BBC Slanders Activist for Daring to Put Riots in Political Context

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
August 10, 2011

After Darcus Howe portrayed the riots in Britain – and around the world – as an “insurrection,” the BBC presenter interviewing him tried to dismiss him as a “rioter.”

Howe, originally from Trinidad and Tobago, is a former broadcaster and journalist. He was a member of the British Black Panther movement and was arrested and tried for rioting in 1970. He was acquitted of all charges. In 1981 he organized the 20,000 strong Black People’s March in response to the New Cross Fire that killed 13 young black people during a birthday party. Howe and the community were outraged by the indifferent response by the police.

The corporate media has concentrated on the criminal aspect of the British riots and all but ignored the social and political dimension of the unrest. Participants are mindlessly characterized as “yobs,” a term invented by the British upper class in the 18th century to describe poor youth (the word is “boy” backwards).

Fiona Armstrong immediately attempted to slander Howe after he made the connection between the riots in England and civil unrest elsewhere in the world.

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t

It is the job of Armstrong and the corporate media to put the elite’s spin on the violence and property damage. Like the Brixton riots of 1981, the unrest spreading across Britain is a direct result of social and economic problems of the country’s poor and working classes.

Howe pointed out the frustration over Britain’s “sus law” (stop and search) used by the police. The original law was based on the Vagrancy Act 1824. In 2007, another law was enacted with a provision allowing the police to act on the basis of suspicion alone and detain people without official arrest for up to six hours.

In 2009, an independent review found that British police are institutionally racist. “If it’s not addressed, this will explode in their faces,” said Dr. Richard Stone, an adviser to the review. “There’s a lot of resentment on the streets; there’s a lot of anger.”

“London’s press has reported that discontent has been simmering among Britain’s urban poor for years, in neighborhoods like Tottenham, where the riots started,” CNBC reported yesterday. “Cameron’s conservative government is under fire for spending cuts to social programs in order to help reduce the country’s debt. Among those hit the hardest are large numbers of minority youths who have been at the forefront of the unrest.”

In 2009, on the eve of the Bilderberg confab at the Nafsika Astir Palace Hotel in Vouliagmeni, Greece, the global elite “discussed at a prolonged, agonizing depression that dooms the world to decades of stagnation, decline and poverty… or an intense-but-shorter depression that paves the way for a new sustainable economic world order, with less sovereignty but more efficiency,” Daniel Estulin’s sources revealed.

Britain’s politically unsophisticated youth are reacting to the reality of increased poverty enforced by a teeming crop of police and the country’s well advanced police state apparatus. Rampaging “yobs” will naturally steal large screen televisions and throw petrol bombs at riot cops and the corporate media will naturally ignore the larger underlying economic and social issues in a mad rush to denounce the poor and ethnic minorities – including Darcus Howe – as criminals and hooligans.

This article was posted: Wednesday, August 10, 2011 at 8:01 am

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