The Lib-Con
coalition government has been accused of failing to implement many of the
recommendations proposed by the cross-party panel which reported on the August
2011 riots. But it is the broader environment of intervention by the state into
everyday life that was the real root cause of the riots - and that intervention
is increasing.
David Lammy, the Labour MP for Tottenham
in north London, found that the majority of the panel’s 63 recommendations have
not been acted upon. These include providing greater support for families,
tackling youth unemployment and fining schools at which pupils have poor levels
of reading and writing. Eleven recommendations that have been accepted or
implemented, however, including better identification of potential problem families
and measures ‘to help youngsters to cope with the pressures of advertising and
materialism’.
There is no doubt that the 2011 riots
exposed serious faultlines in England’s inner cities, which is why the
government’s re-examination of measures designed to prevent further
disturbances is important. But it is perhaps more important to probe whether
such recommendations are the right ones or whether they could in fact
exacerbate existing problems.
The major problem with the official
analysis of the riots is the assumption that the causes in 2011 were identical
to the causes of the 1981 riots: youth unemployment, poverty and police
harassment. Even those, such as Lammy himself, who started to question New
Labour’s drive to ‘nationalise society’ – the tendency to find state solutions
to informal, social problems - still fall back on poverty as a powerful
determining factor in people’s behaviour.
But there are other causes for the riots
in 2011. Far too often, for example, there has been a steadfast failure to understand
the damage being done to young people by therapeutic norms in the UK education
system. And there has been a refusal to see how extensive state ‘support’ in
poorer communities has sapped the next generation of autonomy, solidarity and a
pioneering spirit. Together, such recent policies have left a significant
number of young people bereft of the confidence and self-reliance traditionally
associated with the shift from adolescence into adulthood.
The problem today, then, is that the
therapeutic state operates in ways to ‘protect’ young people from the pressures
of growing up. The result has been a corrosive sense of infantile entitlement
among the young, which was a key trigger for the riots.
This is why Lammy’s call for addressing
structural problems, such as youth unemployment, should not be a priority.
Evidence from employers suggests that a significant number of British
youngsters lack the competence or self-discipline to cope with the demands of
full-time work. UK prime minister David Cameron was on to something last week
when he said that around 500,000 16- to 24-year-old UK citizens were unemployed
during the early-Noughties ‘boom years’, while the same number of EU immigrants
filled the same number of vacancies. Looking at the situation of young people
in this way, it is clear that a sense of therapeutic entitlement, of demanding
undue rewards, is a major problem. Many on the left argue that the well-to-do
have always had a sense of entitlement. What’s wrong, therefore, with the less
well-off demanding similar? Whyshould people
have to do low-paid menial work in the first place?
Yet this argument reveals how far radicals
are now removed from the material world or comprehending why the working class was once considered the motor of
social change. The day-to-day struggles of obtaining work or fighting for
higher pay were what made the working classes a dynamic and forceful section in
society. Indeed, it was the experience of women working in factories during the
Second World War that sparked the demands for women’s liberation. Recognising
the importance of work is not the same as asking ordinary people to accept
their lot. Work, rather, is an important way of becoming a social being, a
citizen, a proper ‘member of the public’ rather than a private, home-ridden
individual. Today’s anti-work posturing by radicals not only encourages a
parasitical relationship of some on the labour of others, but it also does much
to encourage lumpenised passivity and defeatism, factors that can spark
destructive anti-social (rather than political) behaviour.
From this perspective, education secretary
Michael Gove’s decision to abolish the education maintenance allowance (EMA) –
a post-16 student grant – was a positive corrective to the childish entitlement
that helped inflame the 2011 riots. Indeed, the introduction of EMA in 2002
stunted many young people’s development into adulthood and encouraged their
belief that the state should automatically offer provisions. Abolishing such a
ludicrous bribe to stay at school after 16, and re-introducing the possibility
of becoming self-reliant, was an important step in socialising young people
into adulthood.
However, the coalition government has not
gone far enough in this direction. In the face of local education authorities,
sixth form institutions are still powerless to encourage young people to act
responsibly. Child-protection laws are still in place whereby teenagers are not
expected to meet the self-discipline standards set by a school. And so long as
therapeutic norms are not seen as a major factor behind the 2011 riots, such
disastrous policies will continue to go unaddressed.
The same therapeutic tendency is apparent
in state intervention into ‘problem families’ and local communities. When the
state seeks to provide for people’s every basic need, and to shape their
parenting and morality practices, it undermines an organic community spirit and
social bonds. As people become ever reliant on the state, they no longer turn
to their neighbours for moral and social support. In turn, this dislocates
alienated individuals from their community to the extent that they’d think
nothing of burning it down.
Rather than learning from the devastating
consequences of constantly intervening in poorer communities, and thus actually
undermining them, the coalition government has rapidly expanded the state’s
interventionist remit. In December 2011, for example, the government announced
the ‘troubled family troubleshooters’ policy whereby ‘a family worker’ enters a
home to devise a ‘whole plan of action, agreed with the family’. Nothing could
further erode basic solidarities within a community than an army of state
agencies organising people’s lives. Clearly, this is one lesson from the 2011
riots that still hasn’t been learned.
Critics argue that aspiration and ambition
won’t magically evolve due to cutting back the crutch of the welfare state.
True, fatalism and low horizons have often blighted some poorer communities.
But the therapeutic state exacerbates this problem. That’s because, particularly
for younger generations, it recasts the self as permanently incapable rather
than temporarily poor or disadvantaged. It is not people’s meagre sources of
income that’s necessarily the problem, but rather the ideological framework
within which welfare now operates. It is not just about cutting back on
welfare, but cutting out the culture of incapacity that therapeutic norms have
encouraged.
There is also another source of state
intervention that local communities could do without: the state’s war on pubs.
In the blinkered obsession with the nation’s health (a clear example of the
desire to ‘nationalise society’), young people have been priced out of public
drinking. And as local pubs have closed down, youngsters have been deprived of
an important inter-generational institution that helped socialise them into
adult behavioural standards. Recent figures reveal that 16- to 24-year-olds
drink less alcohol than at any time previously, but that only means they’re
becoming privatised individuals rather than social beings capable of acting
responsibly. An organic community spirit would be best served by thriving pubs
and clubs rather than state-sponsored youth centres or social workers snooping
on ‘problem’ families’ dietary intake.
Lammy should be commended for keeping the
2011 riots in the public mindset. The tendency towards political amnesia
regarding those events means sidestepping some difficult questions and pressing
problems around the socialisation of young people. Unfortunately, the
recommendations of the cross-party panel, as well as the coalition’s social
policies, look set to deepen rather than address the problems revealed by the
riots.
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