In trying to identify the causes of the London riots, we could start by reflecting on the comments from former Greater London Council police advisor Lee Jasper in analysing the mindset of the youths on the streets.
In a finger-pointing monologue on The 7.30 Report on Tuesday, Mr Jasper argued that the one group of people who should definitely not be blamed for the riots were the rioters themselves.
“We’ve seen huge levels of austerity cuts in many inner city areas that are leading to a great deal of anxiety and concern,” stated the one-time advisor to former London Mayor “Red” Ken Livingstone. “Unemployment continues to rise and there is a sense of anxiety but also a sense of moral crisis in the country. I think because of the MPs scandal, the corporate tax dodging issue of huge multinational companies, the News International corruption cases with the metropolitan police and phone hacking, there is a kind of failure really of people in power to uphold the kind of moral standards that we all aspire to. And as such, this has had an effect around the country.”
The first notable feature of Mr Jasper’s comments is that they afford a remarkably high level of current affairs knowledge to some of the dumbest and most disengaged people on the face of the earth. In the interviews this week none of the hooded hooligans were telling reporters that they had taken to the streets after reading the Telegraph’s expose of the House of Lords perks scandal – which happened four years ago anyway – or that they picked up a brick in frustration after watching James Murdoch’s evidence to the House of Commons inquiry on the BBC.
Second, Jasper’s comments sought to lend an activist quality to a civil disturbance which is campaigning for absolutely nothing, other than a free television and a shiny pair of sneakers.
This wasn’t a poll tax protest, it wasn’t a show of solidarity with the coal miners or the sacked printers, it wasn’t a G20 riot. At least burning down McDonalds outside a conference promoting free trade makes a crude kind of point.
This was simply an act of mass theft, violence and vandalism by people who, almost to a man, said that they were doing it for fun. It was the first bludger uprising the world has ever seen.
Thirdly, Jasper’s comments have at their centre a belief that, in this case, we are looking at a failure of government to do more. In reality these riots represent a failure of government to do less.
While there is enough material from the four days of rioting to sustain years of sociologists’ conferences, the key issue seems incredibly simple. If you tell several million people that they are under no obligation to work, to learn, to become socialised, and if your laws and your frazzled police and your packed courts don’t treat low-level crimes as crimes at all, you run a pretty obvious risk of ending up with the scenes that we saw this week. If you tell people that life is all take and no give then some of them will end up literally taking things off shop shelves.
One of the first priorities of David Cameron’s relatively new Tory Government has been to rein in the explosion in the British welfare system. Remarkably, one of the central proposals is to stop households receiving unemployment benefits which exceed the average weekly household wage. Remarkable in that things were ever allowed to get that out of hand, with such an enshrined disincentive towards work.
Cameron is a moderate conservative and his welfare overhaul is not extreme. One of his many fair-minded measures is that if you are able-bodied and offered a job but turn it down for no reason, you will be kicked off the dole for three months. This has been denounced as an act of brutality by the welfare lobby, in a country where the number of Britons in employment has fallen by 550,000 since 2004.
In a report on the reforms in The Daily Mail, the newspaper profiled a family in Anglesea, North Wales, Peter and Claire Davey, who have seven children aged two to 12 and receive £815 (AU$1288) a week in benefits. Mr Davey quit his job as an administrator after realising he and his family would be better off living on handouts. On the numbers it makes a sad kind of sense.
Within the welfare sector there is an unusual metric which holds that increases in government outlays on the dole and the pension are the best indicator of success in the portfolio. You see it here in Australia every year – if state or federal governments cut welfare spending in their budgets, even with the corresponding introduction of schemes to get people into work, groups such as ACOSS fire off accusations of heartlessness. These same groups have a broadly left-wing social agenda yet seem completely indifferent to the concept of the dignity of work, which was actually what Karl Marx spent his entire intellectual life working to achieve.
And then there are the likes of Lee Jasper playing the role of random excuse generator, handing out absurd alibis to those too dim to devise one for themselves. The perpetrators are the victims and government should have done more, when the mayhem created by these welfare-funded ratbags shows government has done far too much already.
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