Scenes of anarchy across the English capital which quickly spread to engulf other parts of the nation. An act of aggression by the police was to prove the spark that ignited a tinderbox which fireballed rapidly out of control into a four night spree of violence, looting and arson as mobs of feral youths ran amok in cities throughout England.
Apologists for the disturbances such as Jody McIntyre were to be heard making ill-judged and self-righteous comparisons with Martin Luther King (“a riot is the language of the unheard”) followed by pious proclamations such as “my solidarity does not lie with the corporations making millions and their fully insured smashed windows, it lies with human beings who lose their lives and families”, fanning the flames of the fires and attempting to give events a political motivation (and here we must take care to distinguish between motivation and context) as around them people lost their homes and livelihoods at the hands of gangs unable, unwilling, or perhaps simply not bothered to take the trouble to make such distinctions.
Let there be no doubt: regardless of any subsequent contextualisation, these events were not about social justice, and nor were they about people with a coherent message protesting or combining together for a just cause. This was something much more serious: what we witnessed was a lawlessness in which many individuals and minority groups took advantage of the impotency of the emergency services for their own selfish ends, indiscriminately ransacking and looting from shops and stores for no greater cause than their own personal gain.
Other naïve comments included those along the lines of “this is what a conservative government looks like”. The conservatives are no saints—in fact quite the contrary—however the buck does not stop with David Cameron and his gang, and it is foolish and dangerous in the extreme to believe that this is the case. What we are seeing is the result of a precarious political vacuum: while the political classes and global elite have been busy occupying themselves playing games of growth and globalisation, closer to home, communities, societies and whole nations have been slowly falling apart at the seams.
Nor is the problem confined to England, the UK or even Europe: at its heart this is about a structural problem with the Western democratic model. There is an astonishing disjunction between the ruled, who lack fundamental powers of political articulation, and the ruling who, so long as this condition persists, will continue to be so far removed from them as to be unable to govern for the common good.
If democracy is broken, which it most clearly is, the challenge facing the current generation, both ruled and ruling, is to fix it and wield it for our own ends, not to break it even further. The latter prospect is frightening: a destructive series of conflicts in which the ever needier poor are increasingly marginalised by an ever greedier global elite. In such a scenario there can and will be no true winners.
These disturbances set a dangerous precedent. They are the first signs that we have reached a point at which the only solution cannot even be to reform, but to reinvent the democratic model in order to create more equitable societies. The responsibility is a tremendous yet necessary one, however it is ultimately something that each and all have an obligation to bear, from the disenfranchised of Tottenham to the privileged elites of Knightsbridge and Kensington. Only by putting class politics aside to rebalance the interests of the rich and the poor and create societies driven by cooperation instead of thinly-veiled self-interest will it be possible to emerge stronger from the turmoil we will live through in the coming years.
The world is changing, perhaps faster than we care to realise or are willing to admit. There are immense challenges to be solved and democracy remains the preferable solution. The time has come for benefactors of the democratic tradition to put their houses in order, or step aside and leave it to emerging global powers such as China to provide new models, risking the loss of rights and freedoms that have taken millennia to achieve as a consequence.
Perhaps a good starting point would be for us to reflect upon Aristotle’s definition of the citizen as one who partakes in ruling and in being ruled. Should we prove unable to shoulder both these responsibilities, to echo the words from a recent speech given by Gordon Brown, “friends around the world who admire our liberties will now ask what kind of a country we have become”.
They have every right to do so, although perhaps we had better first begin by asking ourselves.
Troubled Times
Apologists for the disturbances such as Jody McIntyre were to be heard making ill-judged and self-righteous comparisons with Martin Luther King (“a riot is the language of the unheard”) followed by pious proclamations such as “my solidarity does not lie with the corporations making millions and their fully insured smashed windows, it lies with human beings who lose their lives and families”, fanning the flames of the fires and attempting to give events a political motivation (and here we must take care to distinguish between motivation and context) as around them people lost their homes and livelihoods at the hands of gangs unable, unwilling, or perhaps simply not bothered to take the trouble to make such distinctions.
Let there be no doubt: regardless of any subsequent contextualisation, these events were not about social justice, and nor were they about people with a coherent message protesting or combining together for a just cause. This was something much more serious: what we witnessed was a lawlessness in which many individuals and minority groups took advantage of the impotency of the emergency services for their own selfish ends, indiscriminately ransacking and looting from shops and stores for no greater cause than their own personal gain.
Other naïve comments included those along the lines of “this is what a conservative government looks like”. The conservatives are no saints—in fact quite the contrary—however the buck does not stop with David Cameron and his gang, and it is foolish and dangerous in the extreme to believe that this is the case. What we are seeing is the result of a precarious political vacuum: while the political classes and global elite have been busy occupying themselves playing games of growth and globalisation, closer to home, communities, societies and whole nations have been slowly falling apart at the seams.
Nor is the problem confined to England, the UK or even Europe: at its heart this is about a structural problem with the Western democratic model. There is an astonishing disjunction between the ruled, who lack fundamental powers of political articulation, and the ruling who, so long as this condition persists, will continue to be so far removed from them as to be unable to govern for the common good.
If democracy is broken, which it most clearly is, the challenge facing the current generation, both ruled and ruling, is to fix it and wield it for our own ends, not to break it even further. The latter prospect is frightening: a destructive series of conflicts in which the ever needier poor are increasingly marginalised by an ever greedier global elite. In such a scenario there can and will be no true winners.
These disturbances set a dangerous precedent. They are the first signs that we have reached a point at which the only solution cannot even be to reform, but to reinvent the democratic model in order to create more equitable societies. The responsibility is a tremendous yet necessary one, however it is ultimately something that each and all have an obligation to bear, from the disenfranchised of Tottenham to the privileged elites of Knightsbridge and Kensington. Only by putting class politics aside to rebalance the interests of the rich and the poor and create societies driven by cooperation instead of thinly-veiled self-interest will it be possible to emerge stronger from the turmoil we will live through in the coming years.
The world is changing, perhaps faster than we care to realise or are willing to admit. There are immense challenges to be solved and democracy remains the preferable solution. The time has come for benefactors of the democratic tradition to put their houses in order, or step aside and leave it to emerging global powers such as China to provide new models, risking the loss of rights and freedoms that have taken millennia to achieve as a consequence.
Perhaps a good starting point would be for us to reflect upon Aristotle’s definition of the citizen as one who partakes in ruling and in being ruled. Should we prove unable to shoulder both these responsibilities, to echo the words from a recent speech given by Gordon Brown, “friends around the world who admire our liberties will now ask what kind of a country we have become”.
They have every right to do so, although perhaps we had better first begin by asking ourselves.
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