I’ve been watching the riots in Britain with something akin to dread. It is not just the destruction of property and the loss of life. The thing that makes me the most nervous is the reaction I am seeing from British pundits and politicians about this.
Let’s get the boiler plate out of the way. Riots are always bad news. It is never a good thing to have people in the streets destroying the very fabric of neighborhoods with fire and looting. But a riot does not just happen because people are love a good fire or there is nothing on the TV that evening.
The kind of hopelessness that leads people to believe that a rampage of destruction is not going to make things any worse is toxic in and of itself. Which is where the words of British talkers and legislators come in, just take a look at part of a column from Max Hastings at the Daily Mail (a big conservative British tabloid):
They are essentially wild beasts. I use that phrase advisedly, because it seems appropriate to young people bereft of the discipline that might make them employable; of the conscience that distinguishes between right and wrong.
They respond only to instinctive animal impulses — to eat and drink, have sex, seize or destroy the accessible property of others.
Mr. Hastings goes on to blame the liberal policies for the problems of the youth who are rioting. And he is not the only one. Story after story talks about how the lax standards in education and policing have led to this set of events.
Now, I don’t live in Britain, so it is hard for me to know exactly what is going on, but as I said at the top, riots don’t just break out because someone gets on Twitter and posts “Burn, Baby, Burn!”. There must be an underlying cause for the kind of nihilism that leads to violent action.
The focus for the Government of David Cameron is that this whole thing is about “criminality, plain and simple”. I can understand the problem of a Head of State when faced with such riots. The fact that London burned for four days and was only prevented from burning a fifth by a massive police presence and torrential downpour which damped everyone’s willingness to be in the streets.
A government can’t allow this kind of thing to happen, but lets be honest the best way to prevent it from going on is to address the issues that drive those who are rioting to act in the first place. Sadly that is not what we are seeing.
The Conservatives in Britain and here don’t view this as a response to policies that have left millions without jobs, that have at the same time squeezed the very programs that help ease the effects of that long term unemployment. They refuse to look at the facts of income inequality and lack of opportunity that brings despair.
All of this is heading in a troubling direction for the U.K. Anytime there is civil unrest there is a temptation to limit rights. They British government is considering limiting instant communications in response to these riots. Kevin Gosztola has a good piece about it.
But will it stop there? Max Hastings wants to clamp down on behavior across the board. He maintains that it a lack of discipline brought on by public assistance schemes and lax law enforcement that has caused this break down in civic order.
He sounds strikingly like our own home grown Conservatives, blaming the permissiveness of society for the ills of his nation.
So there we have it: a large, amoral, brutalised sub-culture of young British people who lack education because they have no will to learn, and skills which might make them employable. They are too idle to accept work waitressing or doing domestic labour, which is why almost all such jobs are filled by immigrants.
They have no code of values to dissuade them from behaving anti-socially or, indeed, criminally, and small chance of being punished if they do so.
These kind of attitudes will not lead to a positive outcome. It never does when you deal with the symptoms and not the root causes. Are the young people of England under-educated? Maybe, but can all the blame be laid on them? Not to my mind.
They may not want to take low wage jobs (I kind of have my doubts on that, since most people would rather work than hang around with nothing to do), but isn’t it the fault of the government that there are not better job opportunities?
It all comes down to this; nothing ever happens in a vacuum and there is no single cause or policy that leads outbreaks of violence and destruction like this. It is always a combination of cause and effect and if there is to be an end to the rioting it will not come from just cracking down on tonight’s law breakers. It must come from structural change which recognizes that the people must be supported by the government, not just ruled by it.
The floor is yours.