6 Comments on The Prime Minister’s challenge

Ian McGimpsey on Tue, 9th Aug 2011 7:37 am


I think May and Cameron should leave riot cleanup well alone. The Coalition, indeed mainstream political leadership in general, has shown itself incapable of moving beyond ‘mindless thugs’ rhetoric to any kind of reflection on what is going on. If they turn up at the cleanup trying to insulate their politics from being held to account for this mess with that kind of language, I for one will be tempted walk away.

Carl Allen on Tue, 9th Aug 2011 10:56 am


It is the relationship between what is unaccceptable and what is regrettable that intrigues … as seen from different viewpoints.

Neil McNaughton on Tue, 9th Aug 2011 4:43 pm


I want to strike a slightly optimistic note on all this.

Feral youths of the kind we are now seeing have existed for some time. In the past they have been largely engaged in smaller scale criminality – hassling people, shoplifting, drugs, car crime, gang fighting, vanadalism etc. because this has been endemic but relatively low level we have been able, not exactly to ignore it, but to treat it as containable.

The difference here, of course, is that they have gathered in large, semi- organised groups and have engaged in mass actions, rather than individual or small group crime. Why I am trying to look on the bright side is that this will force us, as a society, to confront the issue of feral youth. So, something meaningful may well at last result.

Incidentally, appeals to ‘parents’ are a complete waste of time. Most of these youths and a few girls, will be from the care system, will have no parents effectievly, or will have parenst who are inadequate at best, leading chaotic lives at worst. These rioters and looters are on the streets BECAUSE there is no family in operation.

Tom Brookes on Wed, 10th Aug 2011 1:23 am


Interesting reading as usual Matthew.
I wonder if you’ve come across this website – Reflections on a Revolution, it’s posts from some remarkable people at the heart of the vast Indignados movements in Puerta del Sol & Syntagma Square. I’ve seen very little about what’s happening there in the UK media, it makes for a fascinating perspective on these huge peaceful protests for a better social system. There’s some excellent pieces on the future of capitalism and the effects of austerity on people across Europe.
This is particularly relevant; it’s called – London calling: a haunting glimpse into our future – http://roarmag.org/2011/08/london-calling-a-haunting-glimpse-into-our-future/

It’s an interesting take on the contributing factors and rationale of the perpetrators, but more interesting – and depressing – is how predictable this all was. Inequality breeds this sort of thing, I thought everyone had read The Spirit Level by now, but the cabinet’s copy is evidently being used as a paperweight.

Livy on Wed, 10th Aug 2011 6:55 pm


For amidst the sad and frightening news there is also some hope (and a more positive example of the role of social media). As I write rising trends on Twitter include #reclaimLondon and #riotcleanup as community activists pledge to meet in the morning to help clear up after the riots.

This is also doing the rounds and donations are coming in fast :

http://www.haringey.gov.uk/index/news_and_events/latest_news/centre.htm

I’ll mention something else. Perhaps not the worst aspect of these riots by a long long way, but there was something curiously disheartening about the public response to this on Tuesday evening that hasn’t been widely reported on. Either because it wasn’t as visibly emotive as most of the politically extreme outbursts, or because a majority of people actually behaved in the same way regardless of how reactionary their views were and where they found themselves on the spectrum. Or maybe it just wasn’t newsworthy and I’m full of it.

The streets were empty.

People stayed in at night and spoke fearfully in hush tones during the day. In the evening, there was absolutely nobody in what are usually very busy areas. Even Tesco put a 50 per cent discount on all their condoms, probably working under the assumption that people wouldn’t leave their homes in the evening. And there you have one of the few products that already experiences high sales during recessions.

Even my Thai Boxing gym over in Limehouse, East London was virtually empty, with more than two thirds of the regular guys not even showing up. Thai Boxers, for Christ’s sake.

The minute we change our behaviour in the face of domestic terrorism we allow ourselves to identify with and be absorbed by the horror, rather than recognise and comprehend it. The minute we alter our routines or avoid whole areas of our cities out of fear, we cede these people yet another victory by giving giving into psychological intimidation.

We have to learn that shutting ourselves away and quietly shifting between extremes by indignantly demanding instant solutions from political leaders who are in no position to provide them is no longer a viable way for us to live together or respond to crises.

I’ll die in my footsteps, thanks.

Livy

Edward Harkins on Thu, 11th Aug 2011 7:08 pm


Matthew, there are huge challenges here for the fellowship of the RSA and other like-minded civic institutions to address and assert themselves on.

You rightly say that ‘as the economic crisis moves into another frightening level the simple fact is that it doesn’t feel’ to the people at the bottom that, ‘we are all in this together’.

But this is not restricted to ‘those at the bottom’ – many of us in the ‘squeezed middle’ look askance at the seriously wealthy Osborne and his Cabinet of millionaires and wonder how on earth they can begin to understand where it is that the rest of us ‘are in’. One does not have to be an old-style class-jealous socialist to take that view.

The sense for many of us that we are definitely not, in the U.K., ‘in it together’, has been growing for possibly some decades now.

Some time ago I read in our regional Sunday newspaper of how the voluntary (unremunerated) member of a local housing association had been prosecuted, and convicted of fraudulent housing benefit claiming. The individual was a long-practicing community activist amongst some of the poorest neighbourhoods in our city. He was the head of a large family with many of what are euphemistically now called ‘challenges’. The media coverage was part of the disgrace and vilification that that individual was subjected to, in addition to legal sentencing.

In the same edition of the newspaper I read of how Lord Mandelson had been brought back into the-then presiding Labour Government. That was despite him having been twice previously disgraced in Government office to the extent that he resigned. After one of his earlier ‘indiscretions’, the Government acquiesced in his appointment as a highly paid senior official in the European Union apparatus.

Many observers might see how these two individuals were so contrastingly dealt with as evidence that we were not ‘all in it together’.

Rioters involved in the recent riots in England’s cities are, legitimately, being pursued with full vigour in the courts and (less legitimately?) being hounded with equal vigour in the popular media. There is, however, a member of the House of Lords whose conviction as an arsonist has not interfered or trammeled his privileged presence in the Lords. Incidentally the act of arson, serious and deliberate, was at a major gathering of politicians and media types at a prestigious hotel for an annual media-political awards giving. There was a real, immediate risk to the life and health and many innocent people.

There are other dubious instances concerning our Good Lords, such as the sometime convicted perjurer who seems as welcome as ever in the gilded corridors of The Lords – his high profile career as a ‘media personality’ and novelist seems, if anything to have benefited from his past doings in the courts.

Many observers might see how miscreants in The Lords and miscreants in the street rioting were so contrastingly dealt with as evidence that we were not ‘all in it together’.

Conventional politics in the U.K. can be argued to have been reduced to the level of unaccountable, Whitehall-centric, managerialism in the service of a (now discredited) system of material wealth creation and concentration, and the erosion of any commonwealth values.

The U.K. taxpayer provided billions upon billions of pounds sterling to save a busted private sector financial system. Now they find that their public services are to be savaged and their households’ wealth and income to be hard-pressed to pay for this rescue of a dissolute sector. Subsequently, they must bear witness to rapacious, unconscionable bank and financial services sector executives continuing with the rapacious bonus culture – and just for good measure they will view those horrendously ill-judged, expensive, ever-running, TV advertisements with banking staff seemingly playing at being TV stations or radio broadcasters or whatever.

Many hard-pressed U.K. taxpayers (including redundant front line bank employees) might look on all that and very much feel that we are not all ‘in it together’.

From our vantage point in Scotland, like many of those in the English regions and in Wales, we look on at London’s incestuous politico-media-and-wealth elites and their metro-global worldview, and wonder if we really are part of the same nation. We, incidentally, also have at least one UK Government Minister in the shape of Greg Clark who doesn’t seem to know the difference between ‘England’ and ‘Britain’ (see Huffington Post).

The recent dark episodes of the News International story stand as evidence to this – a top executive in News International tells a House of Commons Select Committee in a public hearing that the company had paid policemen for information (a corrupt act in itself). The result? Nothing… absolutely nothing. No action by that Select Committee, no action by the public prosecutor, the police, the various statutory and self regulatory bodies and, of course, no action by the company owners or institutional investors.

Going by what we now know about the participants in the News International garden parties etc. it seems that in the metro-London elites, just about everyone ‘knew’ but no one wished, or dared, to ‘do anything about anything.’

What passes for the elites and decision-makers in U.K. society, at almost every level and in every dimension, show no or little care for notions of social cohesion, fraternity, common cause or non-monetary values. It all reminds me of Orwell’s concept of Britain (or was it ‘England’?) being at heart a decent and civilised old family that had fallen under the control of the ‘bad uns’ in the family.

We, in the U.K. do not seem to all be ‘in it together’. Perhaps the mindless, pointless and profoundly anti-social behavior of the recent riots is one symptom of the consequent decay and breakdown in the order of things.

I can only repeat that there are huge challenges here for the fellowship of the RSA and other like minded civic institutions to address and assert themselves on.

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