the communities targeted were not in fact immigrants. Which rather undermines the key point you've stated in bold. There's no evidence that racist sentiment and/or violence has developed over the past 25-30 years. It has always been there as a latent threat among a fringe element in society, which is playing out in the same pattern as seen before only with Telegram to better organise it. Just as the potential for more generic urban riots - such as London in 2011 - exists independently of political rhetoric or specific policies. To identify causal factors for the non-existent 'growth' of such violence firstly gives those carrying it out far too much relevance, and inevitably ends up as a pick and mix list of cherry-picked stories/policies that explain absolutely nothing about how and why the rioting took place.

No, I'm simply asking you to show how your claim that mainstream political parties in the UK have a long-term track record of appeasing racism - a pretty wild and cherry-picked take on the past 50 years of social change btw - is in any way relevant to the existence of (small scale) race riots in a UK context. If your theory doesn't actually explain how and why such a riot took place before, then it's not really worth taking seriously at the moment either.

The most logical explanation for the last week's events is quite straightforward, and also matches well with previous urban riots that happen periodically in the UK and in just about every other country too: 1) Fringe individuals and groups on the margins of society always hold extremist and potentially violent views. 2) An incident (whether directly related to those views or purported to be) triggers those fringe groups to mobilise. 3) The weather either aids or inhibits that mobilisation - which is why urban rioting is overwhelmingly a summer event. 4) If gathered in sufficiently large numbers, they feel empowered to act with impunity against police, property and their identified target groups. 5) This breakdown of norms attracts bystanders and/or opportunists to join the unrest, swelling an insignificant group to a more difficult to control mob. 5) That pattern continues until authority gets restored and enough of the fringe group members get arrested or dispersed, or the weather breaks. With the absence of 1) only, the same cause and effect pattern explains the 2011 London riots. An event that had similar chin-stroking political nerds arguing that it was caused by Tory austerity and would be the beginning of a wave of civil unrest unless Things Were Done to help the masses. Yet after a pretty hardline policy of arresting and jailing folk, there was no further unrest of that type on the UK mainland for the rest of the 2010s.

Can you explain specifically how mainstream parties appeasing racism caused the May 2001 urban riots? For example, which mainstream parties "appeased" the targeting of the south Asian community in Bradford at that time? The idea that UK mainstream politics can be characterised as a race-baiting culture politics over the past 50 years is unhinged, quite frankly. The idea of multiculturalism and the significant transformations in that period have rarely been more smoothly embraced by any comparable society and with no greater degree of cross-party consensus. I'm not saying that there hasn't been *any* racism within UK mainstream political culture, but to argue that it is a significant factor in current events is short on evidence.

I see we're into 'just making things up' territory now.

So why did racist riots take place in the same parts of the country in 2001 and in the early 1980s too?

What evidence is there that Gordon Brown's utterly hopeless and completely ineffective 2010 election campaign radicalised English men towards Islamophobic and anti-asylum seeker violence? Citing 'political climate' is simply a cop-out from the reality that no such causal chain exists. Whereas there are plenty of causal chains between the National Front, the BNP, the EDL and the current organisation of far-right violence. There were similar racial riots in northern English cities in May 2001. When the economy was in the middle of a historic period of growth, the government was churning out policies like the minimum wage, tax credits and record NHS investment that *did* redistribute to working class England before the financial crash of 2007-08. They also took place before radical Islam was a viable scare story because 9/11 (never mind the other red herring explanation, the War in Iraq) took place. So given the clear continuity of a fringe bunch of angry white men thrashing neighbourhoods where minorities live, the argument that this unrest is the outcome of recent and specific policy failures is unconvincing to say the least. Any more red herring causes we want to throw out there? Are the rioters in Rotherham/Middlesbrough really turning to far right violence only because going to uni costs £9k in fees? They hardly strike me as the academic type tbh.