History teaches us … we learn nothing from history

1976: On my left is a small white kid with a broken bottle. On my right a taller-than-me (and I’m 183cm) black kid.

It’s nice to be in the middle, mediating race relations …*

We are in a coffee bar run by London’s Borough of Brent (as it was then and still may be) in the Harrow Rd.

I’m the manager, charged by the Borough to run a part-time coffee, burger and pool table refuge for street kids, aimless kids, disenfranchised kids, parentless kids, ill-educated and disaffected kids.

A bit like those who have dominated our television screens in recent days of conflagration, confrontation, nihiilism and mindless violence across the once United Kingdom.

Not much has changed in more than three decades it seems.

It was the Winter of Discontent in Britain in 1976. I was pretty fresh to conversion to Christianity and when not in the Harrow Rd coffee shop whipping up tea and sympathy to the aimless, was working voluntarily in Kilburn’s OK youth club – sponsored by the Inter-Collegiate Christian Union of Oxford University. Kilburn was then a dispossessed area of soul-less Tower Block London.

Kilburn has got a fire symbol over it right now if you look up Google Maps.

The one thing history teaches us, obviously, is that you learn little or nothing from history. Little or nothing has changed in those three-plus decades.

Except perhaps more dispossession; perhaps a greater gap between the rich and poor; perhaps even less able parenting; perhaps greater and more pervasive fear and it’s kneejerk: violence.

Never, ever can you defend mindless greed and violence and lack of simple human empathy. And this is no attempt to. But every action has a reaction. There is a consequence for every tiny decision; every policy. And it plays out … down the ages (as the KJV has it: The sins of the Fathers are visited on the Sons).

And for me Will Hutton nails the underlying reasons for the nihilistic conflagration sweeping the UK in this interview on Radio National PM:

EMILY BOURKE: Some social commentators say the riots are symptomatic of a broken society.

They point to a high and rising unemployment, public services being slashed and rife inequality.

Will Hutton is the author of “Them and Us, Changing Britain – Why We Need a Fair Society”.

He blames discontent on a failed capitalist model, and unfairness that has engulfed British society.

He says Britons need to return to core moral values, where fairness in rewards and punishments is the overarching principle.

I spoke to Will Hutton a short time ago.

WILL HUTTON: It’s become an extraordinarily unfair place Britain. It’s got inequality; all capitalist economies have got inequality but what’s disfiguring particularly about the British and why I say they’re lost is because their innate sense of fairness, that actually rewards related to what you contribute has largely evaporated.

The tremendous steps (phonetic) that actually people at the top in business, in banking, get not just well paid but unfairly well paid, that they get vastly more than what they contribute and what they deserve.

And similarly, there’s a tremendous sense that at the bottom, the opportunity is vanishing in a sense is also not deserved. See, you can work really hard, you can get your apprentice, you can get your vocation and your training and it doesn’t get you anywhere.

And this has been building up for certainly the last 25 years and it was always likely there’d be some sort of crisis and I think that both the riots over the student fees in the autumn of last year and these amazing disturbances over the last few days in London are tribute to that.

EMILY BOURKE: How do you explain the genesis of the dysfunction and the beginnings I suppose of this unfairness?

WILL HUTTON: (laughs) Well there’s a whole book of more than 300 pages where I try to wrestle with it and it doesn’t reduce to 10 seconds but I’ll try.

I think a lot of it is to do with the notion that you should run a capitalist society on the basis of survival of the fittest and this is an idea that’s true also in Australia, and it’s an idea that’s been developing particularly in the United States and exported to the Anglo-Saxon world, we’re all English speaking.

And it’s a very attractive idea for people at the top but if you run a country so that everyone at the bottom is made to feel that they are just losers and that there’s no opportunity then to get to the top because that’s just the way it is, they start behaving like losers and that’s what we’ve been watching in Britain.

EMILY BOURKE: But other Western countries, other Western democracies with capitalist systems aren’t experiencing this level of unrest?

WILL HUTTON: I think they may. I don’t think any capitalist democracy should rest on its laurels at the moment. We’re living through a fantastic financial crisis, everywhere public expenditure is being reined back. You’ve seen very ugly scenes in Greece, big mass protests in Portugal. I think these are all kinds of dysfunctionalities that relate to the belief that societies these days are run in very unfair ways.

The fact it’s most acute in Britain because I think that fairness is a really important value in Britain and secondly I think the scale of the unfairness, the speed with which the incoming coalition government has launched expenditure cuts so that for example in Tottenham where these riots took place, the local authorities simply eliminated, virtually eliminated, in a matter of weeks all the youth services.

Societies can’t take that kind of hit; they just can’t take that kind of hit. They can take it over time or they can take it if it’s carefully managed, but you can’t just brutally cut off arms and legs of a society and expect there to be no reaction, particularly if the whole environment in which things are being done is felt to be so unfair.

And by fairness I mean due desert for what you do. Fairness is not just about apple pie motherhood; fairness is a really complicated idea and deeply felt by human beings. What you put in you should get out in proportion. That rewards should be deserved. And if people feel that those at the top are getting rewards that are undeserved, there’s a visceral response and it’s not just in Britain, it’ll be everywhere.

EMILY BOURKE: You’ve called for a return to core moral values; is that fanciful in this climate?

WILL HUTTON: Well I think that all of this has to be predicated upon a clearly understood notion of fairness. I think we need a generation of politicians to start talking this language because the British understand it very well. One has to talk the language of you will get paid well in Britain but you’ve got to put stuff in, it’s got to be merited. You want big bonuses; you’ve got to put some of your base pay at risk.

EMILY BOURKE: But how does that apply to a generation of disenfranchised youths who have very little hope and they’ve been brought up in abject poverty?

WILL HUTTON: You have to start with the right kind of big language; you’ve got to start with the right words. I was very disappointed with David Cameron’s statement yesterday which was all about, you know, sympathy for the businesses that were looted and sympathy for people who were worried about it and making no attempt to understand or recognise that these people had reasons for doing what they were doing, which also have to be addressed.

You have to, it has to be twin pronged. And if you just talk about repression, policing, that you’re just, you’re worthless criminals, you’re useless riffraff, we want you back indoors or behind bars, all you do is reinforce the sense of monumental unfairness.

If all you’re going to do is put more police on the street and try and lock these guys up, there will be more and more of this in the years ahead. That is not the way to solve it.

EMILY BOURKE: Social commentator Will Hutton the author of the book “Them and Us – Changing Britain – Why We Need a Fair Society”.

From Radio National PM, HERE

* The outcome of this confrontation: An uneasy truce between the warring kids (young men) prevailed. But chaos was to follow later when the kids ran amok in the coffee bar. I called the cops; they never came, as they failed to on another couple of excitable nights. But slow peaceful calm eventually prevailed; with comparitively little damage to the Borough’s coffee bar. Not without a considerable toll on the nerves, however; and I didn’t last much longer than a few months; You look back and think, I coulda done it better …

Read a review of WillHutton’s Book, Them and Us, HERE

Radio National Breakfast also did a fascinating interview with Camila Batmanghelidjh, Founder of the two leading British youth charities: The Place to Be and Kids Company. Listen, download audio:

London Riots: Why are they happening? HERE

And, courtesy of Steve Biddulph, this extract from the British website Compasss:

Compass Special Statement: Anatomy of a riot
Wednesday, August 10 2011

When society feels like it is falling apart it is our job to find ways of binding people back together, to express solidarity over selfishness and hope over fear.

Therefore our first reaction to the frightening extent of looting and disorder that has swept our cities must be to reaffirm our common humanity. Those on the streets, in their houses, the police, the politicians, all of us should recognise that we share the same essential hopes of security, freedom, love and creativity. But we are separated by largely one thing, the accident of birth. As social mobility dwindles and the inequality gap widens, the brute luck of who our parents are dominates our lives. Some come to the debate from Eton via Tuscany, others have never left the streets that now burn. We go our separate ways but this common humanity inevitably keeps breaking through.

So, second we should recognise how much these events show we have in common. What some have unhelpfully labeled a ‘feral underclass’ is simply the mirror image of a now feral elite – the further a few rise beyond society the further many have to fall below it. But both feel compelled to cheat to get what they want. The bankers bend the rules, take reckless risks with other people’s money and asset strip companies and therefore communities; politicians lie and fiddle their expenses for moats; the media eaves-drop on the lives of the stricken and the police are on the take. And the ones in hoods who have no opportunity take it when they see it and have nothing to lose and so little to fear. No not all who are poor are looting but when every police cell in London is full something deep and more profound is happening. So who has the moral high ground? The rich and powerful who cheat for the trappings of super success; or the poor, powerless and humiliated who want so little but see the behaviour of those ‘at the top’. We don’t have to condone the lawlessness (and we shouldn’t) to understand it – so that it’s less likely to happen again.

The similarities don’t end there. The zombie rioters mirror us too, the zombie shoppers who spend every weekend walking through the front doors of the shops rather than through a smashed window after dark. We all want ‘what’s in store for us’. How could it be otherwise when today ‘being normal’ is defined by our ability to keep up as consumers? We all see the same 3000 selling images everyday, relentlessly imposing a single vision of success and we want it. We just differ on how.

Catherine Holmes, a resident in Hackney emailed the BBC in the early hours of Tuesday morning to say “we spoke to looters trying to get home, the only explanation they gave for their behaviour was that they had no money today. It is sad to think that these people are thinking of only the next moment”.

What seemed achingly sad, along with the sight of small shopkeepers losing their livelihoods, were the trophies of lawlessness. It was not transformative power or a different world the rioters sought but almost pathetically just a new pair of trainers. Their ambition, like the wider culture, is only to own.

Ironically perhaps, even the police and the rioters have something in common. The failed consumers, the looters, who take what they can’t buy are used to police us. Systematically they are deployed to create the dark sense of the ‘other’ who we desperately try not to be like. It is in part the fear of their wretched lives that keep the rest of us on the exhausting treadmill of earning and owning. No other option for life is presented or allowed. This is our prison.

Thirty years ago, the last time our cities burned, the shopping revolution, and the rampant individualism it spawned, was just under way – this time it has a stranglehold on all of us.

Finally, we might not know exactly how or why but we all know that the current world order is breaking down. We stand on the precipice of another global meltdown with no resources this time to clear up the mess. And we all know too that the planet is burning beyond our ability to control it. Events are on fast-forward as we stumble from crisis to crisis with no chance to catch our breath. The neo-liberal hegemony of the last three decades is over. Even Charles Moore of the Daily Telegraph recognizes the game is up for the right. But in this interregnum morbid symptoms appear. While we still think we are a fair, prosperous and contented nation, events tell us otherwise. The poor get poorer and the planet burns, creating a third crisis of democracy itself. To which there will always be a reaction.

The sky is darkening not just with the dense smoke of burnt out buildings, but the sight of chickens coming home to roost; a social recession that long predated the economic recession, the rise of a feral elite with no responsibility to anyone but themselves, the loss of the public realm and any sense of public interest, the cuts which hit the poorest hardest and the monotonous creation of a consumer monoculture culture – that has now been taken away.

If we tell young people that their worth is to be measured in terms of how much they own or how close they get to Oxbridge, while pursuing an economic programme predicated on ever-widening inequality, and a political agenda that increasingly alienates the majority from all centres of real decision-making, when our democracy fails to hear their voices, then how in all honesty do we think the ones left at the bottom are going to react? You don’t have to be a police chief let alone a Kaiser Chief to predict a riot.

The finger can be pointed across the spectrum, from right to left. No political party has done the right thing. Cameron once talked about recapitalizing not just the banks but the poor. New Labour said it would be tough on the causes of crime. But it goes wider through every major civil society organisation – the churches, the unions, the big NGOs right down to all of us and all our lives. We take too much and give too little. We deal with symptoms of the rot and never the causes.

Hope can only come from what we have in common. This is the building block of a good society in which no one gets so far ahead that some get left so far behind. People need hope and the belief that we are all in this together. It cannot be austerity for many and riotous prosperity for so few. It is a society in which democracy decides to build parks, playgrounds and youth centres not more, prisons, penthouses and shopping centres. We must commit to rebuilding lives and hopes with apprenticeships and good jobs, with support for meaningful education for all and for communities with services and public spaces in which society itself can be nourished. Right now we need strong local government and localised police forces accountable to the community they serve and through which all are made equal before the law. We need to renew a social contract and revive the notion of the public interest by examining the way in which unaccountable elites now dominate our world.

And we need a good society in which earning and owning comes second to the time to love, care and be truly free not just as individuals but crucially by working together to shape and mould the big things in our lives.

Our common humanity came shining through again as people volunteered to help clear up the mess, as the broom suddenly became a powerful metaphor for collective action, it was evident in the community leaders trying to bind back together their broken neighbourhoods, it can be seen in the good cops and the brave firefighters who understand the idea of a public service ethos. Our common humanity is all we have.

Let this week be a wake up call. There is more to clean up than broken shop windows. We have much to clean out and then an economy and society to rebuild. Only together can we make that happen.

This statement is from the Compass website, HERE

• Thatcherism was just kicking in: pweller.mp3