The London Mob has a long history. The rulers of the nation have always had to keep an eye on Londoners and keep them happy. Elizabeth 1st thought that opening the pubs for longer was one way of taking the steam out of the London mob, with the assumption that they’d get bored rioting and turn to drinking. But nowadays people can multi-task.
Not that drink seems to have fueled the present flare up. The last time I was in the UK I was struck by the similarities to the UK in the seventies. If you had a job, then fine, but if you were coming out of school or the Universities and Colleges you were finding that there were no opportunities for you. The usual reason for turning down your job application was a “lack of experience” which of course you could not get.
In the seventies nobody had come up with the idea of “internships” or “work experience,” so people rioted. Race, the Poll Tax, the closing of Mines, Firemen’s strikes, even moving newspaper production out of Fleet Street could set off a good riot. But eventually it faded away with “enterprise allowances”, subsidized “work experience” and the kick to the economy that Margaret Thatcher introduced, and then the beginnings of the borrowings that are fuelling the present crisis.
A lot of creative thought is going to have to be put into resolving the latest crisis. Internships and work experience seem like slave labour to the present generation. iPads, smart phones, laptops, all cost money and you don’t get that working for free and there is no way you can live without them. Well you can, but not many people brought up with them are going to go plant potatoes in allotments, raise chickens, and entertain themselves with community singing in streets of repossessed houses.
Even for people with mothers and fathers willing to pay for their technological necessities, the “work experience” has merely convinced them that work is as futile as much of their formal education. If you are saddled with the debt of paying for your University and College Courses, you expect them to be useful, or at least inspiring. Most however, are dull, outdated, and presented badly by tired teachers battered by bureaucracy. And the work you are being groomed for is at best uncool, boring and badly paid, or obsolete.
One might say that feckless youth needs to learn that life is not all fun and games and that it should learn its place. But it is obvious that, for some, life is all fun and games, and they didn’t get that privilege from diligent honest work and saving. So, if the opportunity arrives, why not mix it up a little and grab a few of the goodies that kids are all supposed to be obsessed with nowadays?
Politicians have to condemn all this behaviour as inexcusable criminality. It is too complicated to make any other sound without people thinking you are siding with robbery and arson. Like a lot of criminality it is always the have-nots stealing from the have-a-little-bit-mores because their security is less stringent than the stinking rich. So not a lot of sympathy will be offered. Well, until some spotty little thirteen year olds are paraded with their mums before the courts and people start comparing them with the said stinking rich who were rewarded for the massive fraud and corruption that has undermined much of the Western economy.
In a month or so some underaged teenager oblivious of the hand wringing, with a bag of iPhones under his bed, will shrug his shoulders and think it was a good summer romp and how when the new upgrades come in, maybe there will be another opportunity.
What’s the solution? One would like to offer something simple, like, get the State out of the way and let the people be free! Or have the State take all the money from the rich and old and give it to the kids! But the old and the rich can riot just as easily as the poor, and usually have bigger and nastier weapons to do it with. Also, letting the people be free has a habit of resulting in mass slaughter and crazy governments with little respect for laws and humanitarian virtues.
But the Brits don’t worry too much about this sort of thing. They have a long history of riots and in response have invented an endless political debate where shifting alliances of financial interests, of cultural and regional groupings, create all manner of power sharing agreements.
It is hard to imagine how one might share power with a bunch of fourteen year olds, but there will be committees; there will documentaries; there will be TV debates. Miraculously rich patriots will dip their hands into their pockets and money will appear. Newly destroyed shopping centres will be refurbished. iPhones will become cheaper. Hoodies will appear on chat shows articulately explaining how, “it’s all about keeping it real, innit?” And reality game shows will take on new socially aware subject matter.
Then some time in the not so distant future when sixteen year olds are given the vote, ex-rioters will become MPs. And the Brits will do what they do best, gripe and moan as usual, and probably take great pleasure in failing to achieve a single Gold Medal at their own Olympics. A comedian will suggest a new Olympic Sport of Smash and Dash and a warm fuzzy sense of pride in a very peculiar British trait will even worm its way through my cynical old bones.