Many things have been said about the UK riots that took place over the last week, but I don’t think anyone has put causation as succinctly as inspectorgadget when he said “They hate you for the same reasons they hate us, because you have what they do not; industry, motivation, patience and morals.”
I come at this issue from a position of having grown up in a council estate, worked in the department for work and pension, and being the daughter of a (now retired) police officer. For anyone who grew up, as I did, in a housing estate mostly populated by benefit claimants, the abject and reckless criminality and lack of responsibility from the gangs of thugs terrorising streets in the UK will have come as no surprise. A shock, perhaps, in the beginning, but when the ball got rolling, there was nothing happening that does not happen, if on a smaller scale, every single week in this country.
Some journalists and bloggers are attempting to make it taboo to call those who look to excuse the criminals ‘apologists’. Well, they can try, but with the entire country having witnessed the behaviour, they won’t get very far. The fact of the matter is that every individual person that took part in looting and rioting, and even those who stood aside and snickered while others looted, are morally corrupt and harbouring a false sense of entitlement.
One article from the Montreal Gazette, interestingly entitled “London rioters resent media image of hooded teen thug”, goes on to quote some people who took part in the riots, and people who supported them. Oh, do they? Really? What a surprise. Hundreds of hooded teen thugs take to the streets to wantonly destroy the property of others, to assault people, to steal the clothes from people’s backs, to kill people, to burn down businesses that have taken years to build, and they resent images of hooded teen thugs appearing in the media? Perhaps we should have left the shops unlocked for them, too?
Quoted in the article, a man of 22, who took part in the riots and believes so strongly in what he looted for that he refused to be named, says “Some of the parents were there. For some parents it was no big surprise their kids were there. They’ve gone through this all their lives,” Of course they have. It is a sad fact that generation after generation of people are being permitted to live from the state with no intervention, and that the attitude of entitlement is perpetuating through those generations. Many people have been calling the looters, rioters, murderers, assaulters, thugs and criminals “disillusioned”.
Michelle, a 40 year old mother who used to work for the police youth offenders unit, said “My son is 12 years old, and he already knows that police do not work for black people,” Hold on a moment. Your twelve year old son has been taught that the police ‘do not work for black people’. By whom, exactly? Wasn’t it the middle class white male that was supposed to be fostering racism? “The reason I don’t work for them any more is . . . it’s a white institution, and I won’t change my identity,” she said, after apparently stating that her friends and children saw her as an informer while she was working for the police. Okay then, so because your friends and children are presumably doing things bad enough TO be reported to the police, causing a conflict of interest for you, your identity is being suppressed. How about not condoning criminal activity and not hanging around with criminals?
According to the article, “heavily tattooed” Jackie said, while chuckling, “I was out in the riots. My 16-year-old daughter was calling me asking where I was,” Mother of the year, or the kind of responsibility-flouting scum that produced these swathes of young criminals? I’d go for the latter.
Another man, Ariom, said “But if the riots kick off again, I’m going. It’s history, it’s a revolution”. The thing is, beyond getting new treads or a new plasma TV, or burning down a small business for shits and giggles, none of the criminals seem to know exactly what the revolution is, or what they want to happen. Their entire reasoning seems to be that other people are rich, and they are not. Or that the police have the audacity to try stopping them from committing crimes.
Well what, exactly, are they disillusioned about? Another article from Reuters quotes a 41 year old youth worker – that is a person employed specifically to work with these young people to better them – he says “Youths are frustrated, they want all the nice clothes. They ain’t got no money, they don’t have jobs,”.
I have an idea… how about they don’t get to have ‘all the nice clothes’ if they can’t afford them? How about that? I know plenty of people who work 40 hour weeks in minimum wage jobs and shop for clothes in Primark and other discount stores because they can’t afford to buy designer labels. They can’t afford Adidas hoodies, they can’t afford the latest pair of Nike treads, they can’t afford the latest Blackberry phone. So they don’t have them. They live within their means, and let’s be honest, given that the government provides for those who can’t work, and for those who can and are too lazy or self-important to do so, everyone should be living within their means. As a good friend once said to me “it is remarkably easy to live on very little money if you budget well”.
The same youth worker: “The people that run this country, they got money, they are rich, they got nice houses. They don’t care about poor people.” Just a slight correction there: the people who run this country took advantage of its education system, had ambition, had drive, worked hard, and got to where they are today. With the exception of those who’ve inherited large sums of money and those who’ve won the lottery, so did every other ‘rich’ person in the country. And what is the exact monetary value at which these criminals believe it’s okay to demonise someone based purely on their bank balance? 25K? 50? A million?
The excuses for the criminal activity that we’ve seen over the last week come from two places: those who are simply ignorant to the culture that festers within welfare-funded estates and families, and those that are from that culture themselves and have seen the ‘excuse’ on the media and grabbed it with both hands. Many people have pointed at social mobility as a main excuse for the riots, but they fail to understand that it is impossible to socially mobilise people who simply do not wish to be mobilised. There are free courses, apprenticeships, programmes for the unemployed, and seats remain empty while young, unemployed people sit on street corners in their welfare-bought designer clothes using their welfare-bought Blackberry phones. The opportunities in the UK are not perfect, by any means, but any single person who is not too ill to work, who is unemployed and has no qualification or skill to offer should not be doing nothing. There are apprenticeships and places for these people to be, bettering themselves in order that they CAN find work more easily and be more employable.
Apparently, in Hackney in particular, the problem lies not so much in a divide between rich and poor, but in the fact that rich and poor live within such close proximity of each other. The poor see the rich going to work in their hard-earned jobs every day in their hard-earned cars from their hard-earned homes, and think “I want that so I can take it”. Woe betide anyone stop and think “I want that so I shall use the facilities and resources available to me and earn it”.
Many apologists will say that it’s the fault of the authorities. “The Man” is holding everyone down. I see where this attitude comes from, and by and large the vast majority of these people really do mean well. The problem is that they have not experienced the cultures in question first-hand. They have not grown up watching large families ever-expanding, living generation to generation from the state, parking large cars in the drive-ways of their large, state-provided housing. They have not witnessed parents faking ailments for their healthy children, so that the children will be judged disabled and more money will be provided. They have not witnessed the “I don’t have to work so I won’t” attitude. They have not sat in a benefit office, and been screamed and sworn at for stopping the means-tested benefits of someone who just won £50,000 at bingo. They have not had to deal with someone who is irate because after stealing thousands of tax-payers pounds through benefit fraud, they are incensed that it is being taken back from them at a rate of five pounds per week. And whenever they do come into contact with these attitudes, they invariably dismiss it as an isolated phenomenon. But when one has lived in this environment, and seen this mindset at work over and over again, it becomes impossible to ignore the fact that it is an entrenched, highly prevalent social reality. If this problem does not get tackled, people who really need welfare, people for whom the system was created, like those who are too ill or disabled to work, or those who are honestly looking for work every waking moment, are being failed. Once again: it is impossible to socially mobilise those who steadfastly refuse to be mobilised.
Of course there have been others caught up in the mob-mentality. A youth worker, a graduate, a graphic designer. In other words, the media would like us to know that there are ‘normal people like us’ facing charges. They fail, of course, to mention that this is an incredibly small percentage of those arrested for the events of the last week. It is amazing what mob-mentality can do to these ‘normal’ people, but these people have nonetheless committed crimes and should be held individually accountable for them.
Police have done the best that they can with the resources that they have and with keeping in mind their own health, safety and reputations. Policing riots in a post-Tomlinson climate, where people are ready and willing to jump on the ‘police brutality’ bandwagon is no easy feat. Despite the vast majority of the British public calling for tougher measures to deal with rioters, the tiny voice of the anti-police brigade can still be heard. After three whole days and nights of murder, assault, arson and burglary, one officer shown using a baton on a person has sparked immediate outrage in the do-gooder camp. I have heard things like “an institution of police brutality” mentioned. Unfortunately, there will be ‘bad eggs’ in every walk of life, in every institution, in every community, but when we allow our lust for conspiracy to override our common sense and blind us from the good done by the majority, something is seriously wrong. When people are being murdered and assaulted, and others are sitting on the edges of their seats, gleefully awaiting the first baton-strike so that they can claim ‘police brutality’, there is a morality issue in our society that goes far, far deeper than even the riots of the last week.
Of course, for anyone with direct experience within these welfare-claiming cultures, it will come as no shock that people hate the police. The police try to stop them taking what they like from the rest of us. But to exemplify the point, I would ask you to think back to when Raoul Moat mercilessly shot three people, killing one of them, and went on the run for days. The same attitude that is now giving us riots and murders was ‘liking’ the Facebook page “RIP Raoul Moat You Legend”. Why was he a legend? Because he shot a man who was a father, a son, a husband, in the face. The man happened to be a police officer.
Interestingly, people from generally law abiding areas, or even people from areas with a high crime rate who are not criminals themselves, do not hate the police. They praise the police and they welcome police presence, because the police are the people who protect us from violent criminals and burglars and people who would assault us in the street. People who are law abiding do not, generally, claim a culture of police brutality unless they are part of a small minority for whom the notion of police brutality helps to further a wider political or ideological agenda.
The rioting and looting of the last week is nothing short of wanton criminality and should be dealt with accordingly. Further, it’s time to get tough on those who claim job-seekers allowance, and make no attempt to seek jobs. It’s time to start using a token and photo ID system so that only essentials can be bought with welfare funds by the people that claim them, and it’s time to start limiting the amount of available funding for any single family unit that refuses to take long-term responsibility for itself.
This year marks a century since the beginning of the modern welfare state in the UK – and it’s very obviously broken. It’s time for change. Big change.
minority of one 