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
I think the first part of what you say is unfair but I agree wholeheartedly with the last part.
Working people, that is those who actually do work, are appalled by this disgusting thuggery, from what I gather. The perpetrators don’t deserve to be called “working class”: they don’t work and class isn’t a word I would associate with these louts. For goodness’ sake, some of them were raiding JD Sports! No, they should instead be more accurately labelled as scum or whatever pejorative term takes your fancy.
But you’re bang on the money with regard to your comment about entitlement. Some of these cretins were even ranting about reclaiming their taxes through theft and vandalism. I mean, really, how stupid can you get? These rioters seem to believe that they deserve luxury goods and rapstar lifestyles. Well, f*****g well work for it then. Some talent wouldn’t go amiss too, but that might pose a problem.
And the unions’ bleating about the culling of diversity officers en masse and propaganda about ConDem destruction of life as we know it, a la Germany in the 1930s, plays a role. Those giving TV interviews under cover of hoody seem to be repeating the same union slogans in semiliterate fashion without any understanding of the issues. If people moan about Daily Mail headlines, perhaps they could also devote their attention to union banners?
AltGovUK
Our summer of strife is a degenerated, cracked-mirror image of the Arab Spring: http://bit.ly/mYqs1S : writes Kevin Meagher #riots
John Green
You describe the rioters as “a dispossed urban youth with complex social problems”. Where is your evidence? A significant proportion of the thugs now being processed by the courts are in employment, including at least one teacher. By their actions I prefer to call them “scum”.
All societies have a layer of scum floating on the surface. The role of the police and the courts is now to skim this scum from the surface of our society and bang them up.
There are many theories as to why our society is so broken and why we have so much scum. There are the usual bleeding hearts presenting these people as victims. We have had a widely distributed interview from that appalling man Livingstone finding numerous excuses for their actions.
We have had a layer of scum in our society for as long as anyone can remember. The reason we have so much of it slushing around these days, I am sure, is a product of the following:
a) a very large number of useless parents
b) an obsession with rights brought about by many years of misguided liberal policies
c) an absence of any sense of duty and obligation
d) an obsession with, and an overwhelming sense of envy for, fame, celebrity, bling and personal possessions
e) a belief in a lifestyle built around dropping out of school at an early age and claiming benefits for life, supplimented by crime and often drug-dealing
My solution to this societal problem is a mixture of the following:
A) demonstrate this lifestyle choice is not a good one by impossing prison sentences on the scum we collect
B) the benefit of a prison sentence is that life will become much less comfortable for each piece of scum, involving loss of employment
C) for each successive conviction, scum will permanently lose a significant proportion of their benefit which can be restored only by significant and hard work in the community
D) parents are made to share the responsibility and punishment that follows misbehaviour of their spawn
We have spent far too long throwing money in the wrong direction and excusing scum behaviour as an inevitable result of poverty, lack of ambition and local community resources. However, in each of the London boroughs affected by the recent riots, local community leaders have come forward to lament that years spent developing support programmes for local young people and for the unemployed have proved to be so unsuccessful.
Enough. It is time the scum faced a harsh reality.
Knut Cayce
RT @leftfootfwd: Our summer of strife is a degenerated, cracked-mirror image of the Arab Spring http://t.co/TyoVYA0
Extradition Game
Our summer of strife is a degenerated, cracked-mirror image of the Arab Spring: http://bit.ly/mYqs1S : writes Kevin Meagher #riots