1958

The Annual Notting Hill Riot (Er … Carnival) Strikes Again In London

John Derbyshire

09/02/2022

Earlier (2018): The Annually Predictable Catastrophe Of London’s Notting Hill Carnival — And A Related Anniversary

If you think it’s only American blacks who can’t get together for a fun event without it descending into wanton violence, you don’t know about the Notting Hill Carnival.

This is a Caribbean street festival held over a two-day period, a Sunday and Monday, at the end of August in Notting Hill, a district in West-Central London. The district is pretty well gentrified now. A house with a garden will cost you around five million dollars; a one-bedroom apartment goes for eight hundred thou to over a million.

Back in the mid-20th century, though, Notting Hill was kind of slummy. Blacks from the Caribbean settled there in quantity, and Britain’s first big race riot happened in Notting Hill in 1958. It was partly in reaction to the riot that the carnival was started up in the 1960s.

The carnival starts out merrily enough, but soon degenerates to the urban black norm. The gentry types who now inhabit Notting Hill board up their windows and leave town for the duration. Local stores and businesses all close. The police hate the event. They keep demanding that it be relocated to one of London’s spacious parks where the carnival-goers would be easier to control, but the municipal authorities are terrified of being called racist, so nothing gets done.

This year’s Notting Hill Carnival was held last weekend. The butcher’s bill: one killed, six others stabbed but survived, 209 celebrants were arrested and 74 police officers were assaulted.

Enough is enough. There must be a permanent ban on this violent celebration of anti-social behaviour and crime. The police have more important things to do than to have to waste resources on this dreadful event. https://t.co/LIrp011nPr

— Voice of Reason (@brexitblog_info) August 30, 2022

I expected to see that one fatality described as “an aspiring rapper.” No: in the news reports he was an actual rapper, although The Independent qualified it somewhat to “rising star rapper.” The name of the deceased was Takayo Nembhard. He was 21 years old.

Friends of the murdered rapper Takayo Nembhard, known as TKorStretch, paid an emotional tribute at the crime scene while forensics continued the search for evidence and local residents shared their reactions. pic.twitter.com/Zx7IRrlb9V

— Radio News Hub (@radionewshub) August 31, 2022

You might think that after that 1958 riot, and perhaps looking across at the situation in the USA, you might think the Brits would have learned something, but they didn’t.

In the matter of race, nobody ever learns anything. To learn something you’d have to notice things; and as our own Steve Sailer has taught us, noticing things is bad.

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