Looting Shops and Taking Time

For the last week or so I’ve been rather lazy when it comes to blogging.

For some this will doubtless come as a relief.

I put this indolence down partly to being on leave, but also because I’ve been loath to add to the number of trees that have been sacrificed in order that newspaper columnists might reflect on (or rant on about) the English riots. (Is there a virtual equivalent to that image of the old media age? Do the pixies that run Twitter, Facebook and the blogosphere have to tear up fairy forests so that bloggers and trolls can get things off their chests? I’m worried that for every sentence that begins ‘the riots happened because…’ somewhere an angel dies. I will need to tread carefully.)

I’ve been waiting for the dust to settle - literally and figuratively – before putting fingers to keyboard.

It’s hard to know what approach to take when confronted with the violence, looting and widespread lawlessness of the last couple of weeks. 

For some, the only appropriate response is to give full vent to the anger felt at the wanton destruction and terrifying violence. That means meting out harsh sentences on offenders in order that those affected by their actions might feel less pained as they see justice being done. For others, a completely different approach is taken. We must focus on identifying the causes of the riots. We can explain what happened and we must.

I’m bothered by the idea that you can come up with simplistic explanations for what happened. But I’m even more bothered by those who seem to think that to seek any explanation is to ignore the pain of those who have lost their livelihoods or suffered as a result of this outbreak of violence.

Seeking to understand is what differentiates human beings from other animals. My cat, confronted by rioters, would head for the nearest tree. I doubt that days later she would be worrying about the causes of these events. But we are human. We do. That doesn’t mean we don’t feel sympathy as well. Feeling and intellect aren’t mutually exclusive positions. It is possible to do a bit of multitasking.

It must be awful to have lost your livelihood. It must be terrible to feel frightened in your home. But to feel someone else’s pain can never be an end in itself. I want answers to explain why this happened – not least because many of those involved in the looting had never offended before and did not fit the photo-fit for ‘potential rioter’. 

It’s easy to get caught up in the emotions that arise from these events. But we should be wary of acting out of a sense of outrage that does more harm than good. I am deeply concerned at the sentences being handed out that bear little relation to sentencing guidelines in order to send a message. I am worried that policies which withdraw benefits or housing are being made up on the hoof. It may feel good to give vent to our outrage, but such disproportionate actions are likely to create more problems than they solve.

Ed Miliband has, I think, got it about right. He’s understood the shocking nature of these events, but he’s also urged us to think carefully about the meaning of these events: what are their causes, what can we learn from them? And I think he is onto something when he directs our attention to what such events might reveal about the values of our society – a society that has aggrandized wealth and possession, that has ignored economic inequality, and that must look again at the things that make for good, strong communities. 

There are no easy answers. Reflection is a slow business. It’ll take time to come to an accurate understanding of what happened. It’ll take time to work out policies that will address the disaffection that led to these events. It’ll take time to lay the foundations for a better society. But perhaps, in the circumstances, taking time is no bad thing.  

Political Debate: Speaking for or Listening to Others?

The problem with this political activism malarkey is that it takes a lot of time.

Take this blog entry.

I’ve been meaning to write it for the last week now. It started when I read a piece by Dan Hodges entitled 'Harriet Harman Should Stop Acting Like a Girl'. It continued when James Purnell on Newsnight suggested ways in which the welfare state could be revamped.

Let’s start with Dan Hodges.

He’s probably a nice bloke, but his pieces often have the affect on me of nails being dragged down a blackboard. A lot of the time he seems to exist purely to jab a sharp stick into the ribs of his fellow Labourites. This is not, I should say, always the case: his piece today on why epetitions should be banned is well-judged and well-aimed. But it’s that method of riling your own side that reminds me rather too much of Tony Blair’s technique of directing his fire at his own party rather than the Tories.

But I digress.

Dan’s piece focused on Harriet Harman’s motion to conference for gender balance between leader and deputy leader. So if the leader is male the deputy will be female and vice versa. I won’t repeat his argument – you can read it for yourself – but what I thought was interesting was that it was written in a rather neutral tone as if, clearly, the prescription for the problem of women’s under-representation as MPs was something that could not legitimately be outlined by a man. I suspect this shows, at some level, an awareness that women are sick to the back teeth with men speaking for them. It’s not so long ago, after all, that Evan Harris was Lib Dem ‘spokesperson’ for women. (I could show you the long, irritating correspondence I had with him on the propriety of this arrangement but I suspect you’ve got better things to do. Like worming the cat.)

No such subtlety about the lives of others from James Purnell as he addressed questions about the future of the welfare state. Again, there are other places that deal with the detail of his argument, but in questioning the current arrangements what had me grinding what's left of my teeth was the sense that his ideas did not come out of conversations with the people whose lives would be affected by his solutions.

This lack of awareness about the problems that might attend to speaking on behalf of others interests me. On the whole, there is more sensitivity to gender and race issues on this matter now than there is on class issues. (And Owen Jones has done a fantastic job in exposing what that lack of sensitivity means for the way in which the lives of the working classes have been represented and the policies that have been created.) It seems that all and sundry can talk on behalf of the poorest members of society with no sense of embarrassment or unease that they know not the experiences of which they speak.

Talking to my friend Michele she told me of a school of thought in the US that made it a principle when addressing class issues that you never analysed a socio-economic group lower than your own. This avoided misrepresenting or appropriating another's experience. It also freed up the terrain for members of those less well-represented groups to speak about their experience and what would make life better.

We need more of those voices for they are lacking in our current political debates. 

I suspect this is because the political space is dominated by people like me. I’m lucky. My background may be rural working class, but that was a long time ago. I work in higher education. I teach and I research. I have considerable autonomy over my time and that means I can find ways of expressing myself politically.  

If Labour is serious about a reinvigorated politics, we must find ways of engaging all parts of society and of listening – really listening – to voices that aren’t often heard. We need to make our membership fees much cheaper; we need to think about strategies that mean our political representatives are drawn from a range of backgrounds, not just a few. 

If we don’t deal directly with this issue, the time-rich and the well-off will continue to dominate the political arena. And as a second financial crisis looms on the horizon, it is vital that the society that emerges out of that upheaval reflects the voices of all, not just those who shout loudest.