Without the legitimacy, purpose or desirability of the Arab Spring, our Summer of Strife – with its much deeper roots - will be even harder to put down.
THE cod psychologists and moral arbiters of Fleet Street are in full session this morning, raining down fire and brimstone on the looters and rioters running amok in our major cities.
Never short of a tabloid cliché, The Mirror’s Tony Parsons calls them“self-pitying scumbags” exposing “the very limits of society’s attempts to be understanding, to be soft, to be compassionate.”
Over in the Daily Mail Max Hastings rolls out his grandest patrician sneer to call them “essentially wild beasts”. He continued his dehumanising analogy:
“They respond only to instinctive animal impulses — to eat and drink, have sex, seize or destroy the accessible property of others.
“Their behaviour on the streets resembled that of the polar bear which attacked a Norwegian tourist camp last week. They were doing what came naturally and, unlike the bear, no one even shot them for it.”
So far, so knee-jerk.
Meanwhile left-wing politicians – Ken Livingstone aside – observe a self-denying ordinance in linking the disturbances with wider social and economic problems in our inner-cities, terrified of confronting a public mood which they read to be one notch short of a lynch mob.
Amid the bromides and hyperbole, head of the Respublica think tank, Philip Blond made sense this morning when he tweeted that the events we are witnessing are “multi-factoral” ascribing a combination of “social libertarianism on the left and the neo-liberalism of the right” for the disturbances.
So yes, poverty, unemployment and a lack of hope and legitimate ambition drives this phenomenon; but also a breakdown in family life, discipline, social and community ties and respect for others and their property. Both right and left have questions to answer.
They may be rebels without a cause (except, it seems, the conspicuous consumption of pricey electrical goods and designer jeans) but these young looters are a distorted mirror image of those gallant young people gathering en masse for the purpose of shaking off the yoke of tyranny across the Middle East.
The yobs of Birmingham, or Croydon, or Manchester are hardly in the same category as the heroes of Egypt’s Tahrir Square and those protesting and dying in Syria, but the phenomena we are witnessing has parallels with the “Arab Spring” – with seemingly leaderless uprisings driven by social media.
A dispossessed urban youth with complex social problems emboldened by their very outsider status is using technology as an agency to recruit and organise, leaving the authorities flat-footed and unable to deploy resources effectively to counter them.
While our well-paid columnists (whose lives and backgrounds could not be further from those they castigate) churn out the thundering leaders and vent their spleens, the more considered question for policy-makers is how these amoral, unskilled, ruthless, socially alienated, reckless, yet technology-literate young people can be brought into mainstream society.
As our MPs break their summer holidays to gather tomorrow – no doubt to bewail the nihilistic madness of the looting in our cities – they should ally their grandstanding with a practical commitment to addressing the root causes of this phenomena.
This offspring of Margaret Thatcher and Frank Gallagher deserve the opprobrium currently being heaped upon them for their appalling and reckless actions; but if we are serious about avoiding this behaviour becoming a regular part of our urban life then our politicians are going to have to get serious about shattering the glass wall between our mainstream society and the utterly parallel world that a generation of dispossessed young people in Britain now inhabits.
Policy-makers – of left and right – have, in their own ways, created that world and only they can now fix it. It is a world of broken families, drug and alcohol misuse, low educational attainment, violence, parental failure and endemic worklessness – fuelled by welfare dependency and a black economy.
As the autocrats of the Middle East are finding out, it is difficult, once released, to put the phenomena of mass mobilising young people back in its bottle.
Without the legitimacy, purpose or desirability of the Arab Spring, our Summer of Strife – with its much deeper roots – will be even harder to put down.
39 Responses to “Our summer of strife is a degenerated, cracked-mirror image of the Arab Spring”
Ed's Talking Balls
An offensive comparison, in my view.
This underclass that has been festering for years, supported by money confiscated from the hardworking, and has precisely nothing in common with the suppressed revolutionaries in totalitarian states. The latter are not rebels without a cause and I am certain they wouldn’t appreciate being tarred with the same brush.
These scumbags have abused the kindnesses so foolishly extended to them for a long time. This is merely the latest and most flagrant example.
Stupid, bien pensant views have led us here and we need radical change in our approach. More police, prisons and water cannon would be a good start (and the money can come from the social security budget which funds the fast food and Xboxes these oafs live off).
Max Hastings was completely correct in his assessment, which was much more extensive than merely labelling these despicable individuals as bestial (incidentally, that part too was bang on the money: we shoot polar bears for doing things they don’t know to be wrong, yet strangely no bullets find their way towards savages who knew perfectly well what they were doing). Certainly his comments are infinitely more perceptive and useful than what Ken Livingstone and John McDonnell have had to say.
Kevin
Ed – you wanna try reading what I actually wrote. Some impressive rhetoric, but like all right-wingers mouthing off about “scumbags” your public policy prescriptions come up short. Have you even costed your shoot-to-kill policy?!?
Leon Wolfson
The Labour leadership have of course done something appropriate in your view mouse – they’ve made themselves unelectable, when the Tories do the same rhetoric, only better. Of course you can’t admit WHY you’re happy.
Talking Balls – “Confiscated”, right. Well, perhaps we should tax the lazy rich’s unearned capital equally with income? How about abolishing, oh, higher rate pension relief? No? Well, there we go then.
Crush, clamp down, punish the poor for BEING poor. All that’s being said, all that’ll be done. And then they’ll wonder why it won’t stop happening. Sigh. Kill, Murder, Death – the mantra of the right. As ever: You first.
Ed's Talking Balls
Leon,
I won’t be robbing the innocent nor assaulting passers-by any time soon, so I doubt it’ll be me first.
And yes, tax is confiscation of individuals’ money. Uncontroversial. It is a necessity of course, and any right-minded person knows that. But equally any right-minded person should want their money used well, not squandered. Perhaps employing a few more policemen and building a few more prisons would garner public support, particularly among the working victims rather than the feckless perpetrators.
Nope, crush, clamp down and punish criminals for carrying out crimes. No-one is advocating hurting the poor for being poor. I make no apology for calling for severe punishments for lawbreakers. I believe it sends out the right message: civilised society will not tolerate this disgraceful behaviour.
Kevin,
So you don’t like the term ‘scumbag’. You don’t like ‘wild beasts’ either. It leads me to wonder which description you would prefer. Perhaps ‘revolutionaries’, ‘freedom fighters’, ‘oppressed victims’ or ‘visionaries’ would be more appropriate in your eyes. I’ll stick with my description, though, and in polite conversation the word ‘feral’ will rightly continue to feature, despite your protestations.
Incidentally, I did read your drivel, painful though it was. I know you weren’t saying that these assorted cretins are like those in the Arab world. The only similarity is their use of mobile phones to organise themselves. Wow, perceptive stuff.
Your decision to focus on one quotation of Hastings with which you disagreed, rather than address the overall argument which he coherently sets out, marks you out as a poor journalist (rather an exalted term in your case…) His argument wasn’t knee-jerk. The points he raised have been made, by him and others, for years.
What public policy prescriptions did I make? You have criticised them while omitting to mention that I made none. I merely remarked that it was curious that no harm came to those who consciously carried out violent acts while a polar bear, knowing no better, was killed for following its instincts. I wasn’t advocating wholesale shooting but I certainly am advocating rubber bullets, tear gas and water cannon, together with very long prison sentences.
However, were I to have recommended shooting the scum, I would imagine that it’d be a good deal cheaper than housing them in London, paying them benefits or feeding and watering them in HMP Wherever…
Kevin
‘Ed’s Talking Balls’. You certainly are pal, you certainly are.