We may not like it, but this is England

By Patty Williams 

Like many people in this country I have been struck by the images of violence, looting and destruction from London and other cities across England. I have watched in disbelief at the aggression and greed apparently driving these people as they pursue some sort of violent self-gratification via the acquisition of consumer goods through looting. I have watched with sadness, at the frightening personal accounts of people running from their homes in terror with nothing but the clothes they were wearing in order to save their lives, because their residences were set on fire by the mob. And I have watched the images of gangs congregated in the local town centres apparently hell-bent on causing serious damage.  

I cannot feel anything but sympathy as long standing and small family businesses went up in smoke whilst their owners looked on in horror. I cannot approve or agree with violent crowds attacking passers by and journalists reporting from the scene.

No one with any sense condones these acts – I certainly don’t agree with livelihoods being smashed, jobs being lost, buildings set on fire, violent behaviour, and/or looting for kicks. Conversely, I also know that most people with good steady jobs, decent housing, a good education, and with a sense of belonging wouldn’t be looting just for fun. How mindless is mindless?

Margaret Thatcher told us ‘there was no such a thing as society’, what was ours, was ours and we shouldn’t be interested in anyone else. Our effort, our property and our money, ‘greed is good’. The macroeconomic policy was about privatisation of industries in public ownership. The message that was sent out was that private is best, so it doesn’t take a genius to workout that in that context, public/collective is bad!

Taxation policy became overly regressive aimed at helping only one group in society: the very rich.  This process also began to erode our common bonds as a nation. Gated communities began to surface all over the country and the wholesale import of neoliberal thinking into economic policy and social policy was in full flow – carrots for the powerful and sticks for the weak. In less than a decade we moved away from the European post-war consensus towards the American model. We began to jail more people than ever before and hasher punishments became the norm, and at the same time, important social programmes and the welfare state began to be dismantled. for ideological reasons.

What began under Thatcher and progressed under Major was finally consolidated under Blair and Brown and it's now being pursued with true neoliberal zeal by the Coalition - and the result? In many key areas the inequality gap in the UK today is a bad as it was in the 1920’s; we have had painful decreases in actual take-home pay, and increases in regressive taxes like VAT have hit most people on average incomes and lower wages very hard. Our children go to university and acquire huge debts and then have little or no prospect of getting a decent job at the end of it, and most of us simply struggle to make ends meet. If we have jobs, we are in constant fear that we may lose them and if we are unemployed, we despair at the lack of opportunities. In the meantime, our wealthy politicians take pleasure in telling us, (without a hint of irony) that 'we are all in this together’. The bankers that created the huge financial crisis that has caused so much pain around the world continue on regardless – and no one from the banking industry has been imprisoned for the massive damage they caused to the world’s economy and to the lives of millions of people. Perhaps pointing our that looting is not such a  problem, if you loot on an industrial scale!

Against this backdrop our politicians are only talking to the Daily Mail brigade which cannot not see beyond the same old mixture of low taxation, cuts in services/benefits, and hash punishments for law breakers. For them, the Macpherson effect on policing was the problem, ‘political correctness was preventing our police from tackling the thugs’. Equally, for the sort of opinion the Mail, the Sun, and the Express represent there is despair at the fact that in England we still don’t call the army for these sorts of public disturbances. They also disapprove of the fact that, (until now) apart from in Northern Ireland we didn’t have a policy to use water cannons and rubber bullets on the streets of our cities. Furthermore, the more extreme sections of that opinion are also calling for the introduction of a UK-wide shoot to kill the looter type policy - essentially the tougher and the more punitive the better. They are the British version of the Tea Party – the lunatic tendency of anything from crime and taxation to multiculturalism, the environment and Human Rights. This section of society, which keeps pushing for more and more draconian policies, appear to ignore the fact that as in the USA, things don’t improve with these sort of  policies – in fact they only get worse. But these people do have a great influence and continue to push and receive concessions from our politicians.  A good example was the fact that yesterday the PM edged on the side on caution and consensual policing, but overnight he changed his position and agreed to the use of water cannons and hard policing tactics – and this despite the fact that not even the police chiefs want to move away from consensual policing and do not feel they need these tools to keep order on our streets.

It has become all about knee-jerk reactions, ratings and quick public opinion polls – policies are being made on the hoof and driven by fear, 24 hour news coverage and calls for instant solutions. We wouldn’t want to be pressed to make important decisions in a hurry but that doesn’t stop many in the media from calling for government to act in haste and without all the facts.

At the same time, what can we look forward to, when our politicians do not propose anything different to address our problems? The vast majority of us will just carry on angry, neglected, and depressed, but some people will just lose it again in a thuggish kind of way, while others will again turn into thuggish vigilantes to ‘protect’ their communities. So our communities will become more alienated from each other and sooner rather than later, accompanied by a hasher economic climate, we will also see a significant rise in extremism and even more tensions and despair.

So whilst on the surface all of this criminality is not ‘political’ the solutions as well as the challenges are economic and political. We also have conveniently forgotten that a long time ago our political elites asked us to trade prudence, shared burdens and shared values, for stocks & shares, privatisation, low taxation, bling, banker’s bonuses, massive personal debt, individualism, consumerism and to hell with everyone else. 'Respect' was sold to us neatly packaged and with a price-tag, so  we cannot be surprised when many look for it in a shop. So when the economy was growing and jobs were plentiful we managed to keep the lid on simmering tensions, but now that the economy has hit the buffers, and in the absence of alternative political leadership, or a modern Martin Luther King and a March for Jobs and Freedom, many turned to their new idol: consumer goods.

The reality is that without deep socio-economic solutions to address out current 'Giant Evils' the good, the bad and the very ugly, will soon be out on our streets again. People do not live in a vacuum. We cannot truly expect that people that have been excluded and do not feel part of society, show care and concern for it. The hope is that as in the times of The Beveridge Report, we don’t need a major war for our political elites to see sense and deliver social justice and a new order for the 21st Century.

“The rich grind the poor into abjectness & then complain that they are abject!" Shelley


This post was originally published 10/08/2011 and edited  (minor changes) 16/08/2011