A crisis that has been brewing for years

John Edwards

A sensible and thoughtful post. The prevalence of gang culture and parallel "morality" among a section of urban youth has been apparent for some time to those who have to inhabit the same areas with little effective action taken. The riots are now showing the consequences.

Anton

May I suggest that the failure lies in the eclipse of God within British society. When people no longer believe in the being of absolute good and the obligation to seek it and conform to it there will always be violence and ugliness to express the meaninglessness experienced.

Simon Stephenson.

So Martin, how much do you hold responsible the post-1960s infestation of the education system with socialist dogmatists, who see the most powerful weapon in their arsenal as being to taint people's political perception at as early an age as possible, and what would you recommend be done to rectify this situation?

disenfranchised

i think events of the last few days will have been the tipping point for many indigenous english. the hopelessness we've hitherto felt will now have turned to despair.
the country we knew is now gone forever, legislated away by labour with recent help from the coalition. UKIP could save us, but blind tribalism will never allow them any power.
so what's the answer? pickfords international removals.....

Tarka the Rotter

well said disenfranchised - as an Englishman I feel totally disconnected from the society in which I now find myself, with its multi-kulti diversity and gender equalities, its community co-ordinators and outreach workers, its EU servility and statist PC-isms, but as yet I am not rioting or nicking things from JD Sports: tell me guys, where did I go wrong?

disenfranchised

@tarkatherotter.....

thanks man.
where did we go wrong? we played by the rules. but the whole system is now geared against people like us.
disenfranchised doesn't even begin to describe how i feel.
may god help us.....

arnoldo87

@ Simon Stephenson

What would YOU do to rectify the situation?

And do try not to be too authoritarian.

Baron

Martin, but what we are witnessing can easily be explained as a “spontaneous outpouring of criminality’ by the underbelly of the society of whatever colour of skin kept well nourished by the entitlement culture.

the great doctor who used to write for the Spectator got it spot on - the real cause of crime is the conscious decision of the criminal to commit it.

Augustus

I agree with your last paragraph. But what is certain is that true conservatives have very little to cling to.

Bill Due

"David Cameron needs to show leadership and demonstrate that his government cares."

It is government caring that has created the youf mobs. Haven't we been "hugging hoodies" for decades?

Government must stop caring. Government is not Mum and Dad and Nanny and the rest of the Village which the left thinks is necessary to raise a child for the mob.

The police must become institutionally against criminals once again. They should patrol the streets. The force should be less concerned about "mirroring" society and more concerned about enforcing the law. Why is water cannon not used on rioting mobs?

The left and other welfare state saints should no longer be able to get away with their self-righteousness. They have abetted criminality and anti-social behaviour and awarded themselves humanitarian prizes for too long. Who actually believes that they "care" for those "communities" ?

Guy T.

I'm in disagreement completely with the tone and thrust of this short article.

You are asking "why?" and claiming that these wandering street kids in metropolitan cities are a bit justified in setting up their own mores. Really?

There is no justification. Ever.

I do not care how down and out someone is (particularly when objective truth would tell us that most people are about 85 - 95% of their own woes).

Every person alive has had something stolen. Every kid on the street you are talking about has already experienced this. As he or she has experienced lies, dishonesty, maybe even abandonment.

So what? Lots of people in the last 5,000 years of mankind have overcome incredible odds and done great things with their lives.

The negative live experiences usually -- ought to -- force a kid's mind and body to migrate to where he finds the "good."

I am in full agreement with one of the first posters in this thread: You have wayward morality when not firmly anchored to God Almighty. Britain's decline is eminent and will be swift...unless hearts immediately return to the Bible, God, and what Jesus has done for all of us. When people have Jesus in their hearts, behavior changes right away.

No social programme can do this or come even a triffle close.

Stephen

When I look at the scenes from London and Birmingham, it is like looking at another country. I suddenly feel like an alien in my own land and wonder where the England I have been familiar with over the many decades has gone. I think this is as much a cultural conflict as a social-economic one.

A. MacAulay

I think you are being terribly unfair. These young people are here to pay for your pensions, so be nice to them.

stephen bennetts

To anyone who has watched the plethora of fly on the wall police documentaries on the digital channels over the last five years,will not have been surprised by the complete lack of respect and fear of the law demonstrated by the mainly black youths over the last few days. Society as a whole and politicians in particular have been found wanting in dealing with these underlying problems. Will they listen now and do something to address these issues other than issue platitudes? I remain to be convinced.!!!

In2minds

Sorry Martin but there's no money left for Batwomans project as we have spent it all on that climate change nonsense. Blame it on the liberal left?

Bernard

There are no easy solutions to this. We have:

1) Sections of society where the norms of civilized behaviour hold no traction.

2) An education system that does not equip the a large cohort for a useful role in society.

3) A globalized economy that has no use for unskilled or increasingly semi-skilled labout and a large population who are in any case unmotivated to provide it.

4) A culture that makes a fetish of consumption and a media that celebrates a tiny minority who achieve much on the basis of ephemeral talent or zero effort.

5. A powerless and insecure middle class that are just waiting for the chance to kick off with some therapeutic vigilantism.

The surprise is that this has all taken so long to happen.

Simon Stephenson.

arnoldo87 : 10.36pm

What would I do? Depoliticise the entire system of education provision. Make every school private. Attach a non-transferrable voucher to each child redeemable by the school which he/she attends.

In principle, make it impossible for political activists to use schools as centres of indoctrination - once this is achieved, do everything possible to encourage schools to teach children to think OF others, and FOR themselves.

Sorry if this is too authoritarian for you.

Andy Carpark

'She meant that there was a group of young people who were so damaged ...'

The eternal passivese of the bleeding heart liberal bedwetter. Damaged by whom? Me?

Neverwas

How about we shortcut the likely result of the next 20 to 50 years and invite the Chinese to come in and take over now? It'd be tough on me as I'm pretty well tone deaf so Mandarin at my age wd be impossible. But I bet they'd soon be an end to the looting.

Failing that, how about building blocks of bed-sitters. Unemployed single mothers can live in them with on-site supervision from social services and training. Single males can live in similar but separate blocks with on-site training. Load of flats would be freed up for working people who can afford to pay rent.

Martin C

That great sociologist, Charles Murray, wrote about the causes and rise of the British Underclass 20 years ago, back in the early '90s. His essays were even serialised in a national newspaper.
Re-reading his work, the man was quite obviously a genius, a true prophet. He predicted all of this with truly uncanny accuracy (you can read it here http://www.civitas.org.uk/pdf/cw33.pdf ).
His work also contains the solutions.

arnoldo87

@ Simon Stephenson

"Sorry if this is too authoritarian for you."

Well - just a tad Simon.

Creating and maintaining a system of entirely private schools could only really be done by Big Bad Central Government.

No need to worry though. Nobody could ever win an election with such a policy.

Simon Stephenson.

arnoldo87 : 5.58pm

Not sure I quite understand your logic. My recommendation is that Big Bad Central Government, and Big Bad Local Government for that matter, no longer has anything to do with the provision of education other than financing it. I should have thought this makes government less big, and is consequently less authoritarian.

Not everyone's a doctrinaire socialist, you know. Some are more concerned about the quality of education their children receive than how comprehensively they are politically indoctrinated by their teachers. I should have thought an education system free of political mind-benders would be a great attraction at the polls, although not perhaps at the TUC or the Labour Party Conference.

Baron

Stephen @ 7.47, your sentiment shared, Baron arrived here in the late 60s last century, genuine political refugee, spent time inside in the mother country, no help after arrival, ever since, he didn’t have to stay, did, liked it a lot, arguing that if the whole world went bonkers, England would remain what she had always been, he got it totally wrong, still cannot figure why, is thinking seriously about leaving.

C Cole

@ Martin C

Great link, many thanks.

Baron

Martin C @ 5.41:

truly prophetic, Murray’s polemic, even if it’s hard to accept his idea of small governance, the existence of Roma to other communities doesn’t suggest it will work as he may have hoped, the analysis though cannot be bettered, those who will soon start yapping about the causes of the current rioting should read the stuff before their open their mouth, they won’t, of course.

Baron likes, fully endorses Murray’s concluding words: “When meaningful reforms (of the underclass) finally do occur, they will happen not because stingy people have won, but because generous people have stopped kidding themselves.” Priceless, Martin, take note.

Baron

Andy Carpark @ 1.29: “The eternal passivese of the bleeding heart liberal bedwetter. Damaged by whom? Me?”

it took Baron most of the night to figure this quip of yours is not only brilliantly witty, it also has a wholesale application, even if one may have to find other appropriate verbs, it’s amazing how the use of the language does reveal as much if not more of the thinking behind, if you don’t mind Baron will pinch it, use it, not for blogging obviously, he will also mention who the source of it is, it too should add to the beauty of the observation.

also, Martin C, sorry for the error in the first para commenting on your posting, no excuse for saying ‘their’ rather than ‘they’.

arnoldo87

@ Simon Stephenson

I can see only too clearly that you don't follow my logic. Let me try again:-

You see a problem (i.e:- political indoctrination in our schools) and believe you have a solution.

To achieve that solution requires the replacement of our current education infrastructure (predominantly state-run with some private provision) with a fully private system.

The question is "How do you achieve the transition?"

And the answer is "Only by a massive act of will by Central Government."

And even if any party won an election with such a policy (which they will not)and actually managed to implement the policy, then there will be always be subsequent democratic campaigns at local government level to reintroduce a non-private sector.

These campaigns could only be overridden by Central Government diktat.

Richard

Simon Stephenson,

You say that we should 'do everything possible to encourage schools to teach children to think OF others, and FOR themselves.'

I absolutely agree. But this would be a direct and explicit challenge to the consumerist values and the worship of free market competitiveness that have been dominant at bleast since Thatcher - the values of the neoliberal orthodoxy. You wouldn't be depoliticising education; you'd be making it more explicitly political. It is impossible to teach concern for others as a first principle without coming into conflict with consumerist values. This is the old conflict between moral conservatism in the Judaeo-Christian tradition and free market conservatism.

And how would concern for others as a first principle be compatible with turning the whole education system into a profit-driven free market?

Timeto WakeUP

Well just been listening to the Prime Minister taking a debate reference the Rioting in the UK. OK there is a lot of talking and praising of the Emergency Services, but there seems to be no discussion to the gain an understanding of the underlying causes of the rioting.
What makes you laugh is the UK is facing the recession falling deeper and affecting everyone more and more, with the governments talking cuts of employees in services. Please have a look and listen to these politicians debating, this is an underlying cause to the UK's problems. The majority of the politicians in the debate I watched were probably all on a salary of more than £20,000 a year with expenses that are probably more than the average wage of a UK person.
The underlying causes of the problems being faced in the UK today is down to past and present politicians. The debt of the world is a cause of the invasions of the oil producing countries, how much money has been lost in the implantation of the policies since it all began in 2001-2002, IRAQ alone the monies go into trillions of dollars (LOST). Where does that money come from, the rioting at the moment is brought on by the debt / lack of monies and the new law on terrorism, where SOC / Police are over enforcing the law and stopping anyone and everyone.
After looking from the outside it is evident that the UK, need to sort out there problems before criticising and implementing policies to control the countries governments. This will save monies to be used in the UK.
Politicians need to start getting to the bottom of the issues and making decisions for the UK and its people, as it is evident that this is only the start of the problems unless they stop talking, shouting and chanting in the debate chamber and start taking action and talking to people who are suffering and listen to what is happening in the UK.
I can honestly say watching and listening to this debate, my first one. It is embarrassing to say that a majority of these people are in control of the UK, with the chanting, shouting, criticism, bitching and bull sh**. No wonder the UK is in the mess it is in at the moment.

Ron Todd

Anton

I think that my morals compare well with any church goers that I know. I can have morals without beliving in some all powerful god in the sky.

I S

Arrant tosh. These denizens of the underclass are not lacking in any of the basic necessities of life. They are, as ever, aping their ghetto brothers across the pond.
The people I most sympathise with are those working hard for a low wage and then having to live in the midst of these amoral thugs.

Ron Todd

Richard

I don’t see any conflict between thinking of others and capitalism. No business can make a profit without have some concern for what others want and providing it at the right price. And thinking for yourself while hated by those that want to rule us in some socialist paradise, is a necessity for a competitive wealth creating society.

What is wrong with making a profit? Education is clearly not working as it is. H how is providing well-paid jobs for non-productive bureaucrats paying failed teachers, and having an exam system designed to let even the barely literate get qualifications deemed from on high the equivalent of proper exams, any worse than companies competing to give a better education and get passes in proper exams.

Richard

Was Bob Diamond thinking of others when he accepted his 6.5 million bonus and then urged the government to not to mitigate its austerity policies? Was Fred the Shred thinking of others when he accepted that pension after being bailed out by the taxpayer? There is more than one kind of looting, and plenty of people are making the comparison.

Actually, Ron Todd, I'm not entirely blind to the point that you're making, but there is a difference between thinking about how you can make money out of other people by selling them things and thinking conscientiously about their interests. That's why we not only need capitalism; we need strong restraints on it too.

Simon Stephenson.

Richard

In answer to your 11.00am post, I agree with the second paragraph of your reply to Ron Todd. There is a theory of automatic wealth trickle-down that it is blindingly obvious does not actually happen in practice. We need to accept this, and also to accept that there is no successful alternative to creative entrepreneurial spirit as far as wealth production is concerned. We need to kill stone dead the argument that entrepreneurial spirit is wrecked by oversight, at the same time as killing the argument that State-led committees can be as effective as entrepreneurialism in creating wealth.

Ron Todd

Richard

I have never heard of anybody arguing that capitalism should have no restraints. By its nature some controls required. Part of capitalism is secure property rights for that we need a trustworthy record of who owns what. To do that at least a minimum amount of control is required. Pure capitalism if such a thing is possible requires everybody to have equal knowledge of the markets. Since that is unlikely to happen any time soon protection is required for those with less knowledge from those with more.

It is up to each individual if we are talking about mentally competent adults, not anybody else and certainly not the state to decide what is in their interest, they can then choose how to achieve what they need to do to fulfil those interests. Most of the time it will be better (and cheaper) for them to get what they need goods services, or education from non-state non monopolistic providers. Even if those providers make a profit.

Baron

Richard gets annoyed: “Was Bob Diamond thinking of others when he accepted his 6.5 million bonus and then urged the government to not to mitigate its austerity policies? Was Fred the Shred thinking of others when he accepted that pension after being bailed out by the taxpayer?”

you’ve mentioned just two bankers, one could add a whole list of people who get millions, more, one can mention scores of BBC tossers for getting close to millions for what? Spending the license fee, one could mention footballers, actors, hedge fund managers…..that’s part of the price for having a capitalistic society, the market rules, it may be distasteful to people like you, many others, but in spite of such warts, boils, it’s still the best human construct humans have figured as Simon, Ron point out.

Trapped

In theory if we had -actual- Capitalism, we'd not be in this mess. Why? The banks would have collapsed by now under the weight of their own terrible decisions, a lot of the system of usury would also collapse with it. The markets would suffer their inevitable correction and property values would come back into line with what people can afford, and not random figures determined on speculative wealth.

We do not live in a Capitalist society, we live in a Corporatist society, one that engages in larceny on scales that make these rioters look like small change, and instead of nailing them to the wall like we should do with the rioters alike, we instead celebrate their theft and redirection of wealth. Privatising the profits, and making the debt and risk the taxpayer's burden.

revolution

The previous writer put it best when she called them Tony Blair's children.
That is going to be Blair's legacy along with Iraq.

Richard

Good piece by Peter Oborne in the Telegraph today -

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/peteroborne/100100708/the-moral-decay-of-our-society-is-as-bad-at-the-top-as-the-bottom/

He makes the point I was trying to make, essentially - that if we are to talk about moral values, in consistency we must talk about bankers and politicians as well as teenagers smashing windows to steal trainers. Diamond and Goodwin are extreme cases, yes, but they are not aberrations from the neoliberal free-market system; it brought them into being and has no moral vocabulary with which to rebuke them.

A thorough-going libertarian capitalist cannot in consistency believe in an authoritarian moral education. I'm not sure whether Trapped is advocating that position or only summarising it. Ron Todd says that what is in someone's interest should be left purely to their own judgment and regulated only by the market: it's not up to the state or anyone else to decide for them. This, in effect, denies the existence of a public domain on which we all depend and which therefore has to be maintained and defended collectively (not to mention any question of fairness or justice). I don't see how that view is compatible with a demand for strong moral education of the kind Simon Stephenson and others here have advocated.

Simon Stephenson.

Baron : 12.49am

"that’s part of the price for having a capitalistic society, the market rules, it may be distasteful to people like you, many others, but in spite of such warts, boils, it’s still the best human construct humans have figured as Simon, Ron point out"

I'm not going to allow you to misalign me in this way, Baron. My position, as stated, is that aggregated individual ingenuity is the best way of maximising wealth-generation, but also that individual action may work in a way that is counter-social, extinguishing some of the potential for social good that can be derived from the most efficient production of value.

Unlike some, I'm afraid I'm not prepared to assume that free enterprise has an automatic mechanism to ensure that not only is value-creation optimised, but so also is general social benefit. Nor do I agree that measures to discourage the counter-social aspects of individual endeavour need necessarily interfere unduly with the process of doing well by doing good. On the contrary, in fact - I reckon the more it is made clear that fortunes cannot be made through by-passing society, the more the individual entrepreneur will realise that he needs to produce value before he can accumulate it for himself.

Duncan Fitton

Nobody has said much about the reverse eugenics which the welfare state has produced, probably because it is very un-PC.In the nature versus nurture debate scientific research shows a roughly 50/50 split between genes and upbringing. Any dog breeder will tell you that three generations of selection will produce docility or aggressive tendencies, a lone wolf, a social dog or a canine psychopath, of course these tendencies can be modified by training, but the potential is in the genes. Apart from the shameful middle-class thrill-seeking rioters, the majority are third generation bred from the worst in society, paid for by taxing the people who should be having children. We cannot spend a huge chunk of our GDP to employ super nannies to do what a parent should do. We could pay stupid girls not to get pregnant by the local jack-the-lad. Twenty quid a week to have a contraceptive implant could be the long-term saving of Britain.

Simon Stephenson.

Richard : 1.45pm

I second your praise for Peter Oborne's article. I also accept that any system of education must necessarily be in part authoritarian and political.

My conviction, though, is that the way forward is for people to be helped to feel better about themselves, and the wonderful gift of humanity they have received. For their socialism, for want of a better word, to come from within, not to be forced upon them from outside.

Baron

Simon sees the solution: “Nor do I agree that measures to discourage the counter-social aspects of individual endeavour need necessarily interfere…”.

Simon, so who is the one to decide what the measures should be, you, me, the Politburo or who.

Look what happened before Northern Rock hits the rocks, plenty of measures around, plenty of the clever, overpaid ones around, and a fat lot of good did it do.

Of curse, we should have a set of rules, we have always had a set of rules worked out from experience, observations, crisis, your insistence that an enterprise should be constrained by measures aimed at naughty, misbehaving individuals to achieve social good doesn’t cut it, more often than not the social good is defined by some 3rd rate political gnomes purely for holding on to political power, the rule of law and a basis set of time tested rules should be enough, my friend.

Baron

Richard, sir, it may have escaped your attention the bankers didn’t break any laws, the rioters and politicians did, in your view it may not matter, in view of others it does, one cannot conflate law breaking with misguided personal judgment.

What pisses Baron is how many are shouting about morality picking on characters like Fred the Shred when many of the same individuals said FA when the RBS tosser was delivering billions to the Treasury coffers, billions that were seeping through to such individuals, directly or indirectly.

Simon Stephenson.

Baron : 8.56pm

Here's a good article for you to read:-

http://www.johnkay.com/2010/08/18/robber-barons-of-the-rhine

Good politics would have ensured that at minimal cost the Rhine Gorge was kept free of rent-seekers.

Poor politics would have kept it free of de facto rent-seekers, but at an inordinate cost in quasi rent-seekers, as those mis-recruited to be the agents of enforcement see their opportunity as money-making, rather than the provision of a definable service for equitable reward.

And bad politics, of course, would have been where authority merely took over the barons' rent-seeking activities for themselves, and used the Rhine Gorge as a cash cow, just because they could, and irrespective of whether net benefit could be obtained from the spending of the levies elsewhere.

Get political structures right, and sea-change benefits are possible, but leave them as they are, and you are probably right to say that little beneficial will come out of them.

Simon Stephenson.

Baron : 9.05pm

Your first paragraph is a false distinction. Certainly there is a difference between breaking the law and remaining within it, and as far as behaviour goes, this is a crucial difference. But we're not talking only about behaviour - we're talking about attitude, too. The law can't cover attitude, because this is unprovable - but the purpose of law is not really to protect others just from the specific, proscribed behaviours which it covers, it is to protect them from the application of malignant attitude. If malignant attitude is being channelled into behaviour which is not illegal under existing law, then it's up to us either to proscribe this behaviour, or to seek to change attitudes.

It really isn't any good to work on the premise that it's impossible for attitude to be malignant if it is channelled into behaviour that's within the law.

Simon Stephenson.

Richard

Going along with the Oborne article, Howard Jacobson makes some good points in his piece today in the Independent.

(CoffeeHouse doesn't allow me to post the link, but the article's easily found)

Clare

The 'lost' generation is not mustering for war. It's not mustering for anything very much. Most of the time it can't muster the enthusiasm to get out of bed. A bunch of skanks simply worked out - with the aid of the assorted electronic gizmos which they always manage to afford, despite the fact that we are told they are dirt-poor - that the police weren't going to do anything to stop them indulging in free late night shopping and fire-setting. Now that they've been threatened with plastic bullets and water cannons, I confidently predict that they'll spend the rest of the summer playing X-Box and getting off their faces.

Richard

Simon Stephenson,

Yes, that's another powerful piece, quite similar to Oborne's. Thanks for directing me to it.

Baron,

If the main moral difference you see between Goodwin or Diamond and the teenager smashing a window to steal trainers is that Goodwin and Diamond are within the law while the teenager breaks it, then you have surely come to the point of arguing that the law must be changed to regularise the position. The complaint that 'there's one law for the rich and another for the poor' has always been commonly heard, but recent years have given it an unusual force, and it's hard to think of any complaint more corrosive of respect for the law. We won't get far with the restoration of moral authority without being able to show robustly that we have a legal system that doesn't work unfairly in the interests of the rich.

I'm not arguing that there is exactly a direct motivational link between what the bankers and politicians got away with and the smashing and looting in the streets. The looters' appalling lack of concern for the immediate safety of others sets limits to this comparison. But one of the things Oborne and Jacobson are saying, I think, is that we now have a generation of politicians and cultural and business leaders so compromised by the culture that permitted Goodwin and Murdoch and the expenses frauds as to be peculiarly ill-equipped to provide moral leadership.

I agree with you that the people who had no moral misgivings about Goodwin and the other bankers before the credit crunch have some apologising to do.

Cynic

"But the slowly dawning realisation is that we should have got to grips with this years ago. " I suppose it hasn't occured to you that those people who did try to get to grips with the situation previously are now either in prison, dead or out of a job? The message was clear - keep your head down. Hopefully there will now be a sea change at the top and telling the little darlings off will no longer infringe their yooman rites.

Cynic

Spot on, Duncan Fitton! There's been a letter in the MSM from a Minister saying we have to have more houses (hence we shall have to concrete over more land). Why? Because the population (and not the indigenous one, either) is growing out of control. Time to have some incentives to keep it in one's trousers or keep one's legs closed, as appropriate.

Maddy1

Right on , you are so perceptive Bright!
Social intercourse as
unrest began for me between the "Kathy Come Home" TV, documentry,
and the release of the "Their Satanic Majesties Request LP.