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Cameron is out of his depth with this one

Firstly I will start this by saying overall I've been fairly happy with Cameron as PM, I didn't think he was going to be up to it before he became PM but since last May I've thought he has handled himself quite well, he's held a Coalition together in difficult circumstances, started pushing through severe cuts whilst generally keeping most people on board, I've though he has generally cover across like a decent bloke who is more in touch with the ordinary people than Brown was, and more down to earth than Blair.

However the last few days have seen his credibility rating absolutely tumble for me. I think in a crisis he's not decisive enough and much as I hated Blair when he was PM, Blair would have been better dealing with this.

Cameron is a nice bloke but I think he's a bit of a wishy washy liberal, he keeps going on about Big Society and social cohesion. Blair on the other hand had an authoritarian in him and was always looking for opportunities to capitalise on the public mood being ready to accept a clamp down on civil liberties. When Blair was PM the police and security services were all over 'anarchists' like a rash, all you had to be was some unwashed environmental hippie who wanted to hug policemen to share the love, and you'd have MI5 all over you, when there were protests about globalisation and the like Blair's police would smack ten shades of crap out of you, after September 11 and the 2005 London bombings there were armed police with machine guns at stations and airports. Blair might not have done much about being 'tough on the causes of crime' but he liked showing he was 'tough on crime'.

If this looting had kicked off while Blair was on holiday, he'd have been straight back, putting all the cameras on him to make a speech about how people have responsibilities as well as rights, how the actions of few must never threaten freedom, democracy and our way of life, and how he was sent by the Almighty as the chosen one to lead and so the price of leadership was to make unpopular decisions. Then the police would have kicked off at these kids, especially if Blunkett was Home Sec. His mate Bush would have offered some support saying he condemned the violence in the UK and he was going to step up the militancy in the police in the USA to ensure it didn't spread there.

But Cameron laid low fannying around in Tuscany and did f-all about the growing Eurozone economic crisis and now this, then he came back yesterday and made some speech about how terrible the actions were and warning people that if they got involved they would feel the full force of the law and as we saw last night, the scallies in Manchester, Birmingham, Nottingham etc have just LOLed at Cameron, and the full force of law under Cameron counts for jack.

This is now a dangerous situation, yes these scallies will get brought under control but all of those socialist/ anarchist groups will now get emboldened as will Islamic terrorists as they have shown how, when it comes down to it the British government is pretty weak. If you really wanted to cause trouble the British police especially now it's being cut back, doesn't have the power or the resources or will to do anything, so the time is right for causing some serious anarchy in the UK.

What Cameron has missed IMO, which Blair wouldn't have done, is the public attitude now would actually accept violence from the police. If we turned on the TV tomorrow to find out there had been more looting and saw images of 13 and 14 year old boys in hoodies being beaten unconscious by police in batons, widespread injuries because of rubber bullets, CS gas and heavy handed policing, I doubt the first reaction of the public would be "lets condemn this police brutality", they would say the little scrotes got what was coming.

Reply 1

alexio91

Yh I agree Cameron being too soft on the thugs

Reply 2

StarChamber

I think I agree with you. What constitutes a crisis for this man? Indeed I was baffled as to why he didn't return to the country!

What I'd like to know, and perhaps someone here could enlighten us is how much power does a PM (whether it be Blair/Cameron) have regarding police protocol and how to deal with a situation like this.

What is terrifying almost and I agree with MnM is what message does this send out to the people. It'll be interesting to see the aftermath once hopefully everything quietens down. This sort of thing seems as though it can happen at almost anytime.

Also on a side note interesting Miliband wasn't around, could have helped gain some support. What is it with these politicians?!

At the end of the day I guess as citizens we wanted to see something done with this situation so it would be difussed quickly and Cameron and his govt. did not deliver.

Reply 3

Fires

The government generally (and possibly the police as well) have no idea what to do. Mass-internment of a section of the youth might work, but there are no resources to do it and it would need a large security force. If this were to continue for some time, we would be in a near-revolutionary situation, but it would be a Mad Max-style revolution of the criminals. Luckily, the weather in Britain is generally too awful for it to carry on for more than a few weeks. At the moment, short of distributing 100,000 rifles to the citizenry and leaving us to sort it, there is nothing governmental that is going to work. We literally hardly had a government in London the last few nights and they can't leave 16,000 police on the streets all the time. Looks like the same is happening in Manchester and Birmingham.