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it wasn’t george floyd’s protesters who started reacting violently; it was the cops.

the protest was peaceful until the cops showed up in riot gear, and started using water cannons, followed up by tear gas and rubber bullets. i got videos from friends who were there, of people screaming and running away from the cops shooting the water cannons, rubber bullets and throwing tear gas at them. they were even shooting at the protesters dragging people away to get medical attention.

speaking of medical attention, dispatch refused to provide any medical attention to the protesters. people literally had to drive their bleeding friends to the hospital because they refused to send ambulances.

cops are using non-lethal weapons in a lethal way. they shot rubber bullets into people’s heads and injured them. there’s dozens of photos of protesters with bleeding head wounds from the rubber bullets.

multiple people used police scanners and heard that there were undercover cops pretending to be violent protesters who were throwing rocks and whatnot at the police, with dozens of eyewitness accounts confirming that information.

the person who instigated all the chaos last night (it was a fire at an autozone) with the looting and burning buildings is highly suspected to be an undercover cop pretending to be a protester, because the video of him keeps getting taken down. protesters tried to stop him but couldn’t because he had a hammer and they were scared for their safety.

the cops jammed cell phone towers and cut live streams to interrupt broadcasts and to prevent people from seeing what was really going on and who actually started the violence.

the cops lied about protesters being armed and about throwing rocks and are literally trying to continue the violence happening and yet no one is holding them accountable for that.

and during all this, the cop that murdered george floyd still hasn’t been arrested. he has had more than ten complaints filed against him and was involved in three other civilian shootings in the past. and yet he’s still out free along with his three other buddies involved, probably sitting on his couch while all this chaos is happening.

If you voted conservative I don’t want to hear you complaining about climate change.

If you voted conservative I don’t want to hear you complaining about homelessness and poverty (including child homelessness and child poverty).

If you voted conservative I don’t want to hear you complaining that minimum wage is too low.

If you voted conservative I don’t want to hear you complaining about how some children go to school without a lunch, or how some children only eat one meal a day because their parents cannot afford to feed them.

If you voted conservative, I don’t want to hear you complaining about social inequality and injustice.

If you voted conservative, I don’t want to hear you complaining about an increase in food bank use, an increase in knife and other violent crime, cuts in NHS staff and police, or a government that prioritises controlling immigration over inequality, poverty, and the climate crisis.

If you voted conservative, you voted for a government that cares about selling the NHS, making rich people richer, making poor people poorer, and a government that has shown no concern about tackling the climate crisis.

If you voted conservative, you voted for a Prime Minister that supported Section 28, a Prime Minister that has been openly racist, sexist, homophobic, and completely refused to apologise for his bigotry whilst outright admitting to it. 

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u/Sidian on reddit unitedkingdom comments on the blatant double standard between the two major British political factions and their supporters; the rightwing Conservatives and leftwing Labour party

Certainly, yes, and perspective is important, but smugness is dangerous. We currently have worse quality of life than the United States, we have one of the worst homelessness crises in the developed world, hate crimes are hugely on the rise, and we took in some of the least Syrian refugees in Europe. We’re somehow, remarkably, managing to be inhumane to those abroad and at home. 

Then there’s the whole Brexit stupidity, because people want to pretend we’re strong and independent when Britain has never been any such thing. Britain’s industries are dead and gutted, and even at their height, they relied on first colonialism and then imports. We are a tiny island with no industry and no empire; do people think that will magically change?

If Britain had nowhere left to go, we wouldn’t be having a crushing Conservative victory every fucking year. I wouldn’t have to go and work in a food bank that is more crowded than ever, and I wouldn’t have to watch people cry because benefits are harder to claim than they have been in years, or because they’re disabled and terrified and they’ve just been given bullshit fit-for-work status; I wouldn’t have to watch people who’ve worked here back-breakingly hard for ten years and have kids born here be afraid they’re going to get deported and that their kids will never see them again; I wouldn’t have to hear that a fellow volunteer’s friend has been put on a cheaper insulin because there are fears about medicine trade after Brexit; I wouldn’t have to watch people desperately wave their status paperwork in front of me because they’re afraid that without citizenship papers, they’re not entitled to a basic fucking human right like food; I wouldn’t have to take the odd cup of tea to the bloke who sleeps under the porch and offer him a sandwich and lie to the police who come and ask if we’ve had any rough sleepers so they can move him on. I wouldn’t have to listen to my boss crow that the Tories are just cleaning up the messes Labour made, that Donald Trump did nothing wrong and Hillary Clinton is evil, that halal meat directly funds ISIS terrorism. I wouldn’t have to realise the majority of my generation seems to have forgotten, or never learned, that the miners’ strikes ever happened. I wouldn’t throw away the Suns and the Mails left on tables, disgusted, because the vast majority of our news is bullshit right-wing propaganda. I wouldn’t have a friend who when reporting her rape to the police, after being lured to a false “party,” was told, “Why did you go home with him when you had a boyfriend?” I wouldn’t sit and cross out all the places we used to refer people to for debt counselling, for addiction help, for citizenship or homelessness crises, for benefit appeals, because we have to make a new list every two months due to all the closures and the lack of funding. There wouldn’t be four people begging just on my high street, twelve to a street in the city centre. I wouldn’t have to go to a memorial march because a man from my area froze to death alone on the street and wasn’t found for two fucking days. One in eight people in my city wouldn’t be homeless.

Sure, first-past-the-post voting has a hell of a lot to answer for, and without it, maybe we wouldn’t have such a fucked-up two-party system. But if this is genuinely what the majority of my country supports - policies of isolationism, benefits that are nigh-impossible to claim and degrading even if you’re doing everything that’s asked of you, the shutting down of immigration even from refugees, anti-homeless spikes, the selling off of council housing without building of new homes so that people in dire straits have nowhere to go… 

And sure, “but it’s not like people vote for all that! And people can be lied to! And you’re not accounting for propaganda’s influence! And people think the Tories are genuinely helping!” 

You know what I get from most Tories I know? “But money doesn’t magically come from nowhere.” Quite true. But weirdly, they’re too busy frothing at the mouth about “benefit scammers” and “halal meat terrorism” or “but my business will be affected!” to worry about tax evasion from companies like Amazon and Google, and tax-raising is “always a bad thing and taking your hard-earned money from you.” So where do they get the money from?

All it really means is that Tories are quite all right with denying money and resources to people so they and theirs can get it. All it really means is that Tories saw Grenfell and still thought voting pro-austerity was a conscionable decision. It’s always taken from “them” - the homeless, single mothers, ungrateful unions, ungrateful miners, ungrateful teachers, ungrateful junior doctors, immigrants, Muslims, the “not-really-disabled,” pretentious artists, LGBT people, “Zionists,” pick the flavour of the month, it’s always someone they don’t understand or give a shit about  - because “they” are bad and frauds and will destroy our country. Ask a Tory about this, and watch them shift uncomfortably and talk about “necessary tightening of the belt” and “the immigration crisis” and “the ringfenced NHS” (oh, aye, it is, but extending medicine patents and privatising it out from under us aren’t officially making spending cuts, and Tories just love loopholes) and try to avoid your point.

The best case scenario is that people voting are too fucking stupid to question right-wing propaganda that plays right into their prejudices, and the left are either being suppressed or not fucking turning up. The worst is that this result is pretty true to life. And if all that’s what the majority of my country stands for - if that’s what they think is a necessary evil, if they think others don’t deserve basic rights and humanity -

Then you're no friend of mine.

And that's before we get onto the horrific racism, ableism, anti-Semitism and classism. People are going to die. People are going to be deported. People are going to be attacked.

You all saw a man who hid in a fridge to avoid giving answers to a journalist, and decided ‘Yes.’ This man who is afraid to stand up to scrutiny from the BBC and ITV is the perfect man to stand up to the leaders in the EU to get the best deal from Brexit. The perfect man to stand up to Putin, Trump, Xi, and more, and get fair, bilateral trade deals with them

You saw a man who said racist thing after sexist thing after racist thing that I don’t wish to repeat here, refused to apologise, and decided that he was the man to heal the deepening divide we face

You saw a man who, as mayor of London, wasted taxpayer money on a Garden Bridge that was never built, a Thames Estuary airport that never got approved, a cable car that never made a profit, and water cannons that never worked, and you thought that this was the perfect man to be in charge of our economy. A man who boasted not of fighting for the people, but that no-one fought for the bankers as much as he did during the financial crash, and thought he was looking out for you

You saw a man who, as a journalist, was sacked for making up a quotes, and even after failing upwards into other journalism jobs, was well known for lying to the public, and you decided that he’d surely be telling you the truth this time

You saw a party, who, during their time in power, have seen the national debt triple, have forced huge cuts to emergency services leading to an increase in crime, an underfunding crisis for the NHS, and lives put at risk from fire with an inability to remove Grenfell style cladding like promised. A party whose time in power has seen a massive increase in the number of children in poverty, the number of people in at-work poverty, the number of people forced to use foodbanks. And you thought that they cared about you. That they were the party for you

Ultimately you looked at a party of cold, out of touch elites who would claim to deliver on a pipe dream, at a cost of devastating our nation, and would gleefully tear apart our NHS, sell arms to worsen the Yemen humanitarian crisis, would happily let you die if doing so was profitable to them. You looked at them, and the racist, sexist, lying, incompetent bigot they chose to lead them. And you decided that they were what you wanted for your, and our, future.

So congratulations