Why are majority of the riots in northern towns?

[PhoebeMcPeePee]

DH & I were watching the riots on the news this morning like most people absolutely horrified.

He's from one of the northern towns affected although we live in the south and started discussing why these riots now (and historically) tend to be more focused on northern towns but didn't really come up with any one thing. Any thoughts on this?

EddyF · Today 19:15
So what if they don't want to mix??? Why can't different communities co-exist in peace? Look at the state of this lot; would you want to ‘mix’? It is okay for people to a live a different way of life if they do choose so. I mean what can they have in common? One is a culture of pubs, football and union flags and the other one is prayer five times a day and no alcohol. Mixing is being able to respect each other in the community. They don't have to be friends.

Like the way you focus on a union Jacks/pubs and football being British culture, trying to perpetuate the myth that’s that what the UK is about. It’s really not. I know no one who flies the Union Jack outside their home, although if someone wants to do so, they’ve every right. It is our country’s flag after all. I know no one who spends their lives in puns, or who goes to football. Our culture is so much more that that, but I think you know that.

@SaltAndVinegar2 I understand your argument but I don't accept it. It's the same argument you can use for domestic violence or even the terrible atrocities that happened in Southport. You are the sum of your experiences but you also have free will to decide to commit violence or not.

*and as a result can't protest when you are sentenced for your actions.

I live in Leeds and Harehills has always been an area with problems and has always been multicultural. However, it was not the Muslim community but Romanians and Czechs who were mainly rioting.

The emphasis is always put on Muslim communities and this is not the case.
I can't speak for other areas but this all erupted with a Romanian family having their children removed.

Either way, something does have to be done by the government! I have done supply teaching in Harehills and some classes have no British children which creates a divide.
It's just a mess and I don't know what the answer is!

And this was the guy who proclaimed in an interview that he does not believe in working beyond 6 o'clock.

He did NOT say that. He says he sets every Friday evening aside for his family.

@Awwlookatmybabyspider I think you will find he's not on holiday. He made a press statement this evening

Anybody know where Tamworth is ? Sky new says it’s kicking off there now.

https://x.com/TomWitherow/status/1820192069106741276

Less affordable?
Poor areas have better public transport?
I certainly don’t see this as a problem.
Tesco can build a new store because there will be more custom and the council can provide more bus routes.
I think housing them in affluent areas is a very good idea.
They also have lots more fields to build more houses on.

lol our bus is once an hour

peebles32, Denmark has spread new immigrants out where they rely on social housing and state support and removed them from blocks/areas where they were all together, because Denmark wants them to integrate and learn to be Danish. That sounds like a good plan.

Posted and ran, sorry. The point was not about the people but rather they are forgotten north towns, declining living standards, closed industries, high unemployment, no infrastructure or investment, left behind towns - literal tinderboxes when you put migrants in hotels.

I know someone who will have protested somewhere today. He does the rounds for Tommy Robinson protests and has bans from his local football team for violence. He has a big house, a good trade job, two girls and a wife who works. He likes a fight, is right wing and has plenty of similar friends. They are often found on lads weekends away across Europe.

Kids I work with would be there if near enough. They are the illiterate, disenfranchised and often neglected who come from families who have needed much more support than they got. They have enjoyed other similar mini riots in mischief night and are no strangers to crime and will hope for some spoils.

No go areas are determined by poverty - I was in a few streets worth of Batley today where there are no white residents. I got my car stuck in a ginnel and a crowd came out and moved the bins so I could get unstuck. It was uneventful and I can think of more than a few places in local estates where my welcome may well bit have been so good.

what fuels the riots - the usual wealth disparity and poverty plus a side order of disenfranchisement and fear. A government that takes funding from Esol, education and housing creates perfect conditions for trouble. The decision to make obtaining qualifications of L2 or above dependents in Maths and Eng GCSE meant that students with poor literacy or maths could no longer do trowel trades or motor mechanics so get forced to repeat useless level one quals before leaving for no decent employment.

Meanwhile I live in one of the towns someone names above as a hotbed of strife. I drank posh coffee in the park earlier and watched a multi ethnic and multi age footy game with about half the players from one of the infamous migrant (but not exclusively as there are a couple of British couples there too) hostels.

Am just going to take the dogs out for our usual entirely untroubled walk but with a choice of only outstanding or good schools (primary and secondary) plenty of micro pubs and bars, decent restaurants and lots of housing stock above £350 000 and much vastly more then it doesn’t feel like a deprived area to me.

I think this makes sense. It's human nature to want to cling to the familiar and so we should expect that some people will need incentivising/management if they are to properly integrate.
It's no good just leaving immigrants to it, we have to make it clear that there are certain expectations if they want to live in the UK.

@Xenia they also insist the kids go to nursery from a young age to integrate and make sure of language skills - same in Sweden I think

This has made me laugh. I used to live in a very pleasant suburb, quite affluent. But slowly immigrants started settling there. At first it was - oh this is a nice cultural mix, everyone welcome. Then you started feeling a little uncomfortable when rather than going to the play area and chatting to other mums, all of a sudden you noticed many of the mums speaking a foreign language between themselves and having no interest in speaking with you, the kids not mixing with the white kids. Then you start noticing this more in the schools. All of a sudden there’s a lot of time spent in the school with kids whose first language is not English.

You notice that a lot of the drivers are very erratic and dangerous, quite a few people start getting hit by cars. The shops which had done well close down and are replaced by ethnic shops, pubs close and up spring numerous dessert places.

You get a letter home from school sailing back PE because of Ramadan. Your kids school wants to start serving halal meat.

All those community events which ran for years, the carnival, remembrance parade etc get cancelled because large numbers of residents don’t have any interest in typically British traditions.

Your new neighbours buying houses off the long term residents who are leaving the area in ever increasing numbers don’t mix with you, as the only mix in their community.

Your kid starts secondary, half the kids can’t get into the same school when they would easily have done so previously because of all the immigrant children, often in large families get the places. The children your child has previously been friends with since age 4 are bussed all over. You child gets really upset, many of the kids in his new school won’t mix with kids outside their community.

you feel isolated and a stranger in your own town, you feel forced out. Crime shoots up, white kids are targeted in the local park. Yet if you say it was and Asian kid with a knife threatening your child with a knife people are more concerned with calling you racist than the fact your. Hold could have been stabbed.

Eventually you feel so stressed and isolated living there you pull your kid out of school. You have lost your attitude of “oh isn’t in nice to live in this mixture of cultures, let’s be welcoming” to “Jesus I’m not going through that again l” you look up the demographics of various areas and you’re veryvrelived it says 99.1% white British born.

The day you move your 1 remaining long standing neighbour cries saying they will feel so isolated now, no neighbours talk anymore.

But go ahead, encourage the immigrants into your area. You’ll soon regret it and turn out like the rest of us who have been through it. My area was nice, it wasn’t some inner city slum. It had many outstanding schools (why it was targeted). Look forward to hearing from you then.

Just outside Birmingham

I live in the nw , I have always done on the road jobs and met people from many places and cultures.
Recently I have seen a lot of refugees in the area, they are being housed at a local army camp, where normally army families live. A lot of refugees now live at the camp as I don't think government has anywhere else to house them. I know a few women on the camp and they are scared to go out with their children now as the camp is now over 50% male refugees (no families) and they hang around camp in large groups. Working army families which are usually women and kids as the men are often away are intimidated. The refugees do not know our language and culture and they have probably come from an awful country where they have been traumatised and have had no one assess their mental health and if they need counselling etc. no one to teach them about English culture and life here. They have put these refugees in the middle of nowhere army camp and i am not surprised they can't integrate, government really needs to help them Integrate better than they have been doing.
Also I visit heavy Muslim towns and as a white female I have on occasion found this quite intimidating, a few going on about Allah, and how I should become a Muslim. I just explain I am here on business and respectfully I do not want talk religion/ politics.

Would human rights allow us to do that? Force people to live where they don’t want to?

Surely if Denmark can do it we should also be able to?

I don't like racism. My best carers have been black. Racism and religion have become excuses for the uncivilised to act out their anger on others. It is not always riots. People want to take the law into their own hands, because they feel a grievance about something, and no one is helping them, so they incite others to join them, and with the security in numbers, they wade into anything started, and if there is nothing, start their own.

It used to be football: now it is anything.

The riots against slavery were shocking. The history of slavery should not only be taught and remembered, we should publicise the slavery as much as we can.

Those anti-slavery fools were wrong. By ridding the nation of statues of slave owners, they were denying the lives of the slaves, their suffering, and the efforts of those who took terrible risks to rescue them: to save them. Without the slave owners, the recognition of the conditions of slavery would disappear. It is when people see a statue of someone made rich on slavery, that they ask why, and if you cannot tell them, the memory is lost and it can happen again without anyone recognising it until it is too late.

Now we have modern slavery by people trafficking. We have worse though. 19th century slaves worked all day for a wooden shack and food.

If someone in full time work cannot earn enough to put a roof over his family's heads and food in their bellies, then no matter how good the house is, or how better the food is, he is a slave. That is it. I am not talking about part time work or unemployed, or disabled who cannot work. I am referring to someone who works full time, yet doesn't earn enough to pay rent, taxes, fares and food, he is a slave to the people he works for. (he or she or both).

That is why people vote for a party they think will improve their lives.

Still laughing at the idea that someone’s colleague couldn’t get a coffee at Leeds station when it has multiple coffee shops as well as places like McDonalds, Wetherspoons etc and that there is nothing to eat in the centre apart from burgers when Leeds is full of places to eat from Lebanese, Mexican, Caribbean, Italian, Indian, Japanese etc. i struggle to think of something you can’t get. I thought it was a parody post at first but apparently not. It just shows how some people view the north, even vibrant cities.

I live in a Yorkshire town mentioned on this thread, thankfully we’ve had no trouble yet but the EDL types have been here multiple times in the past and I have no doubt they will be back. There is massive division in the town, so much racist shit from people and the local Facebook groups have become a horrible place to be. The town centre is is an awful state, pretty much no shops, groups of drinkers hanging around all day, women openly on the game. the sports centre has been closed, litter everywhere, there is literally nothing to do for families. I moved here in 2010 when it wasn’t perfect but it was busy, had shops and felt safe to walk through the town now many avoid the town centre because of groups of men drinking and behaving intimidatingly or making lewd comments/behaviour, I have been victim of it myself.

Local people are angry that the town that they grew up in has gone to shit and are blaming immigration because that is what they are being manipulated into believing, it’s been simmering for years now and I imagine it is the same in many other towns across the country. People are frustrated because they feel they aren’t being heard, of course some are racist thugs but actually there are some genuine issues and nobody gives a shit because it’s a rundown northern town that nobody cares about and it’s easier just to label anyone who raises an issue as thick or racist or far right.

I feel very uneasy at the moment, I have a mosque a minutes walk from my house, I worry for my Muslim neighbours and their dc.

Would human rights allow us to do that? Force people to live where they don’t want to?

Thats the system for everyone in social housing though. Accept what you're given or find your own place privately.