Anyone like to reconsider what they posted about the train attack on Saturday night?

Tundeira · Today 06:55
There was a thread posted a few weeks ago decrying summer internships that try to improve diversity in some workplaces. The general theme was, ‘My white son can’t get a place so these schemes are bad and need to be abolished’. Do we want people from deprived communities to see these jobs as realistic options, reducing involvement in drug dealing and crime in general, or do we want to keep them as an underclass we can look down on and complain about?

I’m originally from an African country. I don’t have that mental block that many black people growing up in deprived communities in the U.K. do. All the top politicians, most of the senior management, the professionals, the music and film stars are all black in Nigeria. It never occurred to me that aspiring to be a doctor was ambitious because that level of social achievement is standard among the people I grew up with.

It was shocking to realise how some white Britons see me and how many black people growing up in the U.K. without roots elsewhere see their prospects in Britain. It was a white nursing sister who made the ‘ambitious’ comment when I turned down her offer of a permanent job as a healthcare assistant on her night team because I was going to university. It was the way she said it. She’d put me in a box and wasn’t too happy to see me climb out of it, though others were very supportive.

Representation is important. Young black kids from poorer communities need to see black people in those bog-standard professional roles that are much more achievable than footballer, actor or music star to begin to aspire to these careers in significant numbers, which is one reason these diversity schemes are important.

As an aside, it’s not just ethnic minorities that get put in a box. I was also dismayed to hear one of my two biology teachers at college tell a student that professions like veterinary medicine were not for people from colleges like ours. This was a further education college in leafy Surrey, for goodness sake! I wondered why he had to speak up and depress his students’ ambitions, even if he genuinely believed what he was saying.

piggy sorry, yes. I realise the boy wasn't at the barbers and that was a different location.

Are you going to transplant your other posts claiming that it is perfectly fine to exclude boys from deprived areas from internships designed to combat deprivation if they are white? And I can point out that it is unlawful discrimination again.

It’s not unlawful for internships to target underrepresented groups. I will happily transplant my other post.

The boy who was stabbed wasn't at the barber shop. The first barber incident was reported two hours after the event, the second the police came out and couldn't find anyone.

I included the link so people could read for themselves. I’m not going to copy and paste the whole website.

As I said, other people in deprived areas manage not to have such a high rate of knife crime. We need to be able to identify and discuss the issues without constant accusations of racism.

I don't understand why he wasn't caught after the attack in the barbershop. There were plenty of witnesses.
How did he slip through the net twice in 24hrs before the train attack?

Sadiq Khan didn't write the page itself . But also, that is not what the PP is doing.

You’re accusing Sadiq Khan of propaganda?? I don’t like the man but that’s a desperate claim.

Assuming these statistics are credible, are black people in London involved in violence because it’s a nice way to pass the day?

Nobody has suggested that ‘it’s a nice way to pass the day’ but all your theories/excuses are pointless if no one can discuss the issue because they’ll be accused of being racist.

Quite a few other groups in the UK live in deprived areas and manage to not be disproportionately likely to commit knife crime.

Are you going to transplant your other posts claiming that it is perfectly fine to exclude boys from deprived areas from internships designed to combat deprivation if they are white? And I can point out that it is unlawful discrimination again.

We need to get better at talking about all this - shutting down conversations will not help. I’m not sure why so many are so resistant.

Yes, it's instructive to read the whole link in context, not the cherry picking.

From BungleBoogie’s link:

The analysis highlighted that the driving factors behind young people becoming involved in or a victim of violence are lack of opportunity, deprivation and inequality. This Assembly believes that it is therefore important to talk about and tackle structural inequalities and institutional racial discrimination across the country to tackle disproportionality in youth violence.

www.london.gov.uk/motions/knife-crime-black-community

Since you’ve decided to move your propaganda from a dying thread to a fresh one,BundleBoogie I’ll transplant my post from the other thread too:

Assuming these statistics are credible, are black people in London involved in violence because it’s a nice way to pass the day? Do they just enjoy fighting, stabbing and shooting? Or is the violence linked to drug dealing and gangs fighting to control the lucrative drug trade?

The next point some racists make is along the lines of black people being inherently associated with antisocial behaviour like drug dealing, missing out the link to deprivation. The inference is that it’s something to with the genetics or culture of black people. Drug use is high in many deprived communities in western countries, regardless of ethnic make-up. While there is a lot of wealth in London, there is also a lot of deprivation. Black people are unfortunately not well represented among the wealthy but are among the deprived.

Many people in deprived communities, especially men, don’t have the role models to show them that it is possible for people like them to have a job with good financial rewards, not as financially rewarding as drug dealing but much safer. Instead young impressionable boys are dazzled by the idea of great wealth at a young age, with social media ramping up the desire to ‘make it big’.

These pressures are not restricted to black boys, though they do have to deal with additional issues like not feeling accepted by the wider community, causing them to turn inwards, and low expectations at school. In London, the example used by ThatJadeMaker and MissKitty0, because black people are underrepresented in the super-wealthy and high earning professionals category (the main people that can afford to live in London other than social housing tenants), the proportion of the black population that is deprived is much higher than the proportion of the white population that is deprived and there is therefore a greater involvement in the drug business and the associated violent crime.

Knife crime among certain groups IS a problem. This is from the Mayor of London’s website.

This Assembly is concerned that despite making up only 13% of London’s total population, black Londoners account for 45% of London’s knife murder victims, 61% of knife murder perpetrators and 53% of knife crime perpetrators.

This means black Londoners are disproportionately more likely to be victims and perpetrators of knife crime.

https://www.london.gov.uk/motions/knife-crime-black-community

Other European countries like Denmark have found that particular ethnicities are significantly more likely to commit violent crimes with men from Kuwait, Tunisia, Lebanon, Somalia, Jordan, Uganda, Morocco and Iraq committing far more crimes per capita than Danish men. This is not racism, this is fact.

This is a topic we need to get used to discussing without constant accusations of racism. I have been called racist on a previous by a PP who is on this thread for posting facts like those above. PPs got very angry at the facts I shared but readily available information from the office of Sadiq Khan, or the list of perpetrators of mass knife attacks is not racist.

I wonder whether PP throwing insults has donated to important causes like Baroness Nicholson’s charity for Yazidi women - still being held as sex slaves and their population murdered en masse - a genocide that few have even heard of. I am so horribly racist that I have.

I listen to Muslim people. The ones trying (on here and other places) to warn us of plans some parts of the Muslim community have for gaining political power in this country. PPs on here ignore those voices though. They don’t fit their narrative. Many Muslims have come here to get away from those people but we are silencing those who speak about them.

The political influence for Muslim people is already increasing. For a minority of only 6% they seem to have considerable influence. By the next election, large changes are predicted.

Our government is very keen not to upset them, Keir Starmer refuses to support the ban on first cousin marriage (repeated 1st cousin marriage currently causes thousands of babies to be born with significant congenital abnormalities which make their lives awful), he is proposing to make law a definition of Islamophobia which would outlaw discussion if first cousin marriage and have a chilling effect on discussion if the grooming gangs that comprise Pakistani Muslim men.

Jess Phillips is also trying to water down the grooming gangs inquiry. Her constituency is 45% Muslim - look it up. Has she got a conflict of interest?

PPs here running round throwing insults are part of the problem that sees Reforms support rising.

Mistakenly thinking it was a terrorist attack is not racism.

The racism on the threads at the weekend was racism.

I didn’t participate in the threads and I always think we should be aware that we can be wrong, early reporting is often incorrect, and that there may be deliberate misinformation.

But I also firmly reject the idea that recognising patterns is bigotry.

If there’s a reported murder-suicide with a family annihilated, it’s not bigotry to say that fits a pattern of male violence, even to say so on MN. If it turns out that grandma did it, or that the reports were wrong and it didn’t happen, that doesn’t make those commenters sexist bigots.

Reports of a coordinated attack by two black men wearing black sounds like an Islamist attack. It’s the explanation that best fits the facts as they were reported. The fact the reports were wrong doesn’t make the commenters racist bigots any more than in the grandma case above.

The alternative leaves us with bizarro world where we have to pretend that we don’t know anything about anything because it involves making inferences from past observation.

That's ridiculous and completely impractical. Two opposite extremes: at my station there are no staff and no barriers, what purpose would arches serve? And at the opposite extreme: 53,000 people depart Waterloo station between 4pm and 7pm every day, there are four pedestrian entrances, and its on four different tube lines - how on earth, and where on earth, would you put detector arches?

The BBC are now reporting what I heard locally that he’s also the man who waved a knife around in a barbers in Peterborough on Friday.

I get your point @AnyoneWhoHasAHeart , but in this case it does sound like it is mental health issues.

This is the explanation I was given. Rubbish. Spreading misinformation is against the guidelines, yet the thread stood.

Thanks for getting in touch. For now, we will be letting the thread stand - the story is such a prominent news item that people will inevitably want to discuss it. As ever, we will delete posts which break our Talk Guidelines We'll be keeping an eye on the thread, but please get back in touch if you see any specific posts which you'd like us to check out and we'll be happy to take a look.

Makes me want to report every single post that contains misinformation, to the point where MN have to act as the email box will be so full.

There isn't even anyone else to complain to, just MN themselves.

This isn’t straightforward though, on either side.

On the one hand it absolutely isn’t unreasonable to suggest that it was likely terrorism when two men are arrested and it is initially reported that counter terrorist police are involved. That of course was later confirmed not to be the case, but we live in a 24 hour communication age, where people have access to, and communicate via various social media channels where, whether we like it or not, news spreads. And so people will talk between news broadcasts.

The Racist element is aside from that, but the fact that there have been multiple incidents over the years all of which have involved perpetrators of different races is going to mean people will automatically conclude that it was someone from a different race. Once it was confirmed not to be a racist incident any reference to race, immigration etc should have ceased. At that point it was irrelevant.

However, it is also unreasonable to automatically jumpy to the conclusion that this must be down to inadequate mental health provision and essentially turn this man into a victim.

No. No-one who goes round stabbing people is mentally normal. But that’s not the same as mentally ill.

only the trial will tell the facts, and as things currently stand, he hasn’t been detained under the mental health act, he has been arrested, and charged with attempted murder.

Also the police are now looking into whether he may have been involved in an attack on a boy the day before, which, given everyone else is adding their own speculations, just points to him being a horrible violent person.

We need to stop automatically attributing race here or in any such crimes.

But we also need to stop just assuming it must be mental health reasons and essentially giving the man an out.

Absolutely.

Reported posts which contravene MN guidelines stand under ‘we prefer open discussion’.

No you don't MN, you prefer the clicks and advertising revenue.

I fear poor moderation will drive away the more genuine posters, leaving MN with a site full of misinformation. Noone left to challenge or provide facts.

Dangerous in the world we live in.

Major De- registration might make MN think again.

Or Derek Bird.

YANBU @margegunderson, the racism was off the scale!😱

I'm hoping some of those posters will reflect, realise that they have become racist and roll back.🙏 But I know some won't.🤷‍♀️

Some are aggressively pushing a racist agenda on Mnet to sow fear and division. MNHQ needs take a proper look at those posters and take action.

It's an attempt at reducing racial discrimination. It's a fact that a black person's behaviour is more likely to be interpreted as aggressive than if they were white. Research shows this.

I don't see it the same as the rape gangs.

I started reading it on Saturday night and was convinced it would be gone by morning. The fact it remained and (to the best of my knowledge) is still up is shocking.

I'd like to hear an explanation from MNHQ as to why they didn't pull that thread on Saturday night. It seems a lot of people had reported some posters and yet the vile comments were allowed to continue on the night. I get that it was late on a Saturday evening but personally I don't think that is a good enough reason.

Imagine somewhere like peak time Waterloo where everyone have to go through the security. It would be an absolute nightmare. Simply impossible.