Tuesday 9th August 2011
And now on top of potential financial meltdown and European countries in massive debt, we have riots in London. As if that will solve anything. The helicopter pictures are showing the very same dreary streets in Hackney, and the same wretched prison-like blocks of flats I lived in with Adrian all those years ago. And nothing seems to have changed at all; the same hopelessness on the faces; the same desperation; the same squalor. And people are still having to live there like that. I know because I had to live there, and it was depressing, then, in 1972. Everywhere else people’s living standards have risen out of all contrast to those dark days. Why on earth are those mansion blocks still standing, they were decrepit and ripe for demolition in the seventies. .
It seems as if the Police and the Courts and all the Social Workers are just perpetuating the misery; simply processing a problem rather than attempting to solve it. God, I sound like a Socialist. Heaven forbid!! And New Labour with all its’ false promises failed to do anything either, so it is no use pointing the finger at just one political party.
And I can safely predict that in twenty years time we will have young people out on the streets rioting again. As Marlene Dietrich used to sing in that strangely hypnotic husky voice, “When will they ever learn, When will they eeeee-vurrr learn?