stella41b
Posts: 4258
Joined: 10/16/2007 From: SW London (UK) Status: offline
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I've been following this thread, but I don't know, but there's something I don't understand here. What has yob culture and anti-social behaviour got to do with someone's income, or what they do (or don't do) for a living? Here we go again, with this 'it must be people on benefits because they don't work and get up to no good'. This is what I just don't understand about people - how they can believe what they read in the media and regurgitate it verbatim as their own opinions. But there again I live in London, not outside London, and I can only form my opinion from what I see going on in London. However I fail to see any logical connection between the way someone behaves in society and where they get their income from. Now you can either agree with me or not, most of you won't anyway, but who is this thread actually about? I'm not prepared to generalize like some of you, but I can develop a character of who I believe to be a yob. A yob to me is a second generation 'yuppie', raised by someone of my generation who was a yuppie, and aso we're talking about someone who works, usually in an office or a well paid job, often wears a suit or a collar and tie to work, and appears respectable to the rest of society. But here we're talking about someone who respects money, material things, but who has little or no respect for other people. This is someone brought up by permissive parents who put career before family, and so there's no discipline, no basic awareness of common decency or socially acceptable norms, and someone who most probably didn't get a job on merit but through who they or their parents knew. These are the idiots you deal with in banks, customer service, in retail, in banks, in finance, and anywhere else where you find an office. They don't only lack a basic awareness of proper manners, they also lack a basic awareness of their own native language, some of them can't spell, quite a lot of them can't speak English properly, for some of them textspeak is modern English, and they have difficulties comprehending anything which doesn't directly relate to them. They are usually employed, have good jobs, they are unable to survive on benefits and wouldn't last longer than a few weeks in business in today's conditions. Please note that I'm not generalising about office workers, merely writing about yobs who work alongside other office workers. They do less work than their colleagues, they spend their time at work surfing the Internet, sending e-mails, writing blogs and on messageboards, browsing MySpace, Facebook, etc for 'fuck buddies' and 'friends with benefits' (to American readers this doesn't mean friends on welfare, but friends you fuck) as most either have problems with their own sexual orientation (quite a lot of closet gays and trannies) or with relationships with the opposite sex. They tend to be extreme right wing in their views, fascist even, and openly hate benefit claimants, single mothers, Pakis, Eastern Europeans, gays, lesbians, transgendered, asylum seekers, basically anyone who isn't like them. This explains why, despite increases in ticket prices, all seater stadiums and severe restrictions relating to admission and tickets we still have soccer hooligans. If you don't believe me try taking a walk through the Square Mile on a Friday evening, or anywhere in Central London. This is where it all kicks off. I'm writing some of this from personal experience. The theatre I'm developing has found a home in a pub which has just got rid of its yob element, having been forced by local residents and Wandsworth Council. We've had six months of loud cheesy music and shouting every Friday night and Saturday night into the early hours of the morning. I live behind the pub, our recycling bin served as a public toilet, and finding a human turd in a corner of our courtyard or even between parked cars has happened. I got transphobic abuse, my neighbours suffered quite a bit of racist abuse. A lot of these people work in the media, in fact television is full of them (I make no apologies for saying this either). This is why you get Big Brother and reality TV. You can also try the tabloid press. Don't take my word for it, go buy any tabloid paper on any day and read through the articles and stories and you will find the similar opinions to those above - a daily invective against benefit claimants, paedophiles, the government, single mothers, asylum seekers, and of course whos' sleeping with who and why and what parties were attended by who. Don't be surprised to find David Cameron is going to be our next PM as he's rather popular among these yob types. This is because these yobs have no recollection of Thatcherism, and thanks to their dim-witted parents people like Thatcher, Tebbit and John Major are revered and held in high esteem. Blair has tried and failed, and Gordon Brown's cabinet also have a major problem with this culture. Britain's prisons are overcrowded. Fining these yobs doesn't work, they can afford it. Community service might work if magistrates had the balls to sentence them, but the big problem is that the police can't catch them. Why? Because the police are never around when they kick off, and if they are these yobs can easily afford a decent defence barrister who gets them off. Their strength lies in the fact that (1) they mingle effectively with the rest of the population and (2) they've got everybody or the majority blaming other people such as benefit claimants, asylum seekers and even now Eastern European migrant workers. I can assure everyone here that yob culture is not a part of Eastern European culture. So what now? I know what I would do. If I were Home Secertary I would set up an agency known as VAL - Voluntary Agricultural Labour - and offer impoverished farmers in the Eastern European member states such as Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria free farmhands and agricultural labour. Then when Mister Yobbo kicks off in the High Street on a Friday evening, he gets arrested, up before the magistrate on the Monday and on Tuesday gets a free 10 year working holiday in Bulgaria or eastern Poland - transportation combined with hard labour. Let Mister Yobbo do some proper work for a change on a farm with traditional implements in a foreign country where he's got to learn the language and assimilate to survive, and leave the rest of us in Britain to continue living without having to deal with these yob elements. Jobs vacated by these yobs can be soon filled by decent folk who will appreciate the work, such as ,... benefit claimants. Of course I'm not being entirely serious, even though I do feel that this is the solution. If foreigners who can't live in our society get deported, then I feel it's about time we sent some of our own folk who can't live properly in our society packing too. Let them go do community service somewhere else in the world such as Africa and fight world poverty. I think it's high time that people in Britain made a choice - they either find their backbone and patriotism and stand up to these yobs, or we can look the other way and allow them to get away with it and also allow the authorities to build a totalitarian regime all around us which will restrict us all. Considering that we're not even 70 years after a world war to fight totalitarianism and we are aware that half of Europe has just spent sixty years fighting totalitarianism this is hardly a step forward now, or is it? Fear and hostility aren't part of a free and democratic society, or they shouldn't be. Tolerance, civility and community are the very basic traditions of British society. I am not a fan of Margaret Thatcher as people here probably know, many of our current problems come from her time in government, but I'd like to make two points. Firstly, she came into office and served her country with good intentions and secondly, just like Ken Livingstone, she stood by her principles and she had courage to stand up to people. This is what I feel is the solution - we must do likewise and stand up to these yobs and not allow them to cause this country to become yet one more totalitarian state.
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