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Saturday 26 May 2012

Status Anxiety

The world according to the Guardian

Much merriment was to be had earlier this week reading the Guardian’s report of its four-month investigation into the causes of the August riots. Apparently, the police were the main culprits, in spite of the fact that they were conspicuous by their absence. This feat of logic was summed up in the Daily Mash parody of the Guardian’s report: ‘Riots caused by police when they finally turned up.’

Little alteration was necessary to transform the material into parody. Many of the rioters complained about being stopped and searched — ‘They cut my bredrin’s hand open with a cuff’ — and offered that up as an excuse for their criminal behaviour. The Guardian’s researchers supported this explanation, pointing out that the rioters were eight times more likely than the average Londoner to be stopped by the police.

Yet the Ministry of Justice discovered that 10- to 17-year-old males brought before the courts for participating in the riots were 22 times more likely to have a previous conviction than the average 10- to 17-year-old. In other words, if the rioters interviewed by the Guardian were only eight times more likely to be stopped and searched, the police were being unusually lenient. (Hat tip Neil O’Brien, Director of Policy Exchange.)

Running a close second to police harassment as a ‘cause’ of the riots was consumerism. The theory here is that the reason so much looting took place during the riots is because the manufacturers of consumer goods, along with their handmaidens in the advertising industry, have successfully hoodwinked the urban poor into thinking their status depends upon owning a vast array of designer bric-à-brac. By way of ‘proof’, numerous rioters were quoted saying the reason they’d stolen some expensive trinket or other is because they desperately wanted one but couldn’t afford it.

This was immediately latched on to by the Archbishop of Canterbury, who was delighted that his analysis of the riots had been corroborated. ‘Too many of them inhabit a world in which the obsession with “good” clothes and accessories — against a backdrop of economic insecurity or simple privation — creates a feverish atmosphere where status falls and rises as suddenly and destructively as a currency market,’ he said. Note the subtle way in which he slipped in that reference to the world of high finance — it’s all the fault of the bankers, don’t you know.

Unfortunately, the Archbishop didn’t offer any explanation as to why the vast majority of the urban poor didn’t participate in the riots. Could it be that most people on low incomes don’t think they’re automatically entitled to a flat-screen TV simply because other people have one? Or, more likely, is the rioters’ invocation of concepts like justice and fairness simply a way of rationalising their criminality rather than a genuine explanation of their behaviour? Hard to say, because the Guardian didn’t interview those inner-city residents who neglected to take part in the disturbances.

In some ways, you have to admire the earnestness with which the Guardian (in partnership with the LSE) has set about its task. The ‘research team’ is made up of 58 people — Guardian journalists, community workers and social scientists — and, in addition to the interviews, they’ve amassed a huge amount of data, producing no end of ‘interactive’ bar charts and whatnot.

But the report suffers from one major flaw, namely, that the majority of the 58 researchers are left-of-centre. I can’t prove this, but it seems likely given the political bias of the groups they’re drawn from. For instance, nine out of ten British sociology professors describe themselves as left-wing and only 3 per cent vote Conservative. Hardly surprising, therefore, that the researchers have concluded that police brutality, poverty and consumerism are to blame. No doubt a group of right-wing policy wonks would have gone about their task with equal relish, assembled just as much data, and concluded that the causes of the riots were welfare-ism, moral relativism and the culture of entitlement.

This is the problem with most evidence-based approaches to public policy. The researchers don’t impartially gather information and only then draw a conclusion. Rather, they start with a particular point of view and accumulate whatever facts support that view. If the Guardian report had uncovered evidence that at least a couple of the left’s theories about the riots were wrong, it would have had some credibility. As it is, it just seems like an elaborate rubber-stamping exercise and might as well be called ‘We Knew We Were Right’.

Toby Young is associate editor of The Spectator.

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