Practical Thinking, Panic & The Riots

The marketing industry has been caught out. Young males respond to messages of defiance and individualism but, when they act out the fantasy presented to them on a plate by clothes and shoes manufacturers to sell their products, we suddenly have a 'PR problem'.

But what is a 'PR problem' when it is at home? It would appear to be that point when fantasy becomes reality, when Levi's young male squaring up to riot police actually does square up to riot police.

We are now in the midst of yet another 'moral panic' where analysis of the long term structural causes of a social phenomenon are ignored in favour of a wave of emotion resulting in gut reactions that only store up problems for the future. No one is thinking.

The current response of the marketing community comes down to a question that is at the heart of the political crisis: does it appeal to the emotional instincts of its customer base or respond to the emotional reaction of a herd-like media and political culture in a state of confusion, ignorance and fear?

I think we have the answer: it joins in the panic and suddenly becomes 'socially responsible', meaning, in fact, conservative in the worst sense, part of the problem of suppressing discontent rather than stating firmly that it is merely responding to the mood of the time as sound business.

If people are discontented, it is not because of moral laxity but because they have reasons for discontent - local policing, lack of opportunity, overcrowding, underemployment, generational lack of respect (from the old to the young), the hypocrisy of the rich and the lack of representation by the Left.

Watch this short segment of an articulate employed black telling it like it is to the Mayor of London. This man is bright, talented and on the right side of the law but he is not happy.

He does not have to look far to see a world where others no better than he is are raking in bonuses despite bringing the country to its economic knees.

Now, for balance, watch this tough black lady taking on the rioters. The tragedy here is that small traders and property owners with little capital are being ruined and threatened by people with no capital.

Both sides have been shoved into the position of the soldiery of the competing powers in 1914. Neither side then asked why they should even be in this position and neither side is asking that question today.

Here is where one has to put in the mantra that all this does not justify the riots. The riots, of course, were not political as we generally understand them but closer to 'carnival' - anarchic, criminal and strangely authentic. People really suffered but not perhaps the people who should have done.

The most admirable reaction to the whole business was that of The (Tory) Lord Harris. He did not pontificate or moralise. He did not even try to analyse (the job of others). He dealt like a practical man with a fact and offered material assistance to the victims and called on the Government to provide jobs.

The mantra of moralistic blame from 'commentators' misses the point. The riots were a fact on the ground. They happened because they were ready to happen. It is like expecting to humiliate Germany in 1919 and not expect another war.

Business is now stuck in the middle. The selling process is an emotional process, a manipulative process, of entering into the consciousness of its targets and tweaking it into an action in the interest of the sellers. It is not much different from the classical view of magicians of their craft.

Politicians are also not much different except that they are 'channellers', responding to the emotions of the voters and seeking to manipulate them for their own ends, raising intermediary demons (the media) who, like all raised demons, are untrustworthy tricksters.

In the end, the only authentic behaviour seems to be that of the people themselves at the hard edge of the crisis - the rioters rioting in a context of their own, the police trying to do their job under difficult conditions, the victims of the rioting and those attempting to clean up afterwards.

The magistrates panicked, the politicians panicked, the media panicked and the marketeers panicked - the only people not panicking were the population at large. Listen to conversations around you and the question was always: why did this happen now? 

But this was a question avoided by the panic-stricken Establishment because it was an inconvenient question, partly because nobody knew the answer although everyone had an opinion, an opinion usually cast in terms of morality and 'oughts' rather than what was actually happening on the ground.

It does not really want to answer that question because it raises more serious questions about what the politicians and the media have been doing for the last three or four decades. It certainly raises questions about whether the political and economic system is more broken that we had all thought.

This is not the first time that the Establishment has failed to predict an event of great importance - we might start with the fall of the Soviet Union or the rise of Islamic terror but failures to predict economic collapse and urban mayhem are less forgivable because there is no excuse about lack of data.

Naturally, we should now be asking questions about the riots and how they came to be, but before jumping into bed with authoritarian moralists who wish to re-introduce the strap, conscription, hanging and all forms of social terror to a free young population, most of whom did not riot, we should ask this.

How is it that the persons we hired to govern us failed to structure a society where everyone feels they have opportunity, where perhaps one in five of the population is now on the economic edge and where policy can be made rationally before a crisis instead of irrationally after one?

We could learn a great deal from Lord Harris' humane, practical approach to the business of recovery and it strikes me as no surprise that an experienced businessman should put the rest of the panicking and hysterical elite to shame.

New Labour and the 'Lazy Libertarians' of Britain

There have been two stories in the British media this week that help to demonstrate why the New Labour Government is having a problem connecting with the population at large. They are not stories about foreign wars or economic crisis but about the management of private life.

The first saw a 19-year old Canadian woman effectively kicked out of the country because of new visa rules despite having married a Welsh man and being happily settled with him in an apparently stable relationship on British territory.

The second is the announcement that anyone, including parents, who regularly drives children around for social reasons will have to undergo criminal record checks or (in theory though less so in practice) face major fines.

What these stories have in common is an attitude of mind. In a large and complex society, Government has resorted to sledgehammers to crack recalcitrant nuts. Lobbyists against specific abuses have driven Government into solutions that look good on paper but bad in the street.

In these cases, and in many others, the instinct of New Labour progressives when faced with an abuse by a small minority is to create new rules (often begging the question of effective enforcement) that add petty bureaucracy and inconvenience (and costs) to millions.

There are many other examples, low and high. The identity card scheme (in abeyance but far from forgotten) imposes European style social control mechanisms in a forlorn attempt to manage and control massive social security fiddling. Most middle class people just can't see the point.

Sometimes, these approaches are designed to support special interests. New technologies are creating problems for the creative industries so the Government plans to introduce draconian measures on filesharing that could ultimately have coppers bursting in on private homes to arrest teenagers.

If you think this is extreme, observe the Metropolitan Police Art & Antiques Squad's arrest of a teenage artist who dared to challenge the might of Damien Hirst, actually the might of the protectors of the right to print money of fashionable artists needing to preserve value for their patrons.

At other times, the Government follows a different ideological tack. Its Deputy Leader, Harriet Harman, is a hardline old-school feminist who does not like prostitution. Her solution would be to bring in more draconian Swedish-type laws that would outlaw paying for sex.

In her case, just as the change in visa laws is related to forced marriages and the criminal records registration requirements to the risk from paedophiles, the real driver behind Harman's rather potty idea (under British conditions) is the very real problem of sex-trafficking.

If it is not sexual conduct, then it is right behaviour in environmental matters or in late night drinking. Sensible reforms are often made ridiculous with a bridge too far in attempts to control language (implying control of thought) instead of just behaviour.

In Scotland, it would seem a barman cannot volunteer the phrase 'same again' lest that 'nudge' you into that extra drink. The public are treated as mindless zombies. Much of this legislation appears to be guided by a new breed of manipulative cognitive scientists.

Then there is the security agenda which results in increasingly oppressive and patently daft applications of counter-terror legislation in local government. There is not an amateur photographer in the land who is not angered by the increasingly odd behaviour of the police.

Many of the British are beginning to get increasingly irritated by all this interference because it indicates a Government that is weak rather than strong, unable to deal with particular problems through decisive executive action. It can only create blanket rules which it often fails to enforce.

The net effect is a climate of anxiety, fear and inconvenience in which the majority of the population is cowed into avoiding behaviour that they would probably never have considered in the first place, while the really bad people go ever deeper underground where it can be pretended that they do not exist.

There are other irritations. Most of the specific problems that are emerging are the result of globalisation (the easy flow of peoples from other cultures into Britain to meet cheap labour needs) or of community breakdown under free market pressure. But migration and economic interventionism are taboo subjects.

New Labour is trapped by its ideology in two directions - its egalitarian liberal human rights agenda means that rules should apply to everyone equally and its free market agenda fails to permit any  effective and targeted interventionist strategies that can deal with economic root causes.

Not only are there real and vicious abuses in society to deal with but New Labour is also determined to support certain 'creative industrial' interests as part of its competitiveness agenda and to keep its own ideological minorities as happy as possible given its crumbling electoral base.

We are in the position where ordinary British families, generally a-political and best characterised as 'lazy libertarians', are finding that, increasingly, they have to start owning documents and registering to prove they are to be trusted or fear the heavy boot of Plod at every bit of grey area bodging.

They are not only pushed around by uniformed jobsworths (not necessarily the police) when they try to take a snap but they are being forced to snoop on their own kids.

History is repeating itself. In the early 1950s, the Labour Government that created the welfare state and undertook a massive postwar housing programme lost an election to the Conservatives. 

There were many reasons for that defeat but one was that the 'lazy libertarians' decided that they had had enough of 'socialist' regulation and rules and wanted more basic freedoms.

Admittedly a narrow defeat but Labour was slow to understand that many in the electorate saw regulation as a temporary necessity rather than a way of life.

Even though there is now scarcely a socialist bone in New Labour's body (despite the claims of Tory libertarians to whom Roosevelt was a Communist), it has not shaken off its Fabian-derived instinct to manage the population from above through direction and regulation.

There is an element in the New Labour elite that fears HG Wells' projection of his time into a world of Eloi and Morlocks. To Tories like David Davis, council estates are still filled with Disraeli's 'angels in marble' whereas some sour progressives see a seething mob marked by a 'poverty of aspiration'.

Tories have held on to working class votes since Disraeli's time not only through crass nationalism (as Labour people like to claim) but by ensuring a 'laissez-faire' approach to private life. Beer drinkers would naturally gravitate to the centre-right to the degree that the 'temperance' loons took over the left.

In the current Government's case, the ideological predisposition towards social intervention (perhaps accentuated by its refusal to consider economic intervention) is compounded not only by the chaos caused by economic globalisation but by the attempt to Europeanise British culture.

The regulatory frame of mind is normal in parts of Europe. In Germany, it seems accepted that language (as in the criminalisation of holocaust denial) can be a subject for legislation - and this mentality has drifted over into anti-racism legislation and the debate about blasphemy in the UK.

Wherever you look in British public life, in the dying days of what may be the last centre-left administration for a long time, you see a propensity to use the blunt instrument of petty regulation of private life to solve problems that its policy approaches created in the first place.

The gap between the Tories and New Labour will narrow over the coming months as the special interests underpinning the centre-left start to realise what is in store for them - but the general public have accumulated so many petty irritations that a tipping point may have been reached.