The riots in London (and elsewhere in the UK) this week have presented us with a highly uncomfortable truth. A large proportion of our youth are willing, given the opportunity, to commit crime on an unprecedented scale. Faced with a police force unwilling or unable to stop them, they will rampage through their own communities, destroying everything that friends and neighbours have worked hard to build up.
These have been crimes perpetrated almost exclusively by apparently feral youths. Worse still, the victims have been those who should bear the least blame and most credit in these communities. The victims are honest and hardworking, providing important jobs and services where few of either exist. Many of them have risked a great deal to start businesses in difficult areas in the hope of a better future. That these people should have that hope trampled on for ephemeral consumer goods or the momentary high of a thieved bottle of vodka disturbs us all. Their dispassionate willingness to ruin livelihoods chills the blood of those anxiously watching through their own windows, praying the mob does not come for them. The victims were not bankers claiming massive bonuses while presiding over huge losses or politicians fiddling expenses. Neither were these attacks directed at the notoriously trigger-happy police officers of SO19, whatever the rights or wrongs of Mark Duggan's death may be.
All this has contributed to calls for a brand of policing more reminiscent of Cairo or Tehran than London; it has become fashionable, among people as well as politicians, to denounce the rioters as "mindless" and "purely criminal". Meanwhile, some on the left have bent over backwards to justify the looting. At one stage, the Guardian even quoted an historian describing the looting as "a political act". Both of these perspectives misread the truth of the situation.
For years, urban communities across the country have struggled with crime, poverty and drug use. They have been left behind by an economy that has disproportionately rewarded the richest whilst leaving the rest to pick up the scraps. At the same time, the inexorable march of technology has beamed the wealth of the rich into the front rooms of the poor. Quality of life is measured by the clothes you wear, TV's you own and money you can spend above all else.
Politicians have sought to seize the centre ground with policies that appeal to the middle classes. They have rewarded home ownership while shrouding the failure of inner-city education in the cloak of inflated exam results. Drug policies have incarcerated parents in need of treatment, leaving children without role models and resentful of the state. Our adoption laws force willing parents to wait while channelling desperate children into an overstretched care system that abuses and dehumanises them. Too many youth and mental health workers have been dismissed as unnecessary ancillaries rather than key components of the fabric of society.
All of this has served to create a group with a smaller stake in society than any since before the First World War. Children grow up in areas bereft of opportunities in families where few have worked in years. The unchecked march of drug abuse (and pathetically dogmatic response to it) has created a huge number of teenagers for whom law-breaking is the norm. In this context, should we really be surprised that, convinced that the police won't intervene, they go on the rampage?
At the same time, parents seem to have abrogated their responsibilities on a scale hitherto unimagined. The suggestion that perhaps they should have control of their children has too often been greeted with a shrug and a gesture at how few services the state provides for young people. The state has convinced too many people that raising children is its responsibility and not theirs. This has led them to abandon their responsibilities and leave their children to find entertainment on the street. Our benefits system rewards bad choices by funnelling money to teenage mothers and pushing the long-term unemployed onto incapacity benefit. Too often entering the workforce is a foolishly uneconomic decision. For those who do seek work criminal records, drug use and a lack of education has probably permanently excluded them from employment. The only way out exists through crime and many are accustomed to criminality at a young age by their peers and older siblings.
As a result, there is now a group that has little stake in society and no hope of establishing one. They grow up knowing that when the opportunity to profit through crime appears, it should be taken and over the last few days, a myriad of opportunities have opened up in front of them.
These communities have been ignored by politicians of all stripes - Labour because they will vote for nobody else, so why bother? and Conservatives for the same reason. Politicians have hid from the problems - they are too many and too difficult - and left communities disenfranchised and disenchanted.
This is part of the reason why we had riots and looting in London this week. A group of people who society had tried to ignore were given an opportunity and took it. That is an explanation, but it is not an excuse. After Saturday, people looted because they thought they could get away with it and they wanted to. We must not forget the livelihoods they willingly and knowingly destroyed. Nor must we forget the people made to feel unsafe in their own homes, afraid that their street would be next. We must not forget that these criminals were callous and destroyed the very communities they lived in.
We must think carefully about how we address the reasons why they are in a position where looting makes sense; but we must not lose sight of the fact that they chose to loot because they thought nobody would stop them or punish them. They must be proved wrong.
These have been crimes perpetrated almost exclusively by apparently feral youths. Worse still, the victims have been those who should bear the least blame and most credit in these communities. The victims are honest and hardworking, providing important jobs and services where few of either exist. Many of them have risked a great deal to start businesses in difficult areas in the hope of a better future. That these people should have that hope trampled on for ephemeral consumer goods or the momentary high of a thieved bottle of vodka disturbs us all. Their dispassionate willingness to ruin livelihoods chills the blood of those anxiously watching through their own windows, praying the mob does not come for them. The victims were not bankers claiming massive bonuses while presiding over huge losses or politicians fiddling expenses. Neither were these attacks directed at the notoriously trigger-happy police officers of SO19, whatever the rights or wrongs of Mark Duggan's death may be.
All this has contributed to calls for a brand of policing more reminiscent of Cairo or Tehran than London; it has become fashionable, among people as well as politicians, to denounce the rioters as "mindless" and "purely criminal". Meanwhile, some on the left have bent over backwards to justify the looting. At one stage, the Guardian even quoted an historian describing the looting as "a political act". Both of these perspectives misread the truth of the situation.
For years, urban communities across the country have struggled with crime, poverty and drug use. They have been left behind by an economy that has disproportionately rewarded the richest whilst leaving the rest to pick up the scraps. At the same time, the inexorable march of technology has beamed the wealth of the rich into the front rooms of the poor. Quality of life is measured by the clothes you wear, TV's you own and money you can spend above all else.
Politicians have sought to seize the centre ground with policies that appeal to the middle classes. They have rewarded home ownership while shrouding the failure of inner-city education in the cloak of inflated exam results. Drug policies have incarcerated parents in need of treatment, leaving children without role models and resentful of the state. Our adoption laws force willing parents to wait while channelling desperate children into an overstretched care system that abuses and dehumanises them. Too many youth and mental health workers have been dismissed as unnecessary ancillaries rather than key components of the fabric of society.
All of this has served to create a group with a smaller stake in society than any since before the First World War. Children grow up in areas bereft of opportunities in families where few have worked in years. The unchecked march of drug abuse (and pathetically dogmatic response to it) has created a huge number of teenagers for whom law-breaking is the norm. In this context, should we really be surprised that, convinced that the police won't intervene, they go on the rampage?
At the same time, parents seem to have abrogated their responsibilities on a scale hitherto unimagined. The suggestion that perhaps they should have control of their children has too often been greeted with a shrug and a gesture at how few services the state provides for young people. The state has convinced too many people that raising children is its responsibility and not theirs. This has led them to abandon their responsibilities and leave their children to find entertainment on the street. Our benefits system rewards bad choices by funnelling money to teenage mothers and pushing the long-term unemployed onto incapacity benefit. Too often entering the workforce is a foolishly uneconomic decision. For those who do seek work criminal records, drug use and a lack of education has probably permanently excluded them from employment. The only way out exists through crime and many are accustomed to criminality at a young age by their peers and older siblings.
As a result, there is now a group that has little stake in society and no hope of establishing one. They grow up knowing that when the opportunity to profit through crime appears, it should be taken and over the last few days, a myriad of opportunities have opened up in front of them.
These communities have been ignored by politicians of all stripes - Labour because they will vote for nobody else, so why bother? and Conservatives for the same reason. Politicians have hid from the problems - they are too many and too difficult - and left communities disenfranchised and disenchanted.
This is part of the reason why we had riots and looting in London this week. A group of people who society had tried to ignore were given an opportunity and took it. That is an explanation, but it is not an excuse. After Saturday, people looted because they thought they could get away with it and they wanted to. We must not forget the livelihoods they willingly and knowingly destroyed. Nor must we forget the people made to feel unsafe in their own homes, afraid that their street would be next. We must not forget that these criminals were callous and destroyed the very communities they lived in.
We must think carefully about how we address the reasons why they are in a position where looting makes sense; but we must not lose sight of the fact that they chose to loot because they thought nobody would stop them or punish them. They must be proved wrong.
On one hand, applying a technocratic (or 'econocratic', if you will) brush, it's arguably a case of shifting the incentives in the socio-economic system to nudge behaviour in a direction that we deem more civilised. I think this approach should have a place in any party's vision of how they can alter their statecraft to achieve a more 'progressive' politics in the immediate aftermath.
ReplyDeleteHowever, on the other, I feel that there is a more fundamental moral imperative that we see glimpses of when extricating the carnage on the past few days: a reappraisal of liberal conceptions of legitimate actions.
Our assumptions of what is 'civilised' or 'rational' behaviour are ultimately predicated upon notions of reciprocity and stake-holding; that's why we usually judge them acceptable to break at certain points in time, such as when suffering criminal and/or threatening behaviour, emotional distress and, on a larger scale, war. When we consider our own moral evaluations of this question of legitimacy, we almost always do so with a kind of psychological short-hand, resting upon temporally and spatially personal criteria. Rarely do we seek to see beyond the frontiers of our own experience to test our 'rational' theses. Yet, though imperfect for reasons we both know, I think that the classical Hegelian refrain of "what is rational is actual and what is actual is rational" hints at a lesson that needs to be learnt. To a social underclass with obscured world-views fostered under privated living conditions, with only a statistical anomaly to rely on for access to the wealth that is abundant elsewhere, the rational schema is likely to be dissimilar to the middle-classes.
Clearly this wasn't a political action in the sense of formal politics, but the implicit socio-political underbelly of the riots is a clear as crystal. Our reactions to property destruction and distress have been as severe as to constitute large numbers of influential people calling for incredible changes to our statutory arrangements and police protocol in terms of the way we treat our citizens. Perhaps this vehemence can evoke echoes of understanding into how decades of being excluded from sharing in unprecedented and uniquely abundant wealth by the lottery of birth can call into question the prevailing 'civility' and 'rationality' of our social epoch.