Understand Looting? No thanks: it’s much easier to Condemn

Trying to explain the new phenomenon of ‘consumer looting’, is often seen by some, as condoning it. This is clearly nonsense and often comes from people who are strong on condemnation generally and short of the talents required to explain. Sadly, Prime Minister Cameron and Home Secretary May, reveal this failing when they say that the disorder on the shopping streets is, ‘crime, pure and simple’. If only it were. Anyone who has eavesdropped on conversations between young street people or taken vox pop interviews of unemployed youngsters seriously, will soon realise that many of them are suffering from a serious disconnection from what no doubt Cameron and May would describe as ‘the standards of normal society’. Having seen quite a few employed ‘adults’, of whom it is tempting to say should have known better, leaving court, I think the problem goes back across several governments.

Unfortunately in the world of disaffected youth and their parents, or parent, the standards of comfortable Britain are difficult to find. Serial bad parenting over two or more generations can produce a very different person to that which members of ‘normal society’ would like to have living next door. How many people in ‘comfortable Britain’ have heard of the need to teach some failing parents basic parenting skills like how to wash themselves or prepare food. This might explain why such places on such courses, if they still exist, are very hard to find by hard pressed social workers trying to help the disfunctional families among their impossible case load.

The range of factors causing the cultural disconnection is wide and runs from the inability to read, through to an inability to escape the hold of the local gang, drug addiction, let alone an inability to find or keep a job. And all this takes place in a context of materialism and its attendant advertising based on the notion that to be worth anything you must have the product being advertised. No wonder levels of self esteem and hope plummet. Such an individual has no future and nothing to lose.

Excluded people looking in on ‘normal society’ from the outside, sooner or later, will be tempted to break in, or break it up, in some way, you break themselves up. Some get a lucky break but they are hard to come by. Aspirational looting, as I have heard it described today, is now one way of achieving both the break in and having a ‘smashing time’, all at the same time in the company of similarly disconnected youngsters possibly in your gang. These youngsters get some feeling of worth according to their own distorted view of where they are.

To those in normal society they are ‘feckless’, ‘anti-social’, ‘a-social’, ‘a-moral’ and many other things. Judging by the values of the Cameron Government they do not appear to be a sub-class worth investing in. Condemning their social origins as sick Dr Cameron is easy. Do you have a modern Dr Finlay to find a cure? Like so many of the cuts I fear there will be rather a lot of false economies in the pipeline. John Major said we should ‘... condemn more and understand less’. His wish seems to be coming true. Unfortunately, failing to understand something through fecklessness or ignorance, or both, usually has a big price.

Dacier

They just don't get it

Harriett Harman tells us they have got the message. The Prime Minister is angry. So much so he had to repeat it three times. That was John Major’s technique. Watching ‘Mr Three Time’s’ government sink was rather boring. Watching the McMillan government go down against the back drop of the Profumo affair had great entertainment value. The final months of this government as it sinks into the depths will be painful. If only the waters were as shallow as some of the politicians it is consuming. Some of them still haven’t got the message.

The big mistake some MPs are making is that they don’t realise the questions voters are asking themselves. Why cant MP’s understand the simple words, ‘wholly, exclusively and necessarily incurred in the course of your Parliamentary duties’? Why should voters believe them when they try to convince us they know what they are doing? Competence, judgement, and honour are now being questioned. Even some senior politicians are clearly unaware of how ordinary people have to cope in a recession where keeping a job and a home is a losing battle for increasing numbers.

Politicians fail to understand that voters have a good idea of what is acceptable in the work place. To hear Sir Ming Campbell tell the Newsnight audience that the rules are in fact only guidelines, came as a shock. This from a respected MP and a Barrister. He is of course not the only lawyer in Parliament. Lawyers will exploit ambiguity and spurious justification in the performance of their professional duty. This doesn’t always work in a court, but to try it in the current public arena was a lapse of judgement.

For politicians to tell the public that this is all a distraction from major world issues is to state the obvious. The voters also know who has, in part, caused those problems. Government jumped into a war on doubtful grounds, failed to see where the money markets were taking us and then gave loans to the banks without seeking guarantees The present PMs talent for dithering and/or making policy on the hoof, compounds this poisonous mixture. We need a cooling off period not a General Election. Why? Because the deep waters which are consuming the worst offenders also contain more incompetents, especially those nasty sharks who once they have had our votes, will come after us.

Dacier