Tottenham riots

[BCM]

BRITAIN'S festival of righteous indignation has finally resulted in someone being jailed because of tube socks.

 

that's gaoled. tah ;-]

 

 

 

 

(i'm entitled to at least one of these correction things per decade ;-p )

 

 

yeah... if you live in the middle ages or are Oscar Wilde

 

when i was being educated in the 80's it was how it was written. Also up until the late 90's and early 00's, it was the way most media in australia (and likely the UK) wrote it. Then with the rise of the net, there was a dramatic shift towards the US spelling. I suppose, that over time it had been planting it's seed in receptive minds, through television in the 50's like cowboy serials and what not. And then with this current generation it was finally unleashed, as the old guard clinging to the true spelling receded. So the word jail, finally received it's get out of gaol card.

 

But i guess that's all, back in some far distant past to you young whippets of today, living in the second decade of the new millennium. -sie-

 

er, no mate... maybe in Oz but in the UK for decades, likely at least a century the most common spelling has been JAIL.

[delet...]

amazing, and my world view shifts just like that.

[delet...]

i suppose, you call them HM prisons. Maybe gaol is a hangover from colonial times. heh. Ar well my time wasn't wasted writing that post, cause i learned something about an england that i can see that i barely know even though i was born there so long ago.

[mcbpete]

Maybe gaol is a hangover from colonial times.

Yeah looks like the spelling of 'jail' from some 17th century Scottish poem or something:

 

'E tarnished brillig creep'd with fervour ton a bonnie maid,

An' planked her goots wid a stone stollid an' chaid.

Swiftly a posse rode an' stach'd the brillag,

An' tae gaol the brillag weent an' laid.

[pcock]

i was taught when i was young that jail is spelt gaol.

 

 

however, back in primary school at the age of 5, i asked why the moon changes shape, i was told it was because it gets clouds in front of it, which i believed until i was 7 or 8 and completely embarassed myself with.

[Guest futuregirlfriend]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/8708680/Tory-councillor-suspended-after-calling-rioters-jungle-bunnies.html

 

his quote is absolutely incredible.

[SR4]

funny that the british empire raped ,pillaged and colonized abroad as much of the world as they could for the longest time yet when something like this happens people/politicians are shocked and quick to hand out draconian measures

 

i know first hand what a mess they left in jamaica after 62

there was/is no infrastructure,corruption is rampant ,schools are shamefully lacking basic supplies etc

when the party was over and the royal colonizers were finished exploiting as much human/natural resources as they could -they just left in a hurry

not to worry one iota for the country's future -which was sadly shaped by the slavery hoisted upon them by the UK

 

 

Although colonization was an abomination, the Brits, to their credit - abolished slavery in the 1830s, without a civil war.

 

The retributive sentencing the British magistrates are practicing is sickening. Someone should go riot down the courthouse.

 

 

big up to my main man Wilburforce

[chenGOD]

http://www.telegraph...le-bunnies.html

 

his quote is absolutely incredible.

 

LOL his "explanation" is fucking miraculous.

[patternoverlap]

http://www.telegraph...le-bunnies.html

 

his quote is absolutely incredible.

 

LOL his "explanation" is fucking miraculous.

 

"Sir Roger Manwood's grammar foundation school"

 

lol

[Npoess]

[Guest Iain C]

http://www.telegraph...le-bunnies.html

 

his quote is absolutely incredible.

 

LOL his "explanation" is fucking miraculous.

 

Absolutely pitch-perfect use of the classic "Needless to say."

[Guest 277: 930-933]

Am I the only one picturing this guy bobbing his head to "The Message" whilst thinking of his brilliant remark?

[Guest yikes]

source: AP

 

LONDON (AP) — It was a very British coup. The warship slipped into the harbor, the soldiers landed in darkness — and the diplomatic wives made sandwiches for the hungry troops.

 

Secret documents declassified Friday by Britain’s MI5 security service reveal in dramatic and everyday detail how the U.K. under Prime Minister Winston Churchill overthrew the elected government of British Guiana — now Guyana — because he feared its left-wing leader and his American wife were leading the British colony into the arms of the Soviet Union.

 

The documents reveal how British spies kept up intense scrutiny on Cheddi and Janet Jagan, who founded the People’s Progressive Party to campaign for workers’ rights and independence from British rule for the sugar-producing colony in northern South America.

 

Christopher Andrew, the spy agency’s official historian, said the files provide new details of the coup, and “further evidence that MI5 played a more important part in British decolonization than is often realized.”

 

The Jagans — a U.S.-educated former dentist and his Chicago-born wife — seem an unlikely threat. But the 39 folders of files released by Britain’s National Archives are crammed full of tapped phone conversations, intercepted letters and accounts of physical surveillance over more than a decade.

 

In 1951, the year after the Jagans founded their party, an MI5 agent based on the Caribbean island of Trinidad described them as “something new in British Guiana politics.”

 

“Both are able and intelligent and the mere fact that Janet Jagan is white, young and not unattractive in appearance lends considerable interest to her activities and those of her husband,” he said.

 

To British authorities, the Jagans were a headache. To the Americans, they were a potential Communist threat on America’s doorstep.

 

MI5 concluded that the party was “not receiving any financial support from any Communist organization outside the country.”

 

Nonetheless, amid worsening strikes and unrest, Britain grew unhappy with the Jagans’ “disruptive antics.”

 

After the party won a huge majority in British Guiana’s 1953 election, making Cheddi Jagan prime minister, Churchill decided to act.

 

“We ought surely to get American support in doing all that we can to break the Communist teeth in British Guiana,” Churchill wrote to his colonial secretary.

 

In the end, Britain acted alone, mounting a military operation code-named Operation Windsor. Churchill dispatched a warship, HMS Superb, and brought hundreds of troops by air and sea to secure key sites.

 

On Oct. 9, Britain suspended Guyana’s constitution, fired its legislators and arrested the Jagans.

 

The surprise military operation went according to plan. The Trinidad-based MI5 officer noted with quiet satisfaction that “it was obvious that the PPP leaders had no idea that the Constitution would be suspended or that they might be arrested.”

 

And the spy threw in a note of thanks for the women who helped the army march on its stomach.

 

“I might add in parenthesis that catering arrangements for the airborne troops during their halt in Trinidad were carried out by Mrs. Beadon, wife of the Commissioner of Police, Mrs. Rahr, my wife and Joyce Huggins … and I understand that no less than 600 large sandwiches were cut by these ladies,” he wrote.

 

An outraged Cheddi Jagan appealed by telegram to Britain’s opposition Labour Party for help. Labour leader Clement Attlee replied curtly, “regret impossible to intervene.”

 

For the next three years, British Guiana was ruled under emergency powers by the British governor and appointed officials, and the Jagans were kept under house arrest and intensive surveillance.

 

In the years that followed, MI5 softened somewhat toward Cheddi Jagan, acknowledging that he was an astute and popular politician — though the agent based in Trinidad strongly disliked Janet Jagan, whom he described as a committed Communist “uncompromising in her hatreds.”

 

By the 1960s, Britain’s spies worried the Jagans would turn to newly Communist Cuba, possibly making Guyana a base for Latin American revolutionaries.

 

“If the Jagans remain in power after independence and if their activities and views remain unchanged, they will represent a threat to the stability both of British Guiana itself and of the neighboring territories,” the officer wrote.

 

Andrew said it’s clear from previously released government documents that successive British governments “gave in to pressure from the White House to allow the CIA to use subterranean means to ensure that the first leader of independent Guyana in 1966 was not Cheddi Jagan.”

 

“In most British colonies, there was a relatively friendly transfer of power to independent governments,” Andrew said in a podcast for the National Archives. “British Guiana was a notable exception.”

 

The Jagans remained a major force in Guyanese politics, and Cheddi Jagan became prime minister again in 1961, when the batch of MI5 files ends.

After the Cold War ended, Cheddi Jagan served as president of Guyana from 1992 until his death in 1997. His wife succeeded him between 1997 and 1999.