London riots: 'People are fighting back. It's their neighbourhoods at stake'

Just out of curiosity, are British council workers full-time unionized government employees or citizens which may be charged with a specific task and serve as volunteers or near volunteers who may get a pittance as a salary or a per meeting payment?

I will be among the first to admit that there are dedicated people who work in government and on town councils. Many of them work out of a genuine civic desire to serve and deserve our thanks.

Others work out of a lust for power and do not. While it is impossible to say for sure which type this 23 year old kid might be, the stupidity of the remarks indicate either the later or an incomprehensible naivety. Possibly both.

FWIW, I have a kid in the neighborhood who happens to be black mow my lawn. Not because I'm making a fashion statement or trying to promote diversity. But because he's a nice young man who does a good job.

Well, yes, all the categories and types which you mention do exist here just as they clearly do in the U.S. (except that, to be strictly accurate, council workers are employees of local, not national government. A fine distinction, perhaps, but the chain of accountability in local government tends to be much shorter, and redress through the balllot box much quicker.)
You mention the ‘genuine civic desire to serve’. One of the unfortunate changes here in my lifetime is the devaluation in general esteem of public service of this kind. Local government is particularly unfortunate in this respect, since it’s despised both by the centralists (of both parties) in national government, and by much of the citizenry and local press. At one time it was seen as one of the finest callings to which one could aspire, and local public servants were among the most prominent and most respected in their communities. No longer. And while admirable public servants of this kind do still exist (I know a number of them), the incentives to go into this field are not what they were, and the calibre of the profession (with many admirable individual exceptions) is not what it was.
As for a lust for power - well there are little Hitlers in all walks of life. But local authorities in Britain have very little real power any more (so many of their former responsibilities having been centralised); so the ability to satify that lust, where it exists, is largely confined to what goes on inside the office.

Unfortunately, those poor buggers can't own what I can...

These do a pretty good job at keeping those pesky rioters away...

This S&W 500 mag

And this Glock 19...

and this Mossberg 930...

I'd suspect so, though as a matter of fair disclosure, I'm an American and only familiar with Brits and Canadians by working with them most of my professional life.

By and large, the people I've worked with are polite and pleasant to a fault. Much less confrontational than we Americans until you back them into a corner. Then they can show as much or more Moxie than any of us Yanks.

The description which Winniesboy gave certainly sounds accurate by my frame of reference. My father once served as the counterpart of these local governments when we lived in a small town in Kansas. His official title was Justice of the Peace and I think the town paid him $20 per month or some such token. He got the job because he was trusted to mediate the occassional dispute which generally involved some hog getting into the neighboring cornfield or some teenage kid driving over somebody's lawn.

Some of these titles have been carried into modern America, but most of their authority has been diminished by centralization and nobody wants to do them anymore. As little as 10 years ago when we first moved to Pennsylvania, most of the local school board was respected business people and other members of the community.

Now, it has been stocked with mainly union hacks who cross-file in both party primaries and turn out their machine. In our district, we had four of nine slots up for this year. Three of the four incumbents were even former union puppets who begin to show an independent streak.

Most people here can't even be bothered with school board primaries, so the union hack slate won all four of the Democrat slots easily and two of the four Republican slots. So come November, the best we can hope for is a 50-50 split between union hacks and normal citizens.

I don't recall the Second Amendment being widely applied in practice.

The Second Amendment has been widely applied in rural parts of the deep South in the aftermaths of hurricanes. It has also been applied in other parts of the US following other sorts of natural disasters. Generally, few shots are fired. The sight of rednecks and hillbillies with guns is usually enough to persuade potential looters to go elsewhere. The most famous case of 2A application, I believe, was the response of the LA Korean community to the "Rodney King Riots". Shots were fired, and a neighborhood was protected.

Beyond that, riots tend to occur in places where folks don't have much use for the Second Amendment in the first place.

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