Barbarians on the Thames
By Theodore Dalrymple
Complex human events have no
single or final explanation. The last word on the outbreak of looting and
rioting that convulsed large parts of England, including London, in August will
therefore never be heard. But some of the first words were foolish, or at least
shallow, reflecting the typical materialistic assumptions of the
intelligentsia.
An August feature story on the riots in Time offered a
particularly striking example. The author suggested that to understand the
riots, we should start with “something called the Gini co-efficient, a figure
used by economists to indicate how equally (or unequally) income is distributed
across a population.” In this traditional measure, the article notes, Britain
fares worse than almost every other country in the West.
This little passage is interesting for at least two reasons. First is the
unthinking assumption that more equality is better; complete equality would
presumably be best. Second is that the author apparently did not think
carefully about the table of Gini coefficients printed on the very same page
and what it implied about his claim. Portugal headed the list as the most
unequal of the countries selected, with a 0.36 coefficient. Next followed the
U.K. and Italy, both with a 0.34 coefficient. Toward the bottom of the list,
one found France, with a 0.29 coefficient, the same as the Netherlands. Now, it
is true that journalists are not historians and that, for professional reasons,
their time horizons are often limited to the period between the last edition of
their publication and the next. Even so, one might have expected a Time reporter
to remember that in 2005—not exactly a historical epoch ago—similar riots swept
France, even though its Gini coefficient was already lower than Britain’s.
(Having segregated its welfare dependents geographically, though, France saw
none of its town or city centers affected by the disorder.)
As it happened, when I read the Time story, I had an old
notebook with me. In it, among miscellaneous scribblings, was the following
list, referring to the riots in France and made contemporaneously:
Cities affected 300
Detained 2,921
Imprisoned 590
Burned cars 9,071
Injured 126
Dead 1
Police involved 11,200
Average number of cars burned per day before riots 98
And all this with a Gini coefficient of only 0.29! How, then, could it have
happened? It might also be worth mentioning that the Netherlands, with its
relatively virtuous Gini coefficient, is one of the most crime-ridden countries
in Western Europe, as is Sweden, with an even lower Gini coefficient.
At least Time does not go in for the theory that what
caused the riots was the coalition government’s reduction in spending, which my
Polish publisher tells me is the almost universally accepted view in the Polish
press. This Ping-Pong theory of youthful misdemeanor, as one might call it,
suggests that if only the state provided enough services for potential
rioters—including such amenities as leisure centers with Ping-Pong tables and
other diversions—they would behave better. (In the U.S., the theory would
promote midnight basketball.) Apart from the empirical unlikelihood of the
Ping-Pong tables’ exerting the hoped-for prophylactic effect, the theory
suggests that it is government’s duty not merely to keep the peace but to keep
the population happy and amused. It is hardly surprising, then, that when
people claim that service reductions provoked the riots, they are unable to see
that if this were so, the problem would be not the removal of services, but
dependence on them in the first place. In any case, as Time pointed
out, the effects of the proposed—and economically inevitable—spending
reductions have yet to be felt (and few of the reductions have been implemented
to date).
But Time also
proposed, perhaps without fully realizing it, a more plausible explanation of
the riots: that “some of the disaffection with Cameron and his government has
more to do with who they are than what they’ve done.” And what they are is
upper-class. This theory implies that the rioters’ “disaffection” was more
self-consciously analytical than was probably the case; but it does capture a
characteristic of the rioters and, indeed, of many British intellectuals:
resentment.
Resentment is a powerful, long-lasting emotion that usually is self-serving
and dishonest (I have never heard a criminal complain that his defense lawyer
is upper-class, as he often is), as well as useless. Resentment is undoubtedly
part of everyone’s psychology, at least potentially, and few of us have never
heeded its siren song. A population’s general level of resentment, however, is
not a natural phenomenon that one can analyze in purely mechanical terms, as if
it increased geometrically with the Gini coefficient. Britain itself has been
far more unequal in the past without widespread riots’ breaking out, so it is
clear that we cannot understand people’s behavior without referring to the
meanings that they attach to things.
John Maynard Keynes famously observed that “practical men, who believe
themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the
slaves of some defunct economist.” But why should this servitude apply only to
the kind of men whom Keynes regarded as practical—businessmen, for instance?
After all, for every 1,000 people who intone that the only purpose for which
power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community
against his will is to prevent harm to others, only one has actually read John
Stuart Mill (they never seem to quote Mill’s contention that a father who
abandons his children may rightfully be put to forced labor). And when Keynes
goes on to say that madmen in authority are distilling their frenzy from some
earlier academic scribbler, he does not explain why this should apply only to
madmen in authority. Why not to madmen who loot and commit arson?
There is reason to think that it should so apply. One rioter told a
journalist that his compatriots were fed up with being broke all the time and
that he knew people who had absolutely nothing. It is worth pondering what lies
behind these words. It is obvious that the rioter considered being broke not
merely unpleasant, as we all would, but unjust and anomalous, for it was these
qualities that justified the rioting in his mind and led him to suggest that
the riots were restitution. Leave aside the Micawberish point that one can be
broke on any income whatever if one’s desires fail to align with one’s
financial possibilities; it is again obvious that the rioter believed that he
had a right not to be broke and that this right was being
violated. When he said that he knew people with “nothing,” he did not mean that
he knew homeless, starving people left on the street without clothes to wear or
shoes on their feet; none of the rioters was like this, and many looked only
too fit for law-abiding citizens’ comfort. Nor did he mean people without hot
and cold running water, electricity, a television, a cell phone, health care,
and access to schooling. People had a right to such things, and yet they could
have them all and still have “nothing,” in his meaning of the word. Somehow,
people had a right to something beyond this irreducible “nothing” because this
“nothing” was a justification for rioting. So people have a right to more than
they have a right to; in other words, they have a right to everything.
Tangible benefits, on this view, come not as the result of work, effort,
and self-discipline: they come as of right. This inflated doctrine of rights
has turned into a cargo cult as primitive as that in New Guinea, where the
natives thought, after a laden airplane crashed in the jungle, that consumer
goods dropped from the sky. Apparently, all that is necessary for people like
the rioters to live at a higher standard of living, equal to that of others, is
for the government to decree it as their right—a right already inscribed in
their hearts and minds.
This doctrine originated not with the rioters but with politicians, social
philosophers, and journalists. You need only read Henry Mayhew’s
nineteenth-century account of the laboring poor in London to realize that the
notion of having rights to tangible benefits was once unknown to the
population, even during severe hardship. But the politicians, social
philosophers, and journalists transformed things evidently desirable in
themselves—decent housing, for example—into rights that nothing, including the
behavior of the rights holders, could abrogate. It clearly never occurred to
the well-meaning discoverers of these “rights” that their propagation might
influence the human personality, at least of that part of the population
destined to become increasingly dependent on exercising them; and it required
only an admixture of egalitarianism to complete the dialectic of ingratitude
and resentment.
What about unemployment as a
cause of the riots? If there are no jobs, there is no opportunity for
self-advancement. And as Time points out, unemployment for
Britons between 16 and 24 years old has increased from 14 percent to 20 percent
over the last three years and is much higher in the areas where most of the
rioting took place.
Here, too, the explanation is superficial. The current British unemployment
rate, to start with, is not especially high by European standards, though
perhaps it is too early to say that similar riots could not happen elsewhere in
Europe. More to the point, in the boom days before the financial crash, Britain
already had high levels of unemployment among the unskilled young, even as the
country imported large numbers of unskilled immigrants to work. For every 20
unskilled jobs created in the run-up to the crash, 19 immigrants found work in
Britain, while millions of natives remained in state-subsidized idleness.
Three reasons explain this seeming paradox. In the first place, foreigners,
initially without British welfare entitlements, found the wages for the jobs on
offer sufficiently enticing to accept them. For natives on welfare, however,
the financial difference between working and not working—especially when they
could supplement their welfare benefits with a little trafficking or casual
work in the black market—was insufficient to get them into the workforce. A
locution that welfare recipients frequently use is revealing: “I get paid on
Friday,” they say, referring to getting their welfare funds. Their work,
apparently, is existence.
Second, many of the young foreigners possessed qualities superior to those
of their British counterparts, making them more attractive to employers. Few
are the jobs, especially in the service economy, in which such characteristics
as punctuality, reliability, politeness, and helpfulness are not important; but
these qualities were not much in evidence among the young British population.
While in France, one can run a good hotel with young French employees, it would
be impossible in Britain with young British employees; in Britain, hotels and
many other services are good in proportion to their employment of foreigners.
And while educational standards may have fallen elsewhere, it is rare that
young migrants to Britain are as uneducated as young Britons. The foreigners,
unlike the Britons, can do simple calculations, and they often speak an English
that, if not more fluent, is more refined than that of the young Britons.
Finally, the existence of subsidized public housing, or “social housing,”
as we term it in the U.K.—it would be more accurate to call it “antisocial
housing”—discourages recipients from moving to find work. Because the benefit
is not transferable from one location to another, moving would mean that the
tenant would have to pay rent at an unsubsidized rate. At the age when young
people should be most geographically flexible, many become attached to their
lodgings by iron hoops of subsidy. That is why public housing in Britain so
often resembles a prison without walls and without warders, and why the riots
had some of the qualities of a prison riot.
The rioters and the social class to which they mainly belong thus have
genuine reason to feel aggrieved, but that reason is not one that they often
cite. In the name of equality and redistributionism, the state has provided
them with an expensive education that is nearly useless, thanks to the
implementation of pedagogical theories from whose practical effects the better-off
and better-educated parents are, to some extent, able to protect their
children; entrapped them in de facto prisons; and driven up the cost of their
labor so far by means of welfare subsidy that it is worth no one’s while to
employ it. At the same time, their minds have been filled with notions of
entitlement that can only breed resentment.
The state has failed these
Britons in one other respect, perhaps the most significant in helping to
explain the riots: it has not repressed their propensity to crime. It has given
criminally inclined Britons the (correct) impression of impunity. Consider that
the British police catch the culprit of just one robbery in 12 and that just
one in eight convictedrobbers goes to prison in the U.K. Since the
number of robberies is much greater than the number of robbers—each robber
tends to commit many such crimes—failure to imprison robbers, and to do so for
a long time, is in effect to grant the state’s imprimatur to robbery.
When one bears in mind that leniency is shown toward criminals who have
committed other serious offenses as well, it is no surprise that the young and
criminally inclined should believe in their own impunity. They may not be able
to do arithmetic, but they can certainly recognize long odds when they see
them. They know, too, that they have respectable society on the run when
successive lord chief justices have complained that too many Britons are sent
to prison and that such sentences should not be administered to first-time
burglars (meaning, of course, the first time that they get caught, not the
first time that they burgle, a distinction that seems to have escaped their
lordships). It would not be too much to say that recent lord chief justices of
England are a major cause of the riots.
Crime, in short, has been normalized as a way of life. For further evidence
of that proposition, recall that the pretext for the August orgy of looting and
arson was the shooting of one Mark Duggan by the police, who thought that he
had a gun and was going to shoot them. What Duggan’s friends and
relatives said about him was highly revealing. Duggan’s girlfriend observed
that if Duggan had had a gun and had seen the police, he would have run away.
This is not exactly a paean to his peaceful and law-abiding way of life; she
did not claim that it was unimaginable for him to have been carrying a gun. And
if she knew that he might have been carrying a gun, she knew a lot more about
him and his way of life than she was revealing. A sister said, yes, Mark was
“involved in things,” but he was not violent. She delicately refrained from
saying what those “things” were, but her way of putting it suggested that she
was using a code that almost anybody of her milieu would be able to crack. A
friend noted that she did not believe the original press reports, subsequently
proved false, that Duggan had shot first at the police because “Mark is not so
stupid to shoot at the police.” The word “stupid” implies only a prudential and
not an ethical reason for Duggan’s behavior; presumably, there were others at
whom it would not be stupid to shoot.
This impression could only be strengthened by a widely published photograph
of Duggan in which he held one hand up as a gun, clearly in the pose of a
gangster. It is possible that the gesture was only bravado; but at the very
least, it suggests an admiration for gangsters not unconnected with the
antinomial tendencies of most popular culture.
It is true that the British police have come to resemble not the force of
uniformed citizens of which Sir Robert Peel (the founder of the modern police)
dreamed, but a paramilitary occupier, feared mainly by the innocent and
law-abiding. The police have become simultaneously bullying and ineffectual,
the worst of all combinations, barking rudely at motorists who stop where they
shouldn’t but disregarding manifestations of serious criminality entirely. The
reasons for the degeneration of British policing are (again) complex, but one
of them is the extreme leniency of the courts. For a long time, the police had
little incentive to pursue criminals short of murderers, for the courts will
impose a trivial punishment on them.
The riots might herald a positive change, at least in the official stance
toward crime. In an implicit, maybe not even fully conscious, criticism of the
last half-century’s criminal-justice policy, the magistrates have imposed much
stiffer sentences on the rioters than anyone expected. A judge sent one woman
to prison for four years (of which she will serve two and a half) for using
Twitter and Facebook to incite rioting, for instance.
The liberal press viewed this sentence and others handed out after the
riots as “disproportionate,” which, in a sense, they were. The Guardiannoted
that two-thirds of those brought before the magistrates and accused of rioting
were remanded into custody and that only 34 percent received bail; the “normal”
figure was 10 percent in custody and 90 percent granted bail. Likewise, 45
percent of those found guilty of rioting got prison sentences; “normally,” only
12 percent of those found guilty of assault, robbery, burglary, or brawling in
public were imprisoned. Few in the media seemed to recognize that if there was
disproportion here, it was because the system was too lenient before, not too
severe now.
It is therefore just possible that the rioters will, in the long run, have
done a service to the country by awaking it to its past follies. But no one
ever made much of a mistake by overestimating the pusillanimity of the British
political class.
Well, that’s convenient, isn’t it? A four-month Guardian/London School of
Economics study into the riots that rocked English cities in August has found
that the rioters were pretty much Guardian editorials made flesh. Concerned about
government cuts, annoyed by unfair policing, shocked by social inequality and
outraged by the MPs’ expenses scandal, it seems the young men and women who
looted shops and burnt down bus stops weren’t Thatcher’s children after all –
they were Rusbridger’s children, the moral offspring of those moral guardians of
chattering-class liberalism.
