Two elderly women in front of a burnt-out post box in the aftermath of the London riots. Photo credit: Laura Anne Chamberlain http://www.flickr.com/photos/laurachamberlain/6038078543/sizes/l/in/set-72157627299854281/
Left-wingers have voiced concern that the widely anticipated crack-down could see the UK take an unpleasant lurch towards authoritarianism, which risks further alienating troubled communities. Prime Minister David Cameron has suggested that the use of rubber bullets and water cannon, together with powers to compel the removal of face masks, will be considered as potential measures to quell future riots. Right-wing law and order proponents applaud the prime minister’s tough talk.
“The broken society is back at the top of my political agenda,” David Cameron said in a Monday speech in Oxfordshire, in which he said there’s been a “slow-motion moral collapse” in the UK.
Over 1,200 people have been charged since rioting flared in Tottenham, north London. Over the weekend, 16,000 police were on duty in London, triple the usual number.
- “Wishy washy won’t wash now, Dave,” warned The Daily Mail’s Peter McKay, who called for the prime minister to seize the moment and take teak-tough measures to address society’s ills.”The real enemy of political reform, though, is public focus,” observed McKay, who said “we’re all keen on improving the world when our TV screens and newspapers are full of burning buildings and fleeing looters,” but “when normal life resumes, we forget the bitter folk at the bottom of the heap who are remote from all public discourse and debate, deaf to both conservative and liberal pieties and antagonistic towards authority, who might kill, burn buildings, steal property and fight the police if the opportunity presents itself.” McKay backed proposals to trigger wholesale council house evictions and welfare benefit denial for riot perpetrators and their families.
Does Big Government debauch human capital?
- Kill the Nanny State now! It’s bred ‘inarticulate sub-humans.’ Right-wing National Review columnist Mark Steyn tied the riots to the imploding world economy: “The downgrade and the riots are part of the same story: Big Government debauches not only a nation’s finances but its human capital, too.” “The London rioters are the children of dependency, the progeny of Big Government,” argued Steyn, who said the trouble-makers have been “marinated in ‘stimulus’ their entire lives.” The American writer told readers there “is literally nothing you can’t get Her Majesty’s Government to pay for … One tenth of the adult population has done not a day’s work since Tony Blair took office on May 1, 1997.” Steyn stressed that the riots mark the “logical dead end of the Nanny State.”
- “How far right are we going?” asked a concerned Mary Ann Sieghart at The Independent, who reminded that “if a conservative is a liberal who’s just been mugged, then almost all English city-dwellers are going to feel a lot more right-wing now.” Sieghart argued that “’tough on riots’ is all very well, but it’s not enough on its own” and backed Labour leader Ed Milband’s argument that the “smash and grab” mentality of the rioters must be examined to stop the situation recurring: “You can lock ‘em up, after all, but you can’t throw away the key. The looters will be out of jail in six months’ time and the problem won’t be solved. They will simply have become more alienated, less employable and better skilled at criminal pursuits.”
Is ‘feral’ capitalism the root cause of the riots?
- Feral capitalism to blame. Writing at The Staggers, The New Statesman rolling blog, university lecturer Simon Reid-Henry argued that the “real violence we are seeing this week is the violence of a ‘feral’ capitalism.” Reid-Henry argued that we must all accept that we “own their (the rioters) violence because we all buy into a system that provokes it.” With this in mind, the writer insisted that “we are not advised to push the looters away” by branding them as sick criminals. Reid-Henry argued that the “structural violence of capitalism (be it widening forms of inequality or deteriorating conditions for work) and the physical violence of the street needs to be taken seriously” as a causal factor, and stressed that the post-riot investigations “should shine a light on the system itself rather than merely the symptoms.”
