When the riots in England that astonished the world
(but not me) broke out, I happened to be in Brazil. Thanks to the demand for my
opinion from around the world – but not from England – I am glad to say that I
benefited economically more from the riots than the most assiduous looter. It
is truly an ill-wind that blows nobody any good.
After the riots were over, the government appointed a
commission to enquire into their causes. The members of this commission were
appointed by all three major political parties, and it required no great powers
of prediction to know what they would find: lack of opportunity,
dissatisfaction with the police, bla-bla-bla.
Official enquiries these days do not impress me, certainly not by comparison with those of our Victorian forefathers. No one who reads the Blue Books of Victorian Britain, for example, can fail to be impressed by the sheer intellectual honesty of them, their complete absence of any attempt to disguise an often appalling reality by means of euphemistic language, and their diligence in collecting the most disturbing information. (Marx himself paid tribute to the compilers of these reports.)
I was once asked to join an enquiry myself. It was
into an unusual spate of disasters in a hospital. It was clear to me that,
although they had all been caused differently, there was an underlying unity to
them: they were all caused by the laziness or stupidity of the staff, or both.
By the time the report was written, however (and not by me), my findings were
so wrapped in opaque verbiage that they were quite invisible. You could have
read the report without realising that the staff of the hospital had been lazy
and stupid; in fact, the report would have left you none the wiser as to what
had actually happened, and therefore what to do to ensure that it never
happened again. The purpose of the report was not, as I had naively supposed,
to find the truth and express it clearly, but to deflect curiosity and incisive
criticism in which it might have resulted if translated into plain language.
I was also once asked by the editor of a magazine to
read, and then write commentary on, three government reports – one into the
origin of a war, one into the origins of some riots (minor by comparison with
those of 2011), and one into an outbreak of hysteria about child abuse in a
certain corner of England. The findings were more or less interchangeable,
though you might have supposed that the three episodes were very different. The
cause of all human ills, it seemed, was failure to communicate: and so I began
to see what E. M. Forster meant when he finished Howard’s End with the
enigmatic command ‘Only connect.’ Here was a congenial message for the Third
Age – that of psychobabble. If only we connected, that is to say communicated,
all would be well, all conflicts resolved. If only the lion would talk to the
lamb (and vice versa), they could lie down together; carnivores would
henceforth nibble grass.
This is a good moment to return to our sheep (as the
French say): or perhaps I should say to our rioters. The commission, according
to the headlines in the Guardian newspaper, found that ‘people needed a stake
in society:’ with the implication that they did not at present have one.
The mental world in which the commission existed was
one in which people have a grievance if they think they have one; and
furthermore that the grievance about which they feel aggrieved must be
precisely what they say it is, failure by others to accept which would be yet
another legitimate cause of grievance.
In this mental world, anger and outrage are
self-justifying and indeed evidence in themselves of irreproachable
righteousness, the main if not the only source of moral authority. I remember a
little article in the same newspaper a few years ago about the practice of
‘outing,’ that is to say the revelation by homosexual activists of the closet
homosexuality of certain public figures, whether or not those figures
themselves wanted this known. In other words, the activists believed that the
public figures involved had no right to privacy but rather had an inalienable
duty to bare their souls in public.
The article was written in a for-and-against fashion,
giving both sides a fair opportunity to put their case. And the case for the
practice was that it allowed people to express their anger, whose object was
not specified. In other words it was their anger which made them and their
actions morally right; presumably, therefore, the angrier they, or anyone else,
felt, the more rightful they became. This does not seem to me to be a recipe
for psychic, let alone, social, harmony, but rather for a permanent Balkan war
of the soul.
In line with the notion that people need ‘a stake in
society’ in order to refrain from breaking shop windows and taking what they
think they have been wrongfully denied (interestingly, the bookshop was the
only shop in a very badly looted commercial street that went completely
unscathed during the riots), a man called Earl Jenkins – ‘who was one of up to
60 youth workers who went on to the streets of Toxteth [a poor area of
Liverpool] during the disturbances to persuade youngsters not to get involved’
– was reported in the Guardian to have said, ‘If you’ve got nothing to lose,
you’ll do what you can to survive, won’t you?’
There was no comment in the newspaper on the deep
contradiction in the attitude of Earl Jenkins (let us leave aside the question
of how many ‘youth workers’ in Toxteth are needed to prevent a riot there). For
if it is true that the riots were a survival mechanism, why was Earl Jenknis
trying to persuade young people not to join in? Did he not want them to
survive? Suffice it to say that the objects looted during the riots were not
such as people on the verge of famine, or who fear that famine is around the
corner, might be expected to loot. They were, rather, the things that spoilt
children might be expected to want for their birthday.
The term ‘If you’ve got nothing to lose’ in this
context is ambiguous. It might mean such penury, such drastic poverty, that you
possessed nothing that could have been removed from you. But it clearly cannot
mean this, since all the rioters were at liberty, and were clothed, fed,
housed, educated (if unsuccessfully), provided with medical care, and given at
least a small income, much of which could, in theory at any rate, be removed
from them. They could be made homeless; their central heating could be turned
off; they could go hungry and literally penniless, made to wear rags; their
telephones could be taken from them; they could be deprived of their liberty
and even enslaved.
But none of this was going to happen to them and they
knew it perfectly well; so in this sense it was indeed true that they had
nothing to lose. One of the commissioners appointed to enquire into the riots
actually put it succinctly:
When people don’t feel they have a reason to stay out
of trouble, the consequences for communities can be devastating...
But the reason they ‘don’t feel a reason to stay out
of trouble’ is not because they have nothing to lose in the sense of being so
deeply impoverished that they have nothing removable from them, it is because
they have nothing to lose because they know that whatever they have will never
be removed from them, under any circumstances whatever.
Here it is instructive to look at the statistics for
house burglary in England and Wales. 750-800,000 such burglaries were known to
the police in 2006; the police found the burglars in about 66,000 cases. (The
figures for the number of burglaries are underestimated, while those for the
numbers of burglaries solved are overestimated, both for technical reasons not
necessary to go into, and that we can for the sake of argument ignore.) In that
year, just over 6000 burglars received prison sentences. In other words, even
if caught, a burglar in England and Wales is not likely to go to prison; but he
is even less likely to be caught in the first place. In this sense, then,
criminals do indeed have nothing to lose, and possibly much to gain by
criminality.
The mystery, then, is not that there should have been
riots, but that for most of the time there are no riots. This is a tribute to
the inherent goodness, or perhaps to the laziness and cowardice, of man.
The commission’s report recommended that ‘every child
should be able to read and write at an age-appropriate level by the time they
leave primary and then secondary school.’ Amen to that rather unambitious goal;
but asking the question as to why 20 per cent of British youth leave school
unable to read and write at an adult level after eleven years of compulsory
attendance, and at a cost to the taxpayer of $80-90,000 per head, might have
led the commission to a more interesting train of thought about the nature of
the British state. How has it achieved this miraculous combination of expense
with total failure?
When the commission referred to the ‘lack of
opportunities for young people,’ it might usefully have asked why it was that
Britain had had high levels of youth unemployment for many years while
simultaneously importing very large numbers of young people from abroad to
perform unskilled work. This is an awkward question to ask because it could so
easily inflame insensate xenophobia, but it is nevertheless an important one
that I have never seen asked in the public prints. By not asking it, we avoid
the corollary questions of what social and economic policies have led to this
anomaly. And these questions in turn might undermine our confidence in the
presumptions of our social and economic policies of the last three quarters of
a century. Better, then, not to notice the anomaly, let alone try to think
about how it has arisen, and to pretend, rather, that more of the same, perhaps
slightly better-refined or targeted (more training for youth workers in
Toxteth, for example), will solve our problems.
Some of the recommendations of the commission make the
heart sink. It wants children to be protected from excessive marketing, which
they believe is an important cause of their indiscriminate materialism and
ascription of undue importance to the possession of expensive brands of goods.
And in order that they should be thus protected, it recommends the appointment
of ‘an independent champion to manage a dialogue between government and big
brands’ – no doubt at a big salary, with a staff of underlings. There is no
situation that our new Nomenklatura class cannot turn to its advantage; and no
end to the number of bureaucracies it can create in order to employ itself.
It is true, however, that a combination of consumerism
and utter economic dependence on the state is, like the lot of the policeman,
not a happy one. The dependence is (admittedly at some remove) a corollary of
the theory of entitlement, and a belief in one’s own entitlement is a belief as
destructive of the human personality as it is possible to envisage. It
precludes gratitude for what one has, encourages resentment over what one does
not have, and discourages personal effort except to obtain things at other
people’s expense. At the same time consumerism, by offering the mirage of
personal fulfilment through the possession of trifles, lends an urgency to
possession that it might not otherwise have, thus adding to or catalysing to
the resentments of entitlement. I might add that in a world in which income is
in essence pocket money (everything else having been taken care of, albeit at a
level less than that desired) consumer choice becomes the only choice that is
ever exercised, and thus the model for the whole of human life.
The rioters, then, were (and still are, of course)
victims, not of injustice or poverty, but of bad ideas and a rotten culture
that, alas, have become truly their own. And the first idea they ought to be
disabused of is that there is someone who is either able or willing to come to
their rescue.
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