LONDON’s BURNING

The presidential palace, Damascus, August 2011. An aide approaches the President.

Aide: “Majesty, there is a person-to-person call on the private line”.

Assad: “Who is it?”

Aide: “His Excellency the Brother Leader and Guide of the Revolution of Libya”.

Assad: “Put him through”.

The aide steps out again. Immediately there is a ping on the desk phone. The President picks up.

Assad: “Muammar! Wha’ happenin’?”

Gaddafi: “I’m good, man. Another thousand loyal citizens of Tripoli killed by NATO bombs last night, but otherwise like cool”.

Assad: “Good guy”.

Gaddafi: “Enjoying the satellite pix from London. You too, bro’?”

Assad: “Omigod. Awesome”.

London in flames

Gaddafi: “One in the eye for Gordon Brown, innit”.

Assad: “No, he’s toast, bro’. It’s this Cameroon dude now”.

Gaddafi: “Whoever”.

Assad: “See, it’s a civil insurrection led by criminal elements, just like we got, no?”

Gaddafi: “Tha’s right”.

Assad: “Tha’s what the Cameroon dude say, any road up”.

Gaddafi: “He’s a flake, no?”

Assad: “Too right. He lost the country, bro’. Hey, at least there ain’t no lootin’ an’ stuff in Acton, praise be to Allah”.

Gaddafi: “Acton? Wha’s that, man?”

Assad: “Ma bitch Asma, tha’s where she come from”.

Gaddafi: “Oh, right”.

Assad: “Good Syrian peeps roun’ Acton way. No lootin’.”

Gaddafi: “That’s good, man, ‘bout Acton, know wha’ I mean? But from where I sit, y’know, the world goin’ to bits and like soon”.

Assad: “Too right, bro’. We gonna boycott the London Olympics. Can’t guarantee team safety, you dig?”

Gaddafi: “Yeah, good call, Bashar. Well, you take care now”.

Assad; “You too, guy. Don’ let the bastards grind you down, yeah?”

A much-loved Tottenham landmark, the Allied Carpets store with flats above, fired by rioters

“Criminality pure and simple,” David Cameron calls this week’s riots, and it “has to be confronted and defeated”. There’s nothing pure or simple about the events of this week. You wonder why he bothered to fly home from his Tuscan holiday if that’s all he learned from his urgently convened Cobra meeting. And if the assembled parliamentarians are going to spend their recalled session on Thursday wringing their hands and deploring and vowing to punish the bad, nothing will have been achieved.

Wiser old heads might remind the shocked ministers and would-be ministers that you can’t make people good by threatening, hectoring or even legislating. People will be good if they care to be and if it seems worth their while. It can help if you treat them in the first place as if they might have a capacity to be good. But since it came to office, the coalition government has appeared to have no good word for the most disadvantaged members of society. Denounced as spongers, shirkers and benefit cheats, they have seen their meagre support systems whittled away by cuts that seem targeted to do the most damage to the most damaged.

Unemployment is inevitably created by the systematic starvation of support for public services, and youth unemployment in particular is epidemic. Local authorities have been obliged to close youth and other amenities. The government has abolished the Education Maintenance Allowance that supported poorer students and others in work-based learning schemes (what used to be called apprenticeships) and is imposing a high level of indebtedness on future recipients of higher education. At the same time, levels of unemployment benefit are being cut and tests of eligibility have been tightened to the point where, to many recipients, being given any state support or none seems to be a lottery.

Allied Carpets, the morning after

Meanwhile, the media that the public depend upon for information and diversion are full of multimillionaire pop stars, actors and sports people flaunting themselves, not to mention stories of the eye-watering bonuses paid to those who work in banking and the city, many of whom seem to be over-rewarded whether they fail or succeed, whether they contribute to the general good or leech off it.

This infotainment is brought to the consumer courtesy of an increasingly ferocious campaign of advertising and promotion that instructs those consumers hundreds of times a day that they are somehow mysteriously out of the loop if they don’t acquire this, that or the other product. If you don’t have the money to buy these things, the notion naturally grows that you may as well steal them or, in the opportunist field day granted by an urban riot, loot them. After all, the culture that the various media promote carries a wholly dehumanised, grasping, competitive, uncaring, devil-take-the-hindmost message. Loot and steal is what everybody does, however exalted. Why should any kid with no income and no prospects respect a society run by people who live in tax havens and ruthlessly destroy the planet for short-term gain? If that kid lived in east Africa, she’d be starving to death.

Looters in Ealing

Many have asserted that the key to this week’s riots in London and elsewhere is the use among rioters of social networks and other internet devices. If so, society deserves it. The web can help in all sorts of way. A blithe discovery was an interview given by Nick Clegg to Sky News back in the run-up to the general election, in which he forecast that the policies that the Tories were proposing to implement in order to “clear up the economic mess” would cause rioting in the streets, just the policies that he now helps to implement. The piece can be found here

http://bit.ly/obvPOV

and, before Labour crows about it too much, that well-known, finger-on-the-pulse Labour frontbencher Tessa Jowell is seen pooh-poohing Clegg’s doom-predicting quite as disdainfully as David Cameron does. This is not a story from which any politician is going to be able to draw any comfort.

Burnt-out police car in Tottenham

Nor will the police, who find themselves in a classic bind, damned if they hold fire, damned if they go in all guns blazing. On the first three nights, they were soon cast as the villains of the piece, the citizenry – especially those burned out of their homes and businesses -– demanding to know where the help was hiding. It’s widely suggested that the tactic of staying out of it – if that indeed is what it was – was a gesture to persuade the government to stop slashing police budgets. Tonight, with 16,000 head of cops on the streets of London alone and dozens of cities and towns cancelling police leave, the danger is that civilian heads will be broken and well-founded cries of over-kill will ensue and – worse – over-kill on the wrong night. Meanwhile, the cost of police and firefighters’ overtime will have to be added to the cost of the clear-up, insurance pay-outs and eventual rebuild: more that the public purse can ill afford.

And it’s unarguable that there is still an issue over police and race relations, especially in the capital. Afro-Caribbean, Asian and mixed-race youth still feel vulnerable to unfounded police suspicion and it’s not all paranoia. As a gay white man, I cannot say hand on heart that I feel completely relaxed and accepted around police officers and I’m sure ethnic minority people sense similar subtexts of – at best – indifference. There is still a Neanderthal culture in the police – white, straight, right-wing, god-fearing, angry, blokeish – and anyone who doesn’t fit in there feels it. With the best will in the world, there is still a great deal to be changed. Watch the currently repeating fly-on-the-wall Channel 4 series Coppers for evidence.

Car windscreen in Nottingham

So this was the summer that the cities exploded. Truly, it’s been an eye-popping year, every week bringing fresh and unlooked-for astonishments. Much of that turmoil arises from a government feeling its way, with no clear grasp on how it wants Britain to be. Certainly, among the edifices going up in flames on Saturday, Sunday and Monday nights was Cameron’s vaunted Big Society. In opposition, he used to deploy the PR-speak phrase that Britain was “a broken society”. What is it now?