When the going gets tough... Go shopping with a brick
I was in London during the looting and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.
The social unrest throughout the UK in August caught many people by surprise. But considering the recent changes to our education system, the level of youth unemployment and our Anglo-Saxon obsession with celebrities and consumption it is hardly surprising that looting was the obvious answer.
By Matthew Lloyd-Cape, Political Economy PhD candidate
For Brits returning to CEU this semester, a common question asked is “so did you get a nice flatscreen TV this summer”? And this has been a refreshing change from “do you know the queen” I have to say. The images London burning, and rioting and looting throughout Britain was indeed shocking, and demonstrate what can happen when the heady mix of social exclusion, recession and our rampant Anglo-Saxon obsession for consumption are inflamed by outrage at an extradudicial killing by the police. The best phrase to describe the looting I have so far heard is “aggressive consumption”, where shopping sans credit became a political act. The suddenness and seemingly isolated nature of the riots caught most of us by surprise and this has led to some commentators, most notably the right-wing political elite to describe the events as isolated, non-political criminality perpetrated by the “morally sick” as our Prime Minister so helpfully describes the rioters. They cite a breakdown in traditional values, poor parenting and a “rampant welfare state” (whatever that means) as the cause. Labelling the problem as moral, not a political is depressing in so many ways, not least because it implies that our leaders see no connection between morals and politics – Blair's managerial style of politics come to full fruition. I wonder if perhaps one of our political theory student could draw up a reading list..?
To be sure there was a great deal of opportunism and criminality on display, most shockingly in the CCTV footage of a Malaysian student who, having had his jaw broken and wallet stolen was then robbed again by a group of men pretending to come to his rescue. My friends sister narrowly escaped a blazing inferno when a mob burned down the shop directly below her apartment in Tottenham. Of course much of the behaviour was bloody minded and outrageous. Burning down people's houses is just not cool, and smashing up your neighbours small business seems more like petty jealousy (and in some cases racial hatred) than anything else. But unfortunately, these acts did not transmit the actual reason why young working class people in Britain are so angry, which is exactly how our political elite want things left.
Such stories, while repellent and completely inexcusable, have unfortunately enabled politicians to engage in “lock 'em up and throw away the key” populism. The left-wing Guardian newspaper reports that prison sentences have been around 25% longer than normal, with one 11 year old boy being given an 18 month Youth Rehabilitation Order (involving anything from electronic tagging and exclusion from school to curfews and community service) for stealing a rubbish bin worth £50. The minutely calculated indignant rage with which David Cameron pontificated is an easy and obvious political manoeuvre and conveniently avoids the need to analyse the causes of this social flare-up. This is important for Cameron and his cabinet since any question of educational access, social inequality, class and social mobility are toxic topics for them to deal. Eighteen out of our twenty three Cabinet Ministers are millionaires, many of those rich by birth and most of them in receipt of a free university education to boot. But these topics are exactly where we need to look in order to get at the truth. While the data on the rioters is still being gathered, one can only conjecture but that is no reason not to ask simple questions.
For instance, who was it that took to the streets? In light of the fact that around a quarter of prosecuted rioters were under 18 and over half were of university age, let us briefly cast our minds back to the student protests of last year, when the Conservative Party headquarters were attacked. The press tended to focus on the enormous increase in university student fees, from £3290 to over £9000 per year. But a great many of the student on the streets were fighting a different government policy: the cancellation of the Education Maintenance Allowance, a £30 per-week sum to keep children from poor and socially excluded backgrounds in school in order to finish their A levels. Many of the children receiving this grant come from socially deprived backgrounds in areas like Tottenham and Hackney – the epicentre of the London riots. The social exclusion of poor students from even finishing high school let alone aspire to university is perhaps more serious an issue as the university fees and one which has been consistently ignored by the mainstream media and political parties.
But despite the fact that the students were ignored, why has this frustration lead to such violence and criminality instead of political responses? Why are people “shopping with attitude” rather than starting a youth party or burning down the banks in the City, an obvious target of blame for the pitiful youth employment and education prospects in the UK? As mentioned above, this is in part explainable by our obsession with shopping, status and celebrity. In 2006 research by England's Leaning and Skills Council found that one in ten children would drop out of school in order to be on TV, and one in six thought that appearing on a reality TV show would make them famous. We have an unhealthy passion for celebrity in the UK, and if you can't be famous you can at least dress famous. This is certainly part of the explanation for why ipods, expensive clothes and footwear were the major targets of the looting. Partly it was due to a generational disconnect in the UK. Intergenerational social mobility in the UK is the lowest in Europe, a recent LSE report attests, and a great deal of this decline is due to educational (non)attainment by those at the bottom of the heap. Youth unemployment is presently hovering just below the 1 million mark in the UK, a sizeable chunk of the 2.5 million total. This equates to roughly 20% unemployment figure for the under 25s compared to around 8% for the population as a whole.
These depressing figures contribute to the reason why children in the UK are the unhappiest in the OECD, despite relatively high levels of material wealth, according to 2007 UNICEF research. We are surrounded by a culture glorifying footballers, reality TV stars and the like but provide fewer and fewer avenues for young people to get the material rewards we are told to desire. Professor Bradshaw, a leading academic on the topic of child poverty, argues that “The more unequal a society, the relatively deprived people will feel, and child poverty is still double the rate it was in 1979”. Coupling this to a £50,000 university debt and suddenly the life chances of the under 25s today looks far more grim than for their parents generation. So we have a double impact of social exclusion, the young being denied the chances of their parents and the poor being increasingly excluded from their main means of escaping poverty – a meritocratic educational funding system. In short the young have been cut off from the good times their parents enjoyed and both major political parties have let this happen.
Another reason why violence rather than politics has been visited on the capital is the insidious but rarely discussed feature of class in our politics and economics in general, and in the crisis particularly. It is the youth and the poor who are suffering this crisis, while just a mile away from Hackney lies the City of London where another group of mostly young men wreaked havoc on the financial capital just a few short years ago. The national response to this set of hudlums was to reward them with a bank bailout £850 billion pounds, with no cap on bonuses. This figure puts the £100 million cost of the riots this summer into quite a different perspective. Yes, stealing a TV worth £200 is bad, but destroying hundreds of pension funds is a crime on an entirely different magnitude.
Our national response to the banking crisis is teaching people that power is as power does, and despite the valiant attempt of British politicians to not use the “C” word, class politics is surely making a comeback in a big way. With 80% of MPs in the Cabinet being millionaires, and with the poor bailing out the rich, the government's claim that “we are all in this together” cannot but ring hollow on the ears of the young and unemployed. Class and education have always gone together in UK politics with the old boy network always visible just beneath the surface. Of the 51 Prime Ministers in our nations history 18 went to just one secondary school (Eton) and half studied at Oxford. David Cameron did both.
So, in a round about way the roots of riots do become slightly less opaque. There is indeed a moral problem, but not as Cameron meant it. The moral decay is in our political system and the perverted mechanisms of welfare, in the re-emerging class politics, in the abdication of responsibility of one generation to the next, and in our indescribably myopic approach to economy-building. The most disappointing aspect of riots has been the complete failure of the left to capitalise on what appears to be a new groundswell of mass political discontent. This is more concerning than mystifying since the Labour Party has been explicitly trying to shed it's working class origins since 1995. But unless a mainstream political party attempts to bring the young, jobless people in to the political machinery and listen to their concerns, no doubt there will be more “aggressive consumption” on British streets. Either that or some other politically entrepreneurial party (Jobbik UK?!) will provide an outlet for the frustrated generation.
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