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Okay, back to the recent violent disorder. Eating in a local cheap restaurant for lunch, I grabbed a copy of the Daily Mail and was pleasantly surprised at this remarkably non-hysterical piece on the recent controversy about David Starkey, the historian. But of course, if you want a reliable mix of social conservative rant and shafts of lucid insight in the same piece, there is always Peter Hitchens (brother of Christopher) on hand. In the article I link to here, I broadly agreed with some of it but as usual, there is always the equivalent of a crack in the pavement.
“Say to him [Cameron] that mass immigration should be stopped and reversed, and that those who refuse any of the huge number of jobs which are then available should be denied benefits of any kind, and he will gibber in shock.”
Interesting. So Mr Hitchens thinks that mass immigration should be “reversed”. How exactly? There is often, I find in some of the denunciations of mass immigration, an unspoken assumption, never fleshed out, as to what said denouncers want to do about it. Does Mr Hitchens think, for instance, that those who have been living in the UK for some time, and who hold UK passports, should, if they fall into the “wrong” demographic groups as he might define them, be deported? To where? How? Never mind European “human rights” legislation, how can any supposed “conservative” such as Mr Hitchens, with his famed love of “family values” and the rest, countenance a reversal of mass immigration without spelling out the details? Casually referring to “reversing” X or why without saying how is foolish, in my humble opinion.
Of course, there are tens of thousands or more people who emigrate from the UK every year in pursuit of a better life. And I suspect the recent mayhem will only add to the shift. But I get the impression that such folk are not the ones that Mr Hitchens has in mind.
A letter to yesterday’s Times (link behind a paywall):
Sir, Statistics indicate that 100,000 children sleep rough in the UK every night. Evicting rioters from their homes would only add to this shameful number and it would fall on already overstretched charities to protect them. It will also create a disaffected underclass as can be found in countries like Brazil and Mexico.
Trudy Davies
Co-Founder of the Consortium for Street Children charities (CSC)
Wimbledon SW19
There are about 11.8 million children under sixteen in Britain, so according to the statistics cited – or at least mentioned as existing somewhere – by Trudy Davies, about one in 118 of them sleeps rough every night.
Strangely, a six year old document produced by Charlie Bretherton, a Trustee of the very same Consortium for Street Children Charities, gives a less alarming picture, although it does also include a figure of one hundred thousand. It says:
How many young people are involved and where are they?
‘Runaways’: The Children’s Society estimates that about 100,000 children under 16 run away from home every year. Most stay away for between one and three nights, but some stay away for longer. The Social Exclusion Unit estimates that at least one in eight runs three times or more. Most do not travel long distances; only one-fifth travel further afield than the nearest city. The majority will stay with friends or sleep in garden sheds, fields or bus stations.
Homeless: There are few statistics on youth homelessness. Centrepoint in London provides a place to stay for over 500 young people every night; in 2000 one in five were 16 and 17 year olds.
Street Homeless: The last rough sleeper count found only two under-18 year olds sleeping rough on the streets. However young people who run away often choose to sleep in dangerous places.
Emphasis added. From two to a hundred thousand in six years. I blame the Tories.
Whenever a senior political figure, such as David Cameron or Boris Johnson (the London mayor) writes a newspaper column on some issue or other – and Boris Johnson does this a good deal, being a good writer – you can bet that in light of recent events, at least one commenter will make some remark about the politicians’ holidays. You see, it was terrible, apparently, that our Prime Minister was sunning himself in Tuscany or that BJ was carousing in Canada, rather than working 24/7 in their offices. To delay coming back to our Sceptred Isle for a few days when the disorder broke out is inexcusable, just the sort of lazy, arrogant stuff you can expect. Etonians. Bullingdon Club. These bastards probably did PPE at Oxford! (Sarcasm warning).
As you can see, I find all this type of commentary tiresome. It suggests an inability to realise that in the age of the internet, video conferencing and the like, that things don’t collapse when a political leader is away. The Prime Minister is not my Daddy.
And from the point of view of someone who believes in minimal government, the free market and the open society, this mindset is very foolish. While I don’t want to pay for their holidays, I happen to think that the idea of politicians taking time off from their politicking is a very good idea and should be encouraged. A century or more ago, the Peels, Palmerstons, Gladstones and Disraelis holidayed a good deal, and their backbench members of Parliament holidayed even more, or ran their estates. In the USofA, Congress was deliberately located on the swamps of the Potomac in order to discourage people from meeting during the hot, malaria-filled summer months. (Arguably, the governence of the US went down the tubes when air conditioning was invented). And London stank so badly because of the lack of drainage that getting out of London was a good idea for anyone who could do so.
As I said, I don’t mind politicians taking time off so long as we, the taxpayer, don’t have to pay for it. But in principle, the idea that Civilization will come to an end unless Dave, Boris or Barack are constantly at their desks or in the assembly is barmy. There is much to be said for a bit of time out from these people. As the saying goes, we should be grateful we don’t get all the politics we pay for.
(Aside, the commentators on the Daily Telegraph site are truly awful, arguably worse than the Guardian. Take a look at the moronic stuff regarding BJ’s latest article on the riots).
Peter Oborne is not exactly one of my favourite commentators (to put it mildly) so when I saw people praising an article he wrote called The moral decay of our society is as bad at the top as the bottom, I was expecting the worst. And sure enough, he falls at almost the first fence:
A few weeks ago, I noticed an item in a newspaper saying that the business tycoon Sir Richard Branson was thinking of moving his headquarters to Switzerland. This move was represented as a potential blow to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, because it meant less tax revenue.
I couldn’t help thinking that in a sane and decent world such a move would be a blow to Sir Richard, not the Chancellor. People would note that a prominent and wealthy businessman was avoiding British tax and think less of him. Instead, he has a knighthood and is widely feted. The same is true of the brilliant retailer Sir Philip Green. Sir Philip’s businesses could never survive but for Britain’s famous social and political stability, our transport system to shift his goods and our schools to educate his workers.
Yet Sir Philip, who a few years ago sent an extraordinary £1 billion dividend offshore, seems to have little intention of paying for much of this. Why does nobody get angry or hold him culpable? I know that he employs expensive tax lawyers and that everything he does is legal, but he surely faces ethical and moral questions just as much as does a young thug who breaks into one of Sir Philip’s shops and steals from it?
So Branson and Green get tired of having so much of their wealth confiscated that Branson moves some of his operation to Switzerland and Green takes his profits off-shore, and Peter Oborne sees that not as a sign of the confiscatory state’s moral decay but rather… Green and Branson’s moral decay?
That is a bit like saying the shopkeepers who defended their shops from looters were being ‘greedy’ because they did not want the product of their hard works taken by looters… or in Green and Branson’s case, the looting tax man working at the behest of the parasite classes.
Oborne gets it right when he describes the corruption and hypocrisy of the political looter class class, but his failure to grasp the difference between the looter classes and the people they loot means I will not be joining the Amen Chorus praising this article even if I agree with some parts of it.
It seems to me that he misses the obvious target. Sure, politicians are hypocritical and corrupt but when has this ever not been the case? Surely the real issue here is not the predictably dismal behaviour of the generally dismal sort of people who are attracted into politics in the first place, it is the de-socialising nature of the policies that have been followed by both Labour and Tory since 1945.
There exists a broad consensus between so-called ‘conservatives’ and the ‘democratic left’ across the western world that capitalist wealth producers exist to be taxed to fund ‘social’ welfare, which in turn produces a huge class of people benefiting from these confiscations and this, not the crapulous personal greed and behaviour of MPs, is the root of the problem from which everything else springs.
Moreover, it is worth noting that the looters were not in fact the primary recipients of the ‘largess’ (of other people’s money) being collected and redistributed by the state… it is the huge army of people who find their employment via the Guardian’s public sector advertisements who are the actual main beneficiaries.
Just as war, as is sometimes said, can be the health of the state, so can domestic civil disorder. One of the arguments we can expect to hear in the coming days, and are beginning to hear already, is how much of the recent mayhem has been driven by Britain’s evil “consumerist” culture, our “market-based materialism”, and suchlike. The implication being that we need to have more and more controls over our lives (that is not the same as saying people need to understand self-control and save rather than rely on credit. That is a separate argument). I am willing to stake a few pounds that there will be calls for some sort of National Service for youngsters, if not in the form of the military (who’d want these scum in charge of weapons?), but something else, perhaps. (Again, I have nothing against clubs and groups set up to help youngsters grow up a bit into adults, so long as this is voluntary.)
A random example of the kind of “if only we had powerful leaders” line comes from John McTernan, in the Daily Telegraph. He starts off with this:
“Churchill redeemed himself, and saved the world, during the Second World War. Margaret Thatcher defeated fascism in the Falklands war, and ultra-Leftism in the miners’ strike. We are a better and stronger country, at home and abroad, for her undeviating will and courage. It wasn’t just Britain – the post-war world was full of examples. Nixon and China. Reagan and the Russians. Gorbachev and perestroika. Mandela and de Klerk. These were big figures who made bold choices, shaped the future, called the shots.”
Well, maybe. I find the Nixon example dubious. Sure, he may not be the devil of lazy historical analysis and he unfroze relations with China, but he also, remember, imposed wage and price controls in a panic about inflation and was hardly a consistent advocate of small government, at all. I’ll come to Mrs Thatcher in a minute.
“Evelyn Waugh used to criticise the Conservative Party because it had never turned the clock back by a single minute. But at least it was properly conservative. Harold Macmillan would be shocked at the modern party’s Maoist commitment to revolutionary change, just as Tony Crosland would be aghast at Labour’s obeisance to capital.”
Harold Macmillan is a man who wanted Britain to join the EU; his essentially paternalist version of Toryism, and his deference to the legal privileges of the trade unions, helped breed the kind of complacent attitudes that saw the UK lose its industrial edge. In certain ways, “Supermac” and that whole generation of Tories up to Mrs Thatcher advocated a form of controlled retreat. As for the awful Tony Crosland, why praise a man who once infamously said he wanted to destroy those “fucking grammar schools?”. I hate it when a certain kind of commentator gets all misty-eyed for the political leaders of days of yore, such as the ghastly Nye Bevan, the Labour politician who saddled this country with the National Health Service. We can do without that kind of “leadership”, thank you very much.
“The connecting thread is that Left and Right have accepted not merely market mechanisms, but the market’s ultimate mastery. For more than 30 years, politicians have told industries, communities and voters that you can’t buck the system. In doing so, they have internalised their own advice, and ended up enslaved by these new gods themselves.”
One of the people who said you cannot defy market forces, or fail to heed what Kipling called the “Gods of the Copybook Headings”, was of course, Margaret Thatcher, whom the author of this article claims to admire. In fact, Mrs Thatcher’s greatness, in my opinion, in part stemmed from her willingness to tell people that water did not flow uphill, that if you want to distribute wealth, you have to create it, and that defying the laws of supply and demand typically made problems worse, as in the case of trying to fix the value of sterling. That was one of her best traits.
“George Osborne’s mantra is that if we don’t face up to austerity, then we’ll be like Greece, at the mercy of the markets. Would any Conservative politician, in any previous administration, have compared our great nation to a failing southern European economy (rather than a modern-day Athens or Sparta)?”
I have no idea. I think that pointing out that if the UK fails to get its house in order then we will have the kind of disaster as seen in another country, is a good thing for a politician to do. It is about describing hard reality, not coming out with some sort of guff about “we are a great nation and can do what we like” sort of line.
“Our former leaders would be shocked by the willingness of Cabinet ministers to talk down our country. Accepting your own powerlessness is a characteristic of weak leaders throughout history: always managing, never transforming.”
It is not about “talking down”, but facing reality. To change, you first need to accept where you are now. In the UK, many people, some of them holding quite diverse political views, have been slapped hard with that reality.
People going to fancy dress parties do it. The blogger Old Holborn does it. I am talking about face masks.
Face masks have been targeted as one of the things that the authorities may try to ban in the wake of the riots. Enforcing such a rule, even if it makes sense, strikes me as difficult. Perhaps the only way to interpret and enforce such a law would be to say that anyone wearing an item obscuring most of the face during a time of public disorder would be at risk of prosecution. (Wearing a ski mask should be illegal in the middle of a riot, but not on the slopes of Chamonix, for example). But again, how to decide when to impose the rule? Perhaps a public official, preferably a magistrate, has to read out what used to be called the riot act and after the reading of said act, anyone wearing a mask or suchlike is in trouble.
But it may not be so cut and dried as that, alas. There is the issue of public versus private space to consider. Owners of private property, such as shopping malls and the like, are entirely within their rights to insist that people entering the premises should show their faces, and comply with whatever codes of behaviour might be stipulated, however rational or otherwise, just as private members’ clubs and other places ought to be able to insist on dress codes, for example. Banks will typically insist that motorcyclists take off their helmets, if I recall correctly. (That makes perfect sense, for security reasons).
But as I know some regulars will ask, how does this ban on face masks apply to Muslim women who cover their faces behind a veil or other such form of costume? If such a person enters a shop, say, does this mean the police will now insist they show their faces? I’d like to see how that’s going to work. What about Islamist demonstrators against, say, military actions in the Mid-East? I cannot honestly see how the cops are going to successfully enforce a mask ban without a serious ruckus.
Like a lot of ideas that sound good to politicians in the heat of the moment, the notion of banning people from obscuring all or part of their faces is difficult as a general aim of the law, even if owners of private spaces are entitled, as they are, to make such demands. I can see all kinds of issues of interpretation coming up: what about a guy who wears a baseball cap with big sunglasses – is that illegal, or not? What counts as a “mask”? Surely, any law would need to consider the full context here, but it is not always obvious whether wearing a certain item signifies intent to avoid detection.
Instead of such silly measures, the government must focus its attention, as has been pointed out ad nauseam here, on the following areas:
–T ougher sentences for crimes of all kinds, including theft, which in far too many cases is treated as a minor matter. Such punishments must include restitution of the victim(s);
— Drastic cuts to welfare benefits combined with a big rise in tax thresholds at the bottom of the scale to make work pay. Even the dimmest thugs operate under some sort of cost/benefit analysis. Make work pay;
— Lowering the compulsory school-leaving age; change to labour market rules to encourage apprenticeships, vocational training;
— Allow people to use force in self defence, including firearms;
— Legalise (most) drugs. Yes, this is probably the most controversial idea, and maybe I would not enact this until the moral hazard-machine of the Welfare State has been seriously changed, but it is a key issue. If gangs don’t control the drugs trade, it undermines the gang culture more generally;
— Tax cuts more generally so that married spouses don’t feel under such pressure to both work to keep a decent income. This may also reinforce marriage and provide a better environment for children;
— Scrap the various quangos, race relations organisations and other tax-funded institutions that far from alleviating tensions, often inflame them by the manufacture of various grievances for classic bureaucratic empire-building reasons;
— Zero tolerance policing. Get some guys from New York over to London for some rapid tutorials.
I am sure there are more ideas on how to strengthen the family, encourage positive behaviours and deter bad ones, but it seems to me that trying to regulate dress codes in the streets is one of the most pointless unless the conditions can be very clearly defined in law and avoid arbitrariness. Not a good idea, Prime Minister. There are other, more urgent things to do, and time is short.
“The public’s mood has changed irrevocably; on crime and punishment, social attitudes will have hardened permanently as a result of the past week’s events. Strong speeches from the prime minister are a step in the right direction, as is the much more effective policing of the past 48 hours, but the public wants real, permanent change, not just temporary, emergency measures. A YouGov poll found that 85 per cent of the public believe that most of those taking part in the riots will go unpunished – they have lost faith in the system. This is understandable: it also reflects the perception of the thugs themselves. Criminal activity is far more rational than people believe, especially in wealthy societies such as ours: there is a lot of empirical and statistical work that shows that criminals implicitly weigh up the costs and benefits of crime. A high probability and cost of detection reduces crime, all other things equal; a low likelihood of detection, a low likely cost (such as a negligible prison sentence or a caution, as has too often been the case in the past) and a larger payoff (flat screen TVs or expensive trainers) raises it. Many of those storming shops made that very calculation this week, albeit implicitly and in some cases incorrectly.”
Allister Heath, editor of CityAM. Read it all.
The political party that most intelligently grasps this change of mood, and responds to it by a re-assertion of the right of individuals to defend themselves and their property, and which unravels the disaster wrought by welfarism, supine policing and a hopelessly over-regulated labour market, should win the next election. The question, as ever, is which party has the nous and courage to do this. So far, the signs have not been very encouraging.
I am delighted to see that some people are ‘taking the law into their own hands’ and not just abandoning their communities to the barbarian thugs…
When the trouble came, hairdressers, sales assistants and butchers were among the scores of Turkish and Kurdish workers who stood outside their businesses in Green Lanes, Haringey, from 8pm having been warned by police to expect trouble.
The Guardian filmed others – some armed with baseball bats – on guard outside shops and restaurants in Kingsland Road, only a mile away from Hackney’s burning high street. Three workers from Re-Style Hairdressers were among those out in Green Lanes, after word spread that an attack was imminent at about 4pm
[…]
“We were outside ready and expecting them,” said the manager of Turkish Food Market, who asked not to be named. “But I felt very panicky because we are not safe from either the rioters or police. We put all of our efforts into this shop. It took 20 years to get it like this. But we do not know about our rights. I’m scared that the police and the government will attack us if we defend our businesses. We are being squeezed between the two.”
Firstly, to those blaming ‘immigration’ rather than the welfare state, and the utterly grotesque way the state demands you do not protect what is yours, well people would do well to emulate the Turkish and Kurdish community in Britain. Indeed the looters we see on television and streamed over the internet are so multi-racial it must gladden the hearts of the Welfare Statists who created them.
So when the police decry ‘vigilantes‘, I would point out that communities can often do a better job at protecting themselves than the police can and the folks who got out on the streets, not to loot but to defend their neighbourhoods, well they are the real heroes here.
The safety of you and your property is only tangentially of interest to the state (certainly they want to tax what you own, so to that extent they do indeed care about your life and property), but as demonstrated starkly over the last few days, the state also created the conditions that led to these riots and is therefore rather uneasy about punishing people who, after all, only do what the state does every day only without having to smash any windows.
A community of few people with rifles and something worth protecting are not such a soft target to thugs, even armed thugs, compared to a disarmed general population looking vainly for the Plod to save them. But for all sorts of reasons, the British state has so effectively propagandised this country that to even suggest armed self-defence puts you on the lunatic fringe… so crowbars and cricket bats it is then.
If these last few days shows anything it is that when push comes to shove, only you and your neighbours can defend against what can only be called barbarian scum. Contrary to what the state would have you believe, you have the right to defend yourself and your property that morally supersede any law that would deny that right. The rioters ‘took the law into their own hands’ so I applaud those Turks and Kurds (and many others whom the Guardian would not be so keen to report on) who did the same… they took the law back from the barbarians with and put it where it belongs: in their own hands.
The state is not your friend, so do what you have to do and if you drive off some thugs, do not call the police after it is all over as nothing good will come of that.
An Englishman’s Castle:
As far as I can see no one seems to be pointing out the essential cause of all these riots. Rioting is fun, exciting and you get to pick a prize at the end. Even young bloods at Oxford have been known to smash stuff up for the hell of it. It relieves the tedium of it all.
Talking about “the” essential cause is silly. I can think of about a dozen “essential causes” of these riots, as could you, each as “essential” as each other (this being one reason why there have been so many recent postings here on the subject (this being the ninth consecutive one)). Causes do not work alone; they combine, in clusters. For “the” read “an”. “The” Englishman, as he signs himself at the bottom of each posting (is there only one of those?), himself immediately proceeds to add some more “essential causes” of the rioting, like the fact that the penalties for rioting are now too small, along with the fun of it being fun.
Another essential cause of the rioting is that the rioters don’t think that rioting is wrong. They are, in short, scum. Why are they scum? Partly because so many of them have no live-in dads, which is another essential cause of all this.
Another essential cause of the rioting is, as was much discussed by me and the commenters here, that we, the non-rioting classes, are severely discouraged by our rulers from defending ourselves and counter-attacking against the rioters, which is one of many reasons why rioters now face too few penalties for their rioting. (Such defending and counter-attacking might also be fun. Different posting.)
Another cause of the rioting is that the rioters are stuck in a welfare trap. They are paid and consequently trained to do nothing, and have become incapable of doing anything more honestly lucrative. The Englishman alludes to all this by quoting at some length from a piece in the Guardian by Zoe Williams. Her description of what it’s like being stuck in a welfare trap is quite a good one, and should not be dismissed as mere “guff”, as the Englishman dismisses it, merely because Zoe Williams’s opinion about welfare is (I presume) that there should be more of it, and hence that more should be sucked into welfare traps. She describes the problem well.
Nevertheless, the Englishman has a good, big point here. Rioting is fun. This is not the only or “the essential” cause of the rioting, but it is definitely one of the causes of it.
There will be a temptation to beat ourselves up as a society for not doing enough to address problems faced by these groups, especially the inadequate education and consequent lack of qualifications that makes it hard for them to get jobs, which largely go to immigrant workers from eastern Europe. That should be resisted. Billions of pounds have been spent trying to improve schools and regenerate run-down areas. The suggestion from some Left-wing politicians, such as Ken Livingstone, that the riots were due to the impact of Government spending cuts is grotesque. If anything, the biggest problem has been the creation of a sense of entitlement sustained by an overly generous (and no longer affordable) welfare system, which expects nothing in return for the benefits dispensed.
– Philip Johnston, journalist.
Read the whole article.
If you have been unfortunate enough to be following the UK media’s breathtakingly awful attempts to say something useful about the riots… such as tut tutting about ‘social media’ for enabling the looting to be organised (cue calls from that hideous Janus-faced Guardian/Daily Mail Chimera to “Do Something”)… well you might get a giggle from Alec Muffet’s take on that subject.
Sound fellow, that Muffet bloke.
This is not a political rebellion; it is a mollycoddled mob, a riotous expression of carelessness for one’s own community. And as a left-winger, I refuse to celebrate nihilistic behaviour that has a profoundly negative impact on working people’s lives. Far from being an instance of working-class action, the welfare-state mob has more in common with what Marx described as the lumpenproletariat. Indeed, it is worth recalling Marx’s colourful description in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon of how that French ruler cynically built his power base amongst parts of the bourgeoisie and sections of the lumpenproletariat, so that ‘ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie rubbed shoulders with vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, swindlers, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, brothel-keepers, organ-grinders, ragpickers, knife-grinders, tinkers, beggars… and from this kindred element Boneparte formed the core of his [constituency], where all its members felt the need to benefit themselves at the expense of the labouring nation.’ In very different circumstances, we have something similar today – where the decadent commentariat’s siding with lumpen rioters represents a weird coming together of sections of the bourgeoisie with sections of the underworked and the over-flattered, as the rest of us, ‘the labouring nation’, look on with disdain.
– Brendan O’Neill.
You don’t have to buy some of the slightly misty-eyed stuff about working class “communities” to see that he has a strong point. As I often like to point out, an open liberal society requires a modicum of basic respect for the lives and property of others, a certain amount of fertile soil for particular virtues to take root in and flourish.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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