Rioting in Tottenham - Part 1, the catalyst.

A riot has occurred in Tottenham, I am writing this in an attempt to try and quantify what exactly caused it.

Tottenham is a suburb of London, to the north of the centre. It has a large Afro-Caribbean population and is home to a wide variety of ethnicities. It is a deprived area with double the UK national average unemployment

The catalyst for this disturbance was the shooting of a 29 year old man, Mark Duggan, by an armed police officer. The police story (and the only one you'll be hearing in the media) goes that when an anti-gang task force attempted to arrest the dead man he resisted, shot at them with an illegal handgun and they returned fire and killed him.

Which you know, might be true.

The problem is the Metropolitan Police have a great deal of trouble telling the truth. Take for instance the death of Jean Charles de Menezes the way they told it he ran away from them, jumped a ticket barrier and was generally behaving suspicously. The way eye witnesses told it he was sitting on an underground train minding his own business, the police burst in, grabbed him and held him down and then shot him in the head. A slight discrepancy in the police's favour. Similarly when allegations about how police involvement in Ian Tomlinson's death began to emerge the Met forgot that a CCTV camera near the scene of the crime existed.

Lenin's Tomb has an unconfirmed eye witness report that Duggan was executed after being arrested. Now without verification this is questionable but it is far from impossible. Maybe he was killed because they disliked him or, given the endemic corruption across the British police maybe a rival drug gang paid to have him gotten rid of.

Certainly the circumstances surrounding his death are a little odd. He was cornered in the back of a mini-cab and decided to go down in a blaze of glory, if the Police are to be believed, an unusual course of action for nearly all criminals, especially alleged drug dealers with their likely access to a well paid lawyer. Illegal handguns can be placed on the scene, especially if the Police had decided to kill him beforehand. Indeed this is one of the most questionable issues of the whole affair for me, if you ever read one of those cheerleading pieces in the papers about how a cop caught a suspect there will usually be a reference to how if a story is too perfect, too without holes it is likely false and pre-rehearsed. The police officer who shot Duggan apparently was saved by his radio. It so wonderfully justifies his "returning fire" on Duggan in a way a shot lodged in a wall wouldn't do so. Indeed it must've been a wonderous radio because the injured officer didn't even spend a night in hospital.

Now it may be all as the police say, it is just very hard to trust them given the lies they've repeatedly told in the past. The worst thing is though, we have no way of trusting the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC)'s investigation. The reason for this is twofold but connected. Firstly their investigation into Jean Charles de Menezes was deeply flawed with strong suspicions of deliberate coverups. The second reason we can't trust the IPCC is because in the aftermath of that investigation a senior officer directly criticised in relation to the incident was appointed to the IPCC.

With collusion and corruption like this it is difficult to trust anything the Metropolitan Police or the IPCC have to say.

Fractional reserve banking explained.

On a truly terrible day for the markets I have finally happened upon a decent description of fractional reserve banking, one of the major problems with the current financial system.

I've been an occasional follower of Positive money but while their ideas seem fairly decent their videos are terrible.

Happily the Zeitgeist Movement of all things have made a very good lecture about it.


Towards the hour mark things go off the rails slightly but it is consistently a sound analysis of a barely known issue. Their proposed solution is... less sound, being a kind of magical technical centrally planned economy. Though as the guy giving the lecture points out at the end, the current system is way more absurd than that.

Oh and in another unexpected turn arch-conservative David Frum has kinda almost paid Paul Krugman a compliment and again here. We are living in strange times.