Violence in London

Everyone and his brother has contributed to the debate on the recent riots in London and various other parts of Britain, so what can I add?  Perhaps after spending three weeks in London, I might have some objective observations to make, as a stranger to the town.

The first thing is to register the fact that 99% of my interactions with people dealing with the public (shop assistants, restaurant staff and receptionists of various kinds) involve people whose accents indicate they were not born in Britain.  Before the Guardianistas and Independentes give their knee-jerk accusation of racism on reading that remark, let me point out that it is simply a fact.  Is it also going to be considered racist to examine the implications of this fact?

The obvious first implication is that any of the rioters and looters who are unemployed and living on benefits could be doing the jobs of these people, and in my innocence I cannot understand why the situation has arisen where they are not doing them. 

The two conventional arguments brought out on these occasions are (a) foreign workers are prepared to accept lower wages and for many British-born people it is more advantageous to live on benefits than to work, and (b) the native population is not educationally qualified for work.

Both of these arguments are nonsense.  The virtually uncontrolled immigration Britain has experienced since the 1950s is the result of an alliance between employers (who wanted low-paid labour to compensate for the inefficiency of their manufacturing processes) and successive labour governments who saw potential voters in the immigrant population.  The result has been to create a kind of 'sandwich' society consisting of the well-off sitting on top of a large layer of the unemployed/unemployable who are in turn sitting on top of a low-paid temporary or permanent workforce from overseas.

If we paid decent wages for a decent day's work and controlled access to unemployment benefit we would diminish the numbers of the lower two levels and this would have two results: those in work would begin to feel they are participating in society and not that they have a justification for looting it, and those who are bringing their skills from overseas would find that they have to stay home and dedicate their skills to improving the countries they feel the need to move out of.

The educational argument makes me, as an educator, actually angry and not many things do that these days.  In a long career of teaching and teacher-training I have watched standards being eroded and intellectual rigour being corrupted by political correctness.  All of this has been accompanied by ‘grade inflation’ in our school and university examination systems, and the more the educational authorities deny this, the truer it becomes.  If our young people were given an honest education and thorough training they would have no problem in holding down jobs.

All of this brings me to the question that has been of obsessing me during these days of incredible and vicious violence in London and other British cities – why?  We might be able to understand mass robbery from shops if, perhaps, a large section of society were suffering poverty but that is not the case, despite the wailing of NGOs who owe their jobs to creating an image of poverty that only they are capable of alleviating.  What has accompanied the present violence is the deliberate destruction of property, the invasion of private houses and attacks on individuals in the streets.  This is unprecedented; in previous disturbances there has been a racial element but the faces of those being brought to justice after these events show the one area in British society in which multiculturalism seems to have worked.  Also included in this rabble are people who cannot possibly, under any floppy-minded liberal thinking, be considered to be poor.

It will take a long time to find an answer to this question but the automatic responses from the press, following their predictable political lines, are inadequate.  The political right says the situation is the result of the castration of the police force after the report of the Holy Fool Lord Scarman, and the left blames ‘the cuts’ imposed by the new government, conveniently forgetting that these cuts were made necessary by a long period of left-wing government that led the country into extreme levels of debt.

Both are right in their ways, but perhaps not for the reasons they think.  The recent revelations concerning News International have lifted a blanket on various areas of inefficiency and corruption in the Metropolitan Police and anyone who has reported a property theft in Britain during the last 30 years or so will recognise that even outside London conventional policing has disappeared.  Obviously, if a section of society begins to feel the need to disrupt social order the perceived ineffectiveness of the police will only encourage it.  During the recent disturbances they were proved right as we read in the press many reports of groups of police standing watching buildings being burned and doing nothing because of orders they had received.

Right-wing protests against cutting the police force are therefore irrelevant: reducing the numbers of an ineffective organisation will actually be advantageous because it will save money.  Policing in Britain will only become effective after a root-and-branch reform aimed at transforming the police from its present role as an extension of social services to becoming an effective body the main aim of which is enforcing the law and maintaining order.  One step in this direction might be to reform the absurd situation of 52 separate police forces on a tiny island.  If we are looking for savings to be made, the administrative economies resulting from merging the majority of these institutions would be a good place to start.

Left-wing whining about the recent riots (initially called ‘protests’ by the BBC - protests against what?) being a legitimate protest by the underprivileged against a greed-based society is equally ridiculous.  The last Labour government had over a decade to work on the situation of the underprivileged and threw immense amounts of money at social problems and education, to little effect.  One of the reasons that government was ejected from power was that voters realised that this policy was ineffectual, that the greed of bankers was being tolerated as the blackmail price paid for having them stay in London and providing the mainstay of an economy from which industrial production has been largely removed, and that ineffectiveness of border controls meant that large numbers of recent arrivals were putting unsupportable pressure on various social services.

And yet none of this can tell me why, having robbed a shop, young thugs should feel the need to burn it down.  Why they should feel the need to smash down the doors of people in much the same situation as themselves to steal their belongings, nor why they should wish to beat almost to death someone who is arguing against their actions. 

And this really is serious.  If we read the history of civil unrest in Britain, it always has a political or social reason behind it - the events of this weekend do not.

Do I dare to offer an answer?  It may be that the laudable spread of equality of opportunity and of democracy in Britain since World War II has become confused with feelings of equality of possession.  In other words, advertising campaigns tell us that the new Audi sports car is on sale and, by implication, is available to us whoever we are.  If, however, we are an incompetent numbskull working in a low-paid job, or have no job at all, the inconvenient fact of not having the money to pay for the Audi sports car is interpreted as an affront to our equality of possession.  In the often drink-muddled reasoning of our friendly neighbourhood numbskull this is seen as unfair treatment by ‘the system’, a situation which can only be put right by breaking the system’s laws.

Films and television have also created what we might call an ‘equality of violence’ and we are now so saturated with violent images from childhood that violence is seen as a justifiable means of resolving any problem.  Whenever this question arises, the masters of media dismiss it as unprovable, a restriction on the holy right of free speech, etc, etc.  Well, if messages brought to us on the television and cinema screen do not have an effect on the public, why is so much money spent on advertising in those media?  The same executives who say that the hundreds and thousands of violent actions a child will observe on-screen have no effect on his or her attitudes in real life give a very different pitch when they are talking to those they wish to persuade to advertise on those same screens.

As a footnote, I must say that last Friday my Brazilian wife and I were having dinner with friends and she was having to listen to my usual diatribe against violence in Brazil.  By Saturday night I was being sweetly asked about my views on violence in my own country.  Answer have I none.