Something good is going come out of the riots: people care about them. No news event since the 1980s has had people so aroused to read the news and try to really understand what has been happening. The events of recent weeks are a challenge to all traditional partisan narratives, and, to put it simply, no-one is at all sure what on earth we should do next. This is a good thing: the riots have raised the level of political engagement and debate in Britain to a level not seen in years. Everyone I meet is fizzing with ideas, thoughts, plans, and vivid emotions, from the right (string ‘em up!) to the left (the rich had it coming. Pass the houmous, dahling).

This won’t make the people who have lost their homes, jobs and, in a few awful cases, their loved ones, feel any better – if anything, it must make it worse that the powers that be are so utterly confused. But when the dust settles, it looks to me like the consensus of indifference, an ‘each to their own’ attitude to social issues and an ‘every man for himself’ attitude to the economy, that has characterised British politics since the early 1990s, has been found desperately wanting. Real change is going to come, and will be born out of the crucible of genuine ideological debate and political engagement.

For me, there are three urgent things that we need to reflect on.

The first is that, since Blair, the reaction of government to crisis is all about communications. They react to, and seek to do something about, the images that are relayed in 24-hour news, not the reality on the streets. This approach is characterised by the laughable phenomenon that is ‘Cobra’, the government’s crisis committee. Is the best thing to do when there’s an emergency that requires decisive action really to convene a committee to have a meeting? ‘Prime Minister, there’s a crisis.’ ‘Quick, find me Eric Pickles – I want to hear what he has to contribute to a round-table discussion.’ Indeed, the point that Cobra slows everything down has been made before, by former anti-terrorist chief Andy Hayman. Cobra had only been called (and in secret) a couple of times in history before July 7^th, but on that day, it seemed to the government that people found the idea of a secret committee with a cool name rather reassuring. Now, Cobra is called not for emergency issues of national security, but when there’s floods in Cumbria. The real point of meetings of Cobra is obvious: to give 24-hour news a story (which they can fill time with: ministers are arriving, ministers are meeting, ministers have left looking important) which is about how the government is doing something (buying politicians time to do what they do best: prevaricate).

This leads into the second point, the irresponsibility of the media. There’s a risk that thousands of people across the country may go out looting. What better way to encourage them than to write and talk about anarchy on the streets, Britain out of control, the police helpless? The riots weren’t truly riots: the word implies something like the poll tax riots, ordinary people pushed over the limit and out of control. What happened last week was that criminals – the kind of opportunistic criminals who break the law regularly – were given a free rein and the confidence to exploit an unprecedented opportunity to wreak havoc. The kind of crime that happens all the time in Britain’s cities therefore happened in a highly concentrated way. The media are entirely to blame for creating this situation – the media made the news. It should be no wonder that journalists have been so uninterested in the comparisons that can be made with similar riots in other countries - those in the banlieues of Paris in 2005, and in Vancouver earlier this year - for their priority is to present these events as occurring within a vacuum, as chaos. They get away with this because of the small-mindedness of our politicians, inhabiting a 24-hour news cycle, blind to the the long-term (as most horrifically demonstrated in recent times by our appalingly misjudged intervention in Libya). How I wish that on Tuesday morning David Cameron had appealed for calm rather than pledging to restore order. To adopt the language of a Steve Hilton, Britain needed to chill out. Dave just wound everyone up more, by prioritising image over action and doing what the media told him they expected him to do.

Thirdly, these riots weren’t caused by the cuts. All commentary on what ’caused’ the riots is being really very predictable. For the left, it’s the inevitable consequence of the alienation caused by unprecedented levels of inequality (it’s all rather tragic, dahling. Seriously, pass the houmous).  For the right, it’s ‘O tempora, O mores’, and it’s time to bring back national service and take away people’s benefits (like that’s even a thing). Some blame the banks (which is a bit like blaming your feet because you can’t run fast enough). And, yes, many are blaming the cuts (which haven’t actually happened yet, but politics is all about perception).

What we need to consider is the general context and environment out of which the violence on the streets came, and what we should do next. These riots grew out of the same origins as knife crime on London’s streets. The riots were about culture - the culture that motivates teenage boys to deliberately abdicate their future, by being disruptive, by not working, and by leaving school not just without qualifications, but barely able to read and write, seeking fulfilment and status through violence. Government and politics has far, far more power to shape cultural attitudes from the top down (whether it intends to or not) than our craven and irresponsible politicians and journalists realise.

In my view, it’s not “the cuts”, but the whole attitude that the government has held for the last generation towards the poor and the young, a context in which the cuts are no aberration - they fit perfectly neatly. It’s an attitude of indifference masked as liberalism, of apathy towards the needs of the most vulnerable enabled by a desire to not look like a snob, and that inability or unwillingness to empathise that leads to highly misguided policies like stop and search. What hope do we have that our ‘underclass’ can value things like libraries, sports programmes, schools and – most importantly – simply having a job, when their government so clearly doesn’t either? If we continually refer to the poorest, the most vulnerable, the least well educated as an ‘underclass’ they will indeed behave like one. I quite agree with David Cameron that the answers lie in our communities and in our ‘broken society’. I just don’t think he understands what that means. Thanks to this government’s policy, the entire city of Manchester will soon have just one public toilet. Do the government really believe people piss on the street just because they weren’t brought up right?

Filed under: Uncategorized, conservatives, davidcameron, labour, spendingcuts, tonyblair, ukpolitics on August 16th, 2011