David Cameron and Tony Blair have been busy in the weekend papers giving their take on the state of our society and the causes of the riots. The Prime Minister had a prescriptive list of ills and potential actions. Blair was essentially defending New Labour’s social legacy.
The truth is that both Labour and Tory governments of the past have contributed to the conditions for a complete breakdown of law and order in certain districts by certain people, among whom all ages and races were represented, but where the predominant participants appeared to be young and in some cases very young.
It begins with the upheaval of Thatcherism, although it must be said that neither Thatcher nor her minions sought the outcome seen in the riots. Nevertheless the massacre of the British industrial base, destroying the neighbourhood jobs, which reduced what had been decent working class areas to benefit ghettos is a major cause. This happened because union militancy had priced the British factory off the world map entirely and foreign imports were a good deal cheaper than anything made at home. It is impossible to de-industrialise a great industrial power without creating an underclass with nowhere to go.
Add to that the half baked nostrums about education, resulting in functional illiteracy for very large numbers of those affected, enormous centralisation of policy making, the interpretation of human rights in a literal fashion to favour the criminal, the feckless and the wicked above the law abiding and the honest; pour on all of that political correctness favouring all manner of conflicting interests at the expense of the majority; secularise society to the point where it breaches some fatheaded nostrum to point out the difference between right and wrong and it is small wonder society or parts of it are, in Cameron’s words, broken.
But it does not end there. Enter selfishness, greed, people earning obscene sums for doing ordinary or quite useless things, many directly or indirectly from the public purse; construct an economy based upon endless borrowing of ever expanding electronic money, secured not on wealth creation, but on inflating assets to which no real worth is added and then reward those who guzzle at this debauched trough, with incomes on such a scale that greed becomes not a vice to shun but a quality to value; allow the borrowings of business, the state and people to reach levels without precedent in peacetime history and you have a good deal that is broken and a lot more that should be broken up.
Cameron is right to note that there is work to be done. Typically Blair is trying to spin his way out responsibility for trouble that he and his chancellor had a big hand in making.