Another perspective, more optimistic, same message:
Last Summer’s riots were a warning, but nobody has learned anything from it yet. I don’t think I ever thought I could get less optimistic than I was in 2002-2003 when I saw the world slide into war against Iraq, but my fear is that the only lesson the politicians took out of that debacle is that you can ignore popular discontent as long as you got parliament and the Westminster press bubble on your side. They’re wrong, but a lot of people are going to suffer before these fsckers get their just desserts.
In high doses, alcohol impairs our reaction times, muscle control, co-ordination, short-term memory, perceptual field, cognitive abilities and ability to speak clearly. But it does not cause us selectively to break specific social rules. It does not cause us to say, “Oi, what you lookin’ at?” and start punching each other. Nor does it cause us to say, “Hey babe, fancy a shag?” and start groping each other.
[…]
We become more outspoken, more physically demonstrative, more flirtatious, and, given enough provocation, some (young males in particular) become aggressive. Quite specifically, those who most strongly believe that alcohol causes aggression are the most likely to become aggressive when they think that they have consumed alcohol.
Which means that any attempt to limit booze related antisocial behaviour that focuses on alcohol as the evil spirit motivating this is counterproductive:
The drinkaware website, for example, warns young people that a mere three pints of beer (ie a perfectly normal evening out) “can lead to anti-social, aggressive and violent behaviour”, that “you might start saying things you don’t mean and behaving out of character”, that alcohol is implicated in a high percentage of sexual offences and street crimes, and that the morning after “you may wonder what you did the night before”.
Instead, booze should be made into something a bit boring and stop being used as an excuse for people to be assholes:
I would like to see a complete change of focus, with all alcohol-education and awareness campaigns designed specifically to challenge these beliefs – to get across the message that a) alcohol does not cause disinhibition (aggressive, sexual or otherwise) and that b) even when you are drunk, you are in control of and have total responsibility for your actions and behaviour.
Alcohol education will have achieved its ultimate goal not when young people in this country are afraid of alcohol and avoid it because it is toxic and dangerous, but when they are frankly just a little bit bored by it, when they don’t need to be told not to binge-drink vodka shots, any more than they now need to be told not to swig down 15 double espressos in quick succession.
Which is why we should support CAMRA, the Campaign for Real Ale, because how much more boring can booze be than if it’s drunk by middle aged, science fiction reading bearded folkies?
As I see it, the skills of an historian, when confronted by a complex phenomenon like this, ought (and this is neither original nor controversial) to include at least the following:
The evasion of a simple catch-all explanation, of whichever ‘political’ narrative, particularly a doctrinaire explanation
The avoidance of reliance on untestable notions like ‘innate human nature’
The avoidance of sweeping generalisation
The ability to disentangle different elements within the phenomenon; to tease out geographical and other variables
An aversion to reducing a complex phenomenon to simple cause and effect
If only the various talking heads on the BBC radio and television pontificating on the riots this past week had been using those rules. For example, the fools who I heard on Broadcasting House yesterday morning, who dismissed the idea that the riots could’ve been political in nature because some of the rioters didn’t even know which party was in government — as if politics end outside of the Westminster bubble. There seems to be a deliberate refusal to engage the questions of how and why the riots started, why they persisted so long and why they spread on a more than superficial level, at least in the mainstream media and especially at the BBC. If reporting is the first draft of history, this particular one will be unreadable.
Good news for everybody who was hoping for a nice, easy, racist explenation for the riots in Britain, “historian” David Starkey has come to your aid. Yes, the rioters were multiracial, Black, white and Muslim, while the victims and defenders of various communities in turn were also multiracial, Black, white, Sikh, Turkish and so on and it seemed that all the simplistic ideas about how those minorities just cannot help their criminal natures were clearly wrong, but Starkey knew the truth. It was the white man that had gone Black, had abandoned its superior nature, that it had been infected by the “gangster culture”, probably through that newfangled hippity-hop music. This is not racist of course, it’s just common sense. And hence Starkey is listened to politely, not interrupted and taken seriously as a commentator even if the other guests disagree with him.
Compare and contrast the treatment of Darcus Howe, who is clearly a dangerous loony who has to be chided and can’t be trusted to be sensible. Howe needs to be handled aggressively, he’s almost a rioter himself and his waffle about root causes to explain the riots need to be attacked immediately as excuse mongering.
As with every unexpected, natural crisis when the news media are caught unawares, the raw edges of approved reality become a bit more visible. On the one hand, the manipulation of news and acceptable opinion becomes more blatant — one very obvious example being the whitewashing of the spontaneous cleanup operations in the days after the first riots, as noted and ripped apart by W. Kasper. On the other hand, even more blatant is how unacceptable opinions like Howe’s are handled, attacked, shouted down. This by and large is not a conscious process, but something journalists and the news media pick up by osmosis. It’s no surprise that it’s the BBC, supposedly independent but in practise always hypersensitive to how the political winds are blowing, that is the most hardline in this. We saw the same thing with the War on Iraq, where it was the commercial news channels that were more skeptical than the BBC, other than you’d expect at first.
Starkey might just well be trying to move the acceptable discourse to the right, to make his racist ideas respectable as Lenny argues, but the BBC is more culpable by giving him a platform and treating him with respect, making his ideas more respectable by that. Howe’s views on the other hand, the idea that some of the responsibility for the riots may just have to lie with the police for their treatment of (young) Black people in general and the murder of Mark Duggan in particular, are still beyond the pale, as shown by how he is treated. In short, the BBC is actively shifting the borders of acceptable, mainstream opinion rightwards.
The Coalition will fall. Not because of protest, not because of unpopularity but because everytime it tries to do something serious a bit falls off the machine. If they don’t get AV and Vince Cable does not get radical banking reform, then by the time the public sector job losses are eating into their popularity, around party conference time, the Libdems will call it a day. Even more audaciously I will predict the outcome: no election but a Second Coalition to be formed between the Conservatives, an inner core of Orange Book Libdem leaders and various Unionists, with a slim majority. One or two Labour rightwingers, disgruntled by Ed Miliband, may also be tempted to join. Cameron will face down the Conservative right and embrace Coalition government as a modus operandi until 2015. Labour, locked in a policy review process and possibly still reeling from (8) above, will avoid an election.
Jamie had some fun with the second part of that prediction, but I want to look at the first part. Protests, especially in the UK, do not have a particularly good track record in bringing governments down, or even get them to change their minds, but the ConDems are more vulnerable than most, largely due to the Dem part of it and its internal contradictions. Even then, it’s hard to imagine protests, even ones as big as the 2003 anti-war protests, will do much to disrupt the coalition, other than to accelerate the weakening of the machine as Mason puts it.
However, there is the potential for a huge, embarassing clusterfuck to happen smack dab in the middle of the ConDem’s reign. I’m talking of course about the 2012 London Olympics, enthusiasm for which never was that high in the first place, which will make the perfect opportunity for anybody fed up with the coalition’s policies to show their displeasure in front of the whole world. BBC London News today reported that a large part of the success of the Vancouver Winter Olympics was due to the large number of well trained, friendly volunteers at the games — image what could happen if thousands of disgruntled students, jobseekers and other victims of ConDem policies decide to take to the streets during the London games…
What struck me was the contrast between what will be everyday life in England after two years of budget cuts, slashed social services and a crumbling social infrastructure and the attempt to turn London in the world’s largest potemkin village as the Olympics come to visit. Normally the general public is not keen on anybody who politicises the Olympics, but when many members of it will be victims of ConDemmed policies themselves, how will that change?