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”
Leon Wolfson
@8 – Really? You’re advocating murder, and it’s not a long step from there.
Perhaps not following clearly-failed policies, when we already have high rates of locking people up, would perhaps work? Rather than “try the same failed policies again, harder”.
YOU are advocating hurting the poor for being poor, by saying “work for it”. The jobs are not there, in good part due to Tory policy which is blocking proper recovery.
The left haven’t been in power since ’79, New Labour was centralist with right-wing tenancies in many areas. Stop blaming them for right-wing flaws.
@14 – No, I don’t need the truth to bite me before I cans see it no. And yes, Mouse, thanks for highlighting your support for the riots and violence in general. Can’t be enough smashing faces and arson for your kind can there?
I laughed when the EDL’s march came to grief.
@16 – Want to stop it THIS time, or stop it FOR GOOD? The second requires some social changes.
@19 – You “advocate” creating a class where crime is the only way to feed themselves. GG. Oh, and massively increasing the number of children in care, when that system is already overwhelmed.
And yes, it’s time the bankers were charged, the Nordic System was put into place wholesale here and we got the country going again. Not what you mean? Well, you’re supporting capitalist looting, and are by your own definition scum.
@20 – Ah, the Nazi German eugenics answer.
Paul Meagher
Our summer of strife is a degenerated, cracked-mirror image of the Arab Spring: http://bit.ly/mYqs1S : writes Kevin Meagher #riots
Anon E Mouse
Leon Wolfson – The fact you are a suck arse New Labour lickspittle is obvious from the majority of your comments on this fine blog – very few have any basis in fact but do you not think that just for once you can read a page here and NOT comment?
We’ll take it as a given that irrespective of the truth you’ll be rude, abusive and dishonest to other people’s postings.
Instead of offering your theories, which will inevitably conclude with some “racist” or “nazi” slur, can’t we go back to you making things up like being shot at, bombed twice and attacked by a marauding gang of the BNP because you’re white (twice). Oh and your Incredible Hulk story and the NHS being free.
Things were much better then and we want the old bulls*^ting Wolfy back…
MMMMWWWWWWHAHAHAHAHA!
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