Would the riots have happened if there was such a thing as society?

As some of you will know, I was in the Question Time audience last week for the special recording of the programme to discuss the London riots. I wasn't able to make a comment as so many people put their hands up (although I did get to ask my 5th choice question on whether there are any circumstances in which vigilante behaviour is acceptable - my answer to which is absolutely not, but it is understandable when the police seem unable or unwilling to do their job).

But the most important conversation I had in terms of my own ability to make sense of what had happened was with a man who had grown up in Liverpool and had been 18 during the Toxteth riots in 1981. He made an interesting point to me. "The whole focus of government policies since 1979 - and I include Labour governments as well as Conservative governments in this - has been to disentangle people from each other, to divide us, to give us no reason to feel part of society and our community, to make us literally climb over each other to 'win', with there being no reason not to act in our own self-interest. This country was rebuilt after the 2nd World War by making us want to work together, live together, even BE together. Then it all changed, and these riots are the results of whatever 'society' we are left with."

He couldn't have put it better - which is why I wrote down on a piece of paper everything he said. As I've said in a previous article (click here), nothing should be left off the table in our attempts to solve the root causes of these riots. But ultimately we may well need to have a fundamental reassessment of how we are governed and the macro-incentives (i.e. the reasons our economy gives for people to act in a certain way) that influence our behaviour.

I have written before on my blog about the extreme poverty that some children in this country are brought up in. I have written this month about a boy in my old school whose brother thought that the prison he was in for six months gave him a better life than at home. At the same time I have written about a hedge fund managing director who decided to buy a harrier jet with his spare money. Look at MTV and the "entertainment channels" and you can see programmes like "cribs" or reality shows featuring the children of the extremely rich. Get the Financial Times on Saturday and you get a magazine called "How to spend it" free with it. We genuinely need to think about whether it is OK and acceptable that there are such massive inequalities in our society, and in particular how they came about.

Some people, for instance, have got rich by lending money to people they knew couldn't pay it back. Some people have got rich by packaging up those loans that were never going to be paid back and selling it to other people. Some people stay rich by avoiding tax to such a massive extent that they pay a lower rate of tax than their cleaner. People have complained over the last few weeks over the rioters' just being happy to take from society without giving to it. Well, they aren't the only ones.

Another question people were asking was why the rioters were causing so much damage to their own community. They were smashing in and looting the shops on their own high street. They were setting fire to shops and home on their own streets. We need to consider why the rioters might feel in fact that they don't actually have a community.

Of course, the politicians don't set the greatest of examples. One of the reasons that they might find it so difficult to argue that it can be no excuse in court to say that the only reason someone looted a shop was because 'everyone else was doing it' is because that was the exact excuse so many MPs made during the expenses scandal. The fact is that wherever young people look today they can find examples of people taking from society as much as they can whilst seemingly giving much less.

There were many attempts to interview some of the youths taking part. Lines like "we're showing the rich that we can do what we want" suggested that the speaker felt that this country had allowed the rich to be an example to the them. Then there was "we're getting our taxes back". Now, leaving aside the possibility that most of those involved in the riots were not taxpayers, the inability to understand the purpose of taxes in terms of building society is also telling.  Is that because the 'society' that is being built and maintained by those taxes doesn't seem to include the speaker of those words?

The problem with all this is that I don't know an answer to it. Those who are ideologically rigid will have had their say already, but as I have said before, the answers will come from all angles. I know what I would like to do with our education system, but that's for another article.

What I do know is this: Something has to be done to make everyone in the UK feel part of each other's country. Something has to be done to change "us and them" into "we".

The fact is, we had 18 years of Conservative Party Policy followed by 10 years of New Labour,  followed by a financial crisis that has effectively made the tide go out to reveal the population of our country separated from each other in so many ways.

Those of us who study politics will know, as did the Liverpudlian whose thoughts I began this post with, that after the second world war we rebuilt Britain together, based upon a 'social democratic consensus' that helped a country still riven with class differences, to see itself as a society and community that worked together. 

Given we lack the money to solve this problem , we are really going to need to use our brains, because we could do with that consensus again. 

Punish them? Yes. But if we don't listen to them we punish ourselves.

 There has got to be a process over the next few weeks of getting those who have looted, burned and destroyed our cities to talk. They need to explain to us not only why they thought they could act in the way that they did but, more importantly, why they thought they should act in the way that they did. The long-term solution to what I would call the greatest sociological crisis this country has seen in many years lies in making everyone feel like society and community has something to offer them. Because they don't at the moment.

My personal feeling is that these riots have been gestating for years, and I would like to run through how. Regular readers of my writings will attest that I am no bleeding heart liberal and I am also no foaming-mouthed conservative either. The reality is though that we need to look at ideas from all parts of the ideological spectrum. At the moment, too many people I am seeing in the media, on social networks and just talking to are closing their ears and singing "la-la-la" as loud as they can when certain arguments are aired. I think this is dangerous.

Parenting

It was one of the most haunting conversations of my life. I was in the internal suspension room at my old school and a by was telling me about his brother's release from Feltham Young Offenders' institute. I asked him what it had been like and he said "seriously Sir, my brother loved it." "Loved it?" I asked. "Get this right, it was the first time in his life that he didn't have to worry about where the next meal was coming from and there was always stuff to do. It was so much better than home." This made me really rather sad. What is our society coming to when life is better in prison than at home for some of it's members? If you think about the conspicuous consumption of those who have come into large amounts of money (by whatever means) you can see why people are insisting that we have two options to solve this problem - punish those who riot or try to find a way to share the proceeds of society more equally.

That said, there is little doubt that some of the behaviour we have seen has been caused by some outrageously lax parenting. I've seen it myself - the parents who treated my old school as a state babysitter, the parents who told me when I called to talk about their child's behaviour that "it's not my fault you can't control my kid." Police and politicians asked on monday for parents to contact their children if they were on the streets and ask or order them to come home. At what point was that going to work? The rioters may have been kids but if we are going to solve this problem we need to look at the conditions in which they are brought up, and the skills of their parents.

For instance, many students in Years 10 and 11 (15 and 16 year olds) at my old school had baby brothers and sisters. We need to look at the effect this has on them - their mother's time and attention is neccessarily taken up with a tiny baby and so the young people look outside the home for attention and a "family life" (read 'gangs').

Education system

Of the many things said to me on the day I told my old school (a state school) I was leaving to join my current school (a private school), the one that stuck most in my memory was this from an assistant head. "I can't believe you are taking your skills away from young people who need them and giving them to people who don't need them." In one sense, this was hyperbole, because all young people need a teacher's skills, albiet in different ways. But in another sense she had a point about the students at my old school. They need teachers, not just to teach them academic subjects, but to help them engage with life.

An amusing article I read once described a conversation a new teacher had with an old mate. "He asked me what this PSHCE was and I went through it in detail, how it teaches about sexual health, drugs, alcohol, relationships, citizenship skills and all that. There was a pause.....and then he said 'Oh, right, so it's basically doing what parents should do'."

The education system needs to be looked into, because every single person involved in the riots has been through it at some point in their lives. Yes, some of them may have truanted. Some will have left at 16. But even if schools haven't caused the problems, they can be involved in the solution.

We need to look at making sure the education system inculcates the right values and behaviours to ensure young people can get on in society. It also needs to be offering them opportunities to learn subjects that help them get a career and feel there is some hope in the future. We need to look at other education systems around the world. Let's start with Germany, for many reasons, but not least this one:

Britain's Gini coefficient (a measure of equality that puts an entirely unequal society at 1 and an entirely equal one at 0) is 0.36, France’s 0.32 and Germany’s 0.28. Germany's economy has recovered very strongly from the recession, but they also have an education system based upon matching their young people to appropriate educational pathways, and the result is higher equality.

Rights without responsibility

This is where something has, in my opinion, gone rather wrong in society. Somehow or other our young people are very cognisant of their 'rights' but far less accepting of their 'responsibility'. I still recall with a shake of the head what Ramzi Mohammed (one of the failed 21/7/2005 London bombers) shouted as he cowered behind a door as the police tried to break in..."I have rights! I have rights!"...this from a man who had attempted to murder hundreds of people.

It is the ultimate expression of a perfectly honourable attempt in the late 1990s to ensure that everyone was aware of their rights to make sure that they didn't accept ill-treatment and got what they were entitled to. New Labour made it very clear at the time that these rights - enshrined in the 1998 Human Rights Act - were to be given in return for citizens being responsible too. But it led to a distortion of the 'rights-culture' into what we have now.

As a teacher, I have heard many times that the school has "no right to have my kid in detention" from parents, perhaps in response to a detention for not doing homework or something nasty said to someone else. The problem is that those same parents never quite understood that not only did the school have a right to discipline their child, but it was our responsibility to do so, for their own good.

An interesting extension of this has been seen in the term "respect". Young people these days are constantly on the look out for respect. Interestingly, they feel they have a right to respect and they have no responsibility to earn that respect. I was listening to an interview with  a girl the other day saying something I have heard quite a few times along the lines of "they are disrespecting me so I'm gonna disrespect them. When they respect me I'll respect them." Trouble is, it is never clear what this 'respect' entails, and it may appear to some that 'disrespect' actually means 'trying to stop me committing crime'.

I prefer to look at it another way. As a society we should find out what would make young people feel they are being "respected" and try to offer it. Maybe it's feeling listened to. Maybe it's feeling cared about. It might actually be something we can do. But when we do it, we must insist on reciprocal responsibility.

Relations with the police

The middle class tend to look at relations with the police like they do immigration. Because they don't feel the negative side of it they think it isn't a problem for others. Immigration has been only good for me - I get cheap food from around the world and cheap cleaners and builders etc and a wonderful diversity of pupils to teach in school. But many people have seen themselves marginalised in society in favour of immigrants in terms of both jobs and housing, and we middle class intelligensia seem to brush those feelings aside as racism instead of empathising with the genuine frustration some people feel. It's the same with relations with the police. We in the middle class - not experiencing the constant hassle from the police that many in society do, never subject to constant stop and search and constant suspicion in the course of what the police will regard as just doing their job - just brush aside these claims with an "if you're doing nothing wrong you've got nothing to worry about." Well, as I talked about in point 4 of a previous article (click here), some people in society do nothing wrong and still have to worry. We need constant dialogue and understanding between the police (who are supposed, after all, to have a 'monopoly on power') and the policed. Some, of course, see the police as an impediment to them committing crimes, and hide that behind complaints of brutality and bias, but that is a very small minority.The police have made so many positive strides since the horrors of the 80s and the institutional racism laid bare by the McPherson report in the 90s in terms of their engagement with communities. But they are not there yet, and the alleged refusal to communicate with the family of Mark Duggan after he was shot dead shows that.

Restrictions on the police

The Met Police have admitted today that they gave strict orders to those on the street to "stand and observe" rather than go on the offensive against the rioters. This was because of the risk of legal challenge to their actions in the light of the ongoing court cases related to the policing of the G20 protests and the student fees protests. I have written about this (read here) and pointed out that the rioters will have guessed that this might happen and will have taken full advantage of it. By yesterday, there seemed to be a public consensus that the police should be allowed to do their job properly. Through the media the plans to use plastic bullets was aired and water cannons discussed and given that there wasn't the usual backlash to these ideas they would have probably gone through with it should there have been serious disturbances in London. BUT we need to have a debate about how it came to this. The police effectively admitted that the constant legal challenges to their actions have made them fear doing their job and the result was looting, arson and violence. Have we, in our attempt to be a liberal society, gone too far? Have we now got the police force we deserve? The vigilante groups set up yesterday and out in force all over London certainly think so.

What they see as acceptable in society

Many of the youths involved in the rioting see a society that has excluded them from 'having'. They see footballers exhibiting vast wealth and even minor celebrities flaunting their possessions. They will also have been told by some of the ringleaders that looting is OK because the rich are looters too. Tax avoidance is seen by many as stealing from society. Causing a financial crisis then rewarding yourself with 'a bonus in order to retain talent in a global employment marketplace' is also seen as looting as well. Too many people, in the eyes of the marginalised in society, have taken from us without giving. Now it's their turn. There was an interesting stand-off in Clapham where a group of residents blocked off their road to be confronted by a group of youths shouting   "you are rich, we are poor" and "we rule London tonight, not you." Others, talking to the press said that "we're going to show the rich that we can do what we want, just like they can". This, to most people, seems like a shallow excuse, but in their minds, they may believe that our current society rewards those who take what they can - but only legalises some of the methods.

"The cuts"

Ken Livingstone was called an "opportunist" for saying on Newsnight that "if you are making massive cuts, there's always the potential for this sort of revolt against that".  He talked about the social divisions created by the government's austerity drive and also the effect of the cuts in police that are taking place - pointing out that he raised the number of police by 7,000 in his time as mayor. No doubt this is electioneering by Livingstone, and, as is always required by those on the left wing, it ignores the £1 trillion of debt this government inherited from Labour but to call it 'opportunistic' is, welll, 'opportunistic' too. Because Ken is right, we do have to look at the effect of the cuts as part of looking at the causes and solutions to the current crisis in our society. From Sure Start to other children's services through to youth clubs and the like, we need to be careful what is being done away with, because the effects will be in the long run. It seems to me that the government is happy to attack the entitlements of those who don't or can't vote (the young) whilst leaving along the entitlements of those who do (the old) even though many of the older recipients of bus passes and fuel benefit are very wealthy and don't need it. I would like to see, as part of whatever inquiry arises from these riots, a closer scrutiny as to who is being affected negatively by the austerity drive. I believe in the reasons for the austerity drive, but that doesn't mean I neccessarily agree with how it is being done.


Lack of opportunities

And here lies the nub of this crisis. Many of the rioters just didn't care. So what if they got arrested? So what if they got sent to prison? Arrest and prison are a badge of courage where they come from. It doesn't make a difference to them anyway. We might say - "if you go to prison you'll find problems getting a job". To which they might legimately answer "well I didn't have any chance of getting a job before this so what difference will going to prison make?"

No, we need to get together as a society and work out how to make all young people feel they have opportunities to be successful in life. But we need to make sure their targets are actually attainable and realistic. Through help with parenting, education, sensitive policing, ensuring they learn the importance of the responsibilities of a citizen as well as the rights we can see that there are benefits from being part of a community, from being part of society.

Or we can just hang-em and flog-em.

I think I know what is more likely to work.

Rioters benefit from the "Simon Harwood problem"

I once took some students to see "Question Time" being recorded. During a conversation on knife crime and how to stop it the panel were wittering on about youth clubs and the like when one of my students put his hand up. David Dimbleby pointed to him and the boy - who lives on a troubled estate in West London - said "people commit crimes because they think they can get away with it. If you make laws and enforce them properly so no-one can get away with a crime they'll stop". It was the end of the debate on that issue because no-one could argue with him.

If you look at the pictures on the TV and in the newspapers you will see gangs of youths rampaging through the streets of London looting shops, setting cars and buildings alight and attacking the police. Someone watching from another country would stare in wonderment at what looks like a lawless society in which police are powerless to intervene when crimes are being committed. They would be wrong, the police DO have the power, but are scared to use it. At an institutional level they are scared of accusations of over-reaction, racism and brutality, but it's much more important at an individual level, in which the "Simon Harwood problem" seems to have taken over the mindset of many of the extremely brave men and women who are our only legitimate form of protection against these thugs.

For those of you who are wondering who Simon Harwood is, he is the police officer who has been charged with the manslaughter of Ian Tomlinson during the G20 protests. Tomlinson was attempting to get home from his work when he was struck from behind by PC Harwood, an action which allegedly led directly to his death. Video of PC Harwood's behaviour during the hours leading up to that action show a man not entirely in control of himself, getting involved in a variety of scuffles with protesters when his actual job was to stay with his vehicle. The inquest which returned a verdict of unlawful killing on PC Harwood has led to him being personally charged with manslaughter.

But let's take a step back. On that day in April 2009 we saw a phenomenon we are now used to. The majority of people came to protest but a violent minority came to riot. Being a police officer on those occasions is very difficult as first you have to distinguish between protester and rioter and then you have to deal with the rioters, many of whom are intent on violence and have hidden their identity. PC Harwood got it horribly wrong with Ian Tomlinson, but in the course of his duty that day it is quite understandable that he, as a human being, had become increasingly wound up as the day went on. He went far too far and was stripped of his duties.

Now, imagine you are a police officer on the lines these past few nights (and probably the next few nights). You are under extreme stress and provocation. You know that you are confronting young men intent on violence who are hiding their identity. You know that you are not allowed to hide your identity and that the moment you actually take action to stop this rioting there will be people there who will film you and report you and question you and in some cases charge you. You have a family and a mortgage and a life which all could be ended by what you do and how you act.

You can stand, riot shield up, protecting yourself, possibly cordoning off vital areas, but resulting in you being screamed at for "not doing anything to stop the rioters". Or you can advance on the rioters, arrest them, basically do what you have to do, in which case you may feel there is a chance you could yourself be hauled before the courts, personally tried and convicted.

The Times says this morning that "today's rioters appear both cynically aware of police wariness and adept at exploiting it". Which goes back to the story at the start of this piece, and what my student said - ""people commit crimes because they think they can get away with it. If you make laws and enforce them properly so no-one can get away with a crime they'll stop."

These boys think they can get away with it. Yes, some of it is a reaction to poverty. Some of it is saying "well, people have got rich by taking from society and giving nothing back so this is our way of doing it." Some of it is a reaction to issues with the way the police do their job.

But when the police feel they can't do their job, and quite a few experienced policemen have suggested that is going through their heads right now, you get what we are seeing.

And by the way, those who bemoan the paucity of met police intelligence about London's youth gangs should ponder this - there are 60 (SIXTY) met police officers working right now on the phone hacking case.

Priorities, London. Priorities.

We must learn from these riots

We could call the riots that have swept London this weekend either common criminality or the anguished roar of the politically dispossessed and economically disenfranchised. The truth is probably in the middle, but we should take every chance we can to learn from what happened and why in order to make sure they don't continue.

But first some pertinent stories and statistics:

1) Being a policeman is a hard job. One told me about being screamed at outside a tube station on July 21st 2005 (the day there was a failed suicide bomb attempt - a fortnight after a "successful" one). "Why aren't you stopping them?" he was asked "you should do everything in your power to stop them." Yet when they do make attempts to stop 'them' they are often accused of racism or brutality. "I feel like I can't win" said this particular police officer, "because I'm damned if I don't stop crime and damned if I try and stop it."

2) Being a 15 year old boy in London is also a hard job. A lovely young man at my old school who is now at university told me of the time he was stopped and searched by police three times in one day. It was cold, so he had his hoodie up and he was walking fast. He wondered if he was guilty of looking like he was about to commit a crime or of being a 15 year old black boy in London.

3) On average every year the armed police units get called out about 10,000 times. They only actually reach their destinations about 2,000 times as normally on their journey it is found they are not needed. They draw their guns on average about 100 times a year and on average around 10 bullets are fired. If you are an armed police officer and you shoot your gun you are immediately placed on what might be termed an "honourable suspension" and you will never be allowed to be an armed police officer again. You are trained NOT to fire your gun, and you know that to shoot it will be the end of that particular career.

4) During recessions it is like the tide going out and revealing us as a society. Some of us saddled with unpayable debt, some of us with no form of income, some of us homeless, and some of us so rich that we actually can't find ways to spend our money.

Social unrest is created by many things. Take Tottenham for instance. In Tottenham here are more than 50 people for each unfilled job, and 10% more people claiming Jobseeker's Allowance this year than last. Last week Mark Duggan, about which we know very little, was shot by a police officer. The family wanted answers as to how it happened, but, partly due to it being the subject of an Independent Police Complaints Commission inquiry, they were not getting any. So they marched to the police station in Tottenham peacefully on Saturday afternoon demanding "justice" for the killing of Mr Duggan. What this "justice" actually involved, I'm not sure.

But what we do know is since then we have had rioting, looting and the attacking of police officers in Tottenham, Enfield, Walthamstow, Edmonton and Brixton. It seems to have been organised over the internet, and people have been coming in from quite a distance to get involved. Shops up and down highstreets, from chain stores to independent newsagents, have been ransacked and looted by mobs of youths, and there has even been the almost ridiculous sounding scene of about 100 people in a retail park in North London emerging holding boxes of trainers and loading them into cars.Today (Monday 8th August) we have looting and quite a lot of setting fire to things in Lewisham, Peckham and Hackney.

So, again I ask - common criminality or the anguished roar of the politically dispossessed and economically disenfranchised? I believe it is both, and we must do something about both in order for it to stop.