The sausage roll road to fascism

Tweet

 

One of the more absurd images to emerge over the past week was the one of the topless guy liberating a tray of sausage rolls from a Greggs shop during the riots in Hull. Whilst we cannot be completely sure that it wasn’t a carefully-planned intention to arm himself with sausage rolls to wave in the face of Muslims whose religion does not permit the consumption of pork, rather in the manner of pointing kryptonite at Superman, it seems much more probable that he was just feeling a little peckish. And we have no conclusive evidence to suggest that he’d know the difference between a pork sausage roll and a vegan one anyway.

Some politicians – and not just those of the political right – have suggested that stopping the riots depends at least in part on dealing with the so-called ‘legitimate concerns’ of the protesters about immigration. I don’t really understand what those ‘legitimate concerns’ might be, but I struggle even more to comprehend the link between a concern about immigration and a daring raid on purveyors of sausage rolls (delicious though they may be). It’s true that some services in the UK are under pressure – such as housing, education, social care and health. But the last two of those would be under even more pressure if it were not for staff who have come from elsewhere in the world to work in those sectors. And in more general terms, those pressures are more to do with underfunding by successive governments – a policy which Labour apparently intends to continue – than with such increase in demand as results from migration. Deliberately creating a shortage and then finding a convenient group to scapegoat is a divide-and-rule tactic which is as old as the hills.

It's also more than a little strange that an allegedly non-racist concern about total numbers manifests itself in the form of direct and violent action against the adherents of one particular religion. Even if the original rumour about the religion and background of the alleged assailant in Southport had been true, the leap to blaming, and then seeking to punish, all adherents of that religion surely owes more to prejudice than to logic. If I recall correctly, Marx once said something along the lines of: ‘anger in the multitude is enough – just give me six in the country who understand’. It’s not something which applies only to the political ‘left’. Those out on the streets attacking immigrants don’t need to have a worked-though political philosophy; they don’t need to be fascists themselves. They merely need to express their anger, whipped up by those who would use that anger for their own ends. And even some of those doing the fomenting don’t need any sort of ideology to underpin their actions. If the UK were to descend into fascism, it wouldn’t be the likes of ‘Tommy Robinson’ who would end up as dictator, it would be one or other of those who offer ‘solutions’ to the ‘problems’ which they themselves have blown up in the minds of the many. Locking up the pawns who are ‘merely’ angry might be a necessary step in the short term, but it’s dealing with the symptom. The ones we should really beware of are those whose ‘solutions’ involve authoritarian rule and restrictions of freedom.

"We're not racist, but..."

Tweet

 

One of the threads running through some reporting of the disorder in English towns and cities in recent days has been the strong denial by some of the participants that they are in any way racist or far-right in their views. Sometimes there’s a ‘but’ though, and in one case reported in yesterday’s Sunday Times, the ‘but’ was that in his town (Holyhead, for those who might be thinking Wales is somehow immune to what we have seen in England) “seven out of eight corner shops are owned by Muslims”. Now it is, of course, entirely possible that the person in question is an expert and well-schooled theologian, who has questioned all the shopkeepers concerned about their religious beliefs, and whose deep study of religious teachings has led him to the conclusion that buying his milk or newspapers from a Muslim is a serious threat to his own religion and culture which can only be countered by travelling to Liverpool to join an anti-Islam protest. It does seem rather more likely, however, that he has made a judgement about their religion from their appearance.

That does, though, leave unanswered the question of why anyone might see Muslims running shops as such a bad thing that it requires people to attack the most convenient mosque. Let us take it as read that at least some of those involved really do believe that there is nothing racist or right-wing about attacking anyone who happens to ‘look like’ a Muslim, along with their places of worship, their businesses, and places where they might be living, because to do so is actually defending Britishness, or what they assume Britishness to be, from the threat posed by ‘outsiders’. Where could such a belief possibly have come from? A major part of the answer to that question must surely turn around the way in which certain politicians have normalised terms like ‘invasion’ and ‘swamping’ in relation to migration. When the propositions that immigrants do not share ‘our’ values, and that immigration threatens ‘our’ way of life become part of mainstream political debate, why would anyone expect that those whose prejudices are thus validated would see such positions as being politically extreme? It would be unfair to accuse such politicians of egging on those participating in the violence, even if their ritualistic condemnations of it are invariably accompanied by a ’but’ of their own, in this case about failing to be sufficiently harsh with refugees. But not actively encouraging the riots doesn’t necessarily mean that they don’t see the potential value to themselves in the ensuing disorder. There is, apparently, no evidence to support the widespread belief that Lenin coined the term ‘useful idiots’, but somebody did, and from the point of view of the far right the rioters fit the definition.

It isn’t only the rioters who are useful to the far right – immigrants also serve a similar function, albeit even less consciously. I’m not convinced that the far right themselves are always or necessarily racists. A belief that society should be run by authoritarians in the interests of the few does not in itself require the othering of any particular group. But ‘vote for me so that I can impose my will on you and concentrate wealth even further in the hands of myself and my friends’ isn’t exactly an election-winning slogan. Identifying and promoting conflict between groups in society, blaming some of those groups for the fact that others feel relatively poor or dispossessed, and then offering to resolve the situation in favour of one of those groups is a much more powerful way of achieving the same objective. Persecution of those who have been othered is more of a means to an end than an end in itself.

An authoritarian response to rioters looks and sounds like firm action, but also serves to strengthen the belief that authoritarianism provides solutions. Resolving the artificially induced conflicts is more about getting people to understand that the interests of the ‘useful idiots’ and the othered groups have more in common with each other than they do with the right wing authoritarians who are pulling the strings.

Inequality, aspiration, and consumerism

Tweet

Much of the political reaction to the rioting in a number of cities was pretty predictable.  For some, it was the result of a ‘broken’ society - and therefore the fault of the previous government, for allowing it to get broken in the first place.  For others it was the result of cuts to public spending - and therefore the fault of the current government.  

(Although some of them seemed to be a bit confused about which cuts they were referring to.  Were they concerned about those cuts which might have affected the communities where the rioters lived, or more immediately about the ones that might simply mean fewer policemen were available to deal with the rioters?  It sometimes looked more like the latter than the former, with no obvious recognition of the huge difference between the two positions.)

Then, closer to home, there were those who saw it more as an ‘English’ problem.  The report from Professor Adamson yesterday should have been more than enough to debunk that one.  There is nothing about any of the suggested underlying causes which seems to me to be likely to change just because of what is currently little more than an internal boundary between two parts of the same state.  (There may well be something in the argument that Wales is more rural, and its major conurbations smaller, than the cities affected, but that is equally a difference between different parts of England; it isn’t a simple Wales/England distinction.)

The problem with a largely political response is that so many politicians work on an essentially very short time horizon, defined mostly by the electoral cycle.  It leads to a superficial point-scoring approach, well-illustrated by the latter part of this post from Peter Black.  An attempt to say that it shouldn’t be a blame game – after a paragraph putting the blame squarely on other parties – sounds more than a little hollow; but he isn’t the only politician, nor is his the only party, to have attempted such sophistry.

Underlying many of the different analyses is a mindset which sees ‘problems’, and assumes that what is needed must therefore be ‘solutions’.  Such a rational and logical way of looking at things is part of the current zeitgeist, but seems to me to be more than a little detached from an understanding of the nature of humanity, which never has been – and probably never will be – amenable to such purely rational analysis. 

Trying to find a way of enforcing or encouraging conformity to the prevailing norms might well appear to be an entirely rational response to mass breaches of those norms, but defining the problem in those terms makes a lot of presuppositions.  And, as an aside, conformity to prevailing norms isn’t the human attribute which has driven the development of civilisation.

Insofar as there is an underlying trend which can lead to such outbreaks, we need to be taking a much more long term view of the way in which society is changing than we are hearing at a political level, and Professor Adamson expresses that well when he talks about the way in which the distance between rich and poor has been increasing.

It has done so inexorably over many decades; and it is something which governments – of both parties – have not only tolerated, but actively encouraged.  It ought to be enough to lead to a greater demand for change in the economic structures of our society, but that viewpoint is not currently being well-articulated in a political structure which broadly accepts the boundaries of the current economic structures.

However, even given that lack of an opportunity for political expression, I doubt that growing inequality would be sufficient to lead to the sort of actions which we saw last week.  But we need to add into the mix two other factors which are comparatively recent. 

The first is that we are in an age of rapid mass communications, so that differences in social status and material wealth are much more obvious than they would have been fifty years ago.  And the second is the way in which those mass communications are used to relentlessly push the consumerist agenda, creating aspirations in the many for material possessions which can never be delivered to all.

I was reminded, when I read this thoughtful piece by Gary Raymond a few days ago, that there is an underlying philosophy – usually expressed rather less starkly than it was by Ayn Rand – which says that ‘anyone can succeed if they work at it’.  It underpins the idea of ‘social mobility’ signed up to by successive governments, and implies that if people are poor, it’s because they haven’t got up and gone.

In itself the idea that ‘anyone can succeed’ has a ring of truth to it; but the flip side is that ‘anyone’ can never be the same as ‘everyone’.  An economic system which encourages such an approach is predicated on an assumption, nay a requirement, that most will, by the same criteria, ‘fail’.

The big lie of politics is that inequality can be addressed solely by setting and achieving targets for lifting up people, families, and communities at the bottom of the economic pile, without any constraints on those at the top.  It can’t.

Greater economic equality is no guarantee, of course, that there will never be those who break with norms and seek to help themselves; but continuing increases in inequality are a pretty good guarantee that there always will be.

Supercops

Tweet

On a recent post, a friend referred to the tendency of some to use the following sequence of thoughts as a basis for action:

1.      Something must be done.

2.      This is something.

3.      Therefore, this is what must be done.

The flow has a certain logic to it, albeit badly flawed.  It came to mind again in recent days, when I listened to some of the reactions to the rioting of a week ago; it’s an approach which does rather seem to be popular with government, from Cameron down.  In their haste to be seen to be doing ‘something’, it looks at times as though they are prepared to try anything.

Or, at least, anything which looks like, or can be presented as, ‘tough action’.  The response of the official opposition hasn’t been a great deal better, although they are faced with the little difficulty of being duty-bound to disagree with the government whilst still sounding just as tough.

The result is that specific proposals don’t really seem to be receiving the sort of scrutiny and consideration which they deserve; they are measured solely against the need to be tough, or rather to be seen to be tough.

To take one specific proposal, I don’t really see the objection in principle to considering and learning from police experience elsewhere.  Provided that the assessment of what has worked elsewhere is carried out thoroughly, and the different context of policing is understood and taken into consideration, it’s always possible to learn from others.  That does not, though, appear to be the motivation behind the government’s decision to seek assistance from an American ‘supercop’.

This isn’t about considering the similarities and differences between Los Angeles or New York on the one hand, and Birmingham or London on the other, and then applying any lessons.  I rather suspect that the differences are more significant than the similarities, but will be deliberately ignored.  Worse, the consequences of ignoring the differences and then applying US style policing techniques may well be to reduce the differences and increase the similarities, even if that isn’t the intention.

The man himself, Bill Bratton, certainly seems to have a very high opinion of his own abilities, to read this report.  He can not only deliver better policing, but can do so for a great deal less money, to read his statements.  I can understand the attraction of that combination to Cameron.  There is, though, nothing new about the idea that the court’s favourites will say what the king wants to hear. 

But I’d like to hear what isn’t being said.  Rushing into the application of US-style policing in major cities is likely to have a whole host of unintended consequences which aren’t even getting a hearing.