Predictaby much of the reaction to the riots has fallen into class and ethnic stereotypes, the great British obsessions. When, as far as I could tell, the rioters got one thing right – there was no discrimination by race or class, as early court appearances confirm. I’ve been there with the best of them on Twitter, saying what I think. Well, it was better than sitting there glued in horror to the repetitive streams of appalling images churned out on BBCNews. But the main thing that struck me was that this was very ordinary behaviour played out on a very extraordinary scale.
Those of us who have spent our lives in the arena, rather than the timid souls who sit on the sidelines coming up with glib formulae or using the disaster to further their own political agendas, know that these things have happened because they have been rehearsed for at least two decades and no one in power was willing to take what they were being told seriously. The line from Romeo & Juliet
“And I, for winking at your discords, have lost a brace of kinsmen…all are punished.”
is spot on, and shows that we have been here before, for centuries, maybe from the beginning of time. But that doesn’t make it OK. I would hope the rioters themselves have decided to put the cork back in the bottle having seen what’s happened. I fear that what could go wrong at this crucial moment is that Parliament will get it wrong and slap some inappropriate plaster on what they perceive to be the wound. If those who have hijacked this grim happening for their own political purposes, people like Gus John, Darcus Howe, Ken Livingstone, succeed, then we will have legitimised the indefensible. Let’s not pretend that the rioters are uneducated or marginalised. They are neither. Again, the rollcall of people appearing in court shows that.
What we have here is the abandonment of common sense, respect, fairness and lawfulness that can be seen in hundreds of schools on Leavers’ Days, on any day. “Rushing” is a phenomenon that has been around for decades. It is wild, boyish, boorish behaviour, bred of a belief that if the numbers are large enough, authority can’t touch you. Well, good headteachers across the land have made sure there ARE consequences for such behaviour, though they were under immense pressure during the 90s and the early 00s to LIMIT the use of sanctions such as exclusions for this very kind of behaviour. Blair and his cabinet recruited focus groups (I was on them) but didn’t want to hear what the frontliners said.
The furious shopkeeper in Ealing touched the issues at the centre of the problem when she screamed “What are the parents doing!” The issue is to do with kids learning about consequences otherwise you end up with what we got this week. The rioters did very bad things this week. But I don’t accept that they are bad people. They are people who made bad choices. They made those choices for three reasons.
One. Because they had never suffered real consequences for similar behaviour before.
Two. Because they thought they could get away with it as there were so many of them.
And three. Because they have justifiably no respect for most authority figures. But how could they? A corrupt press. MPs fiddling expenses. Police in cahoots with Murdoch. Pedophile priests. Bankers still paying themselves bonuses while the rest of us bail their broken down banks out. There are no bastions of authority which have not been discredited.
So let’s not demonise them. Let’s not turn them into political freedom fighters. Let us make sure they face the consequences so they learn. But, for God’s sake, let’s look at ourselves in the mirror, you, me and all those who are supposed to be grown-up.
