Opinion London burning

What followed was that many apolitical,anarchistic gangs of teenage youths who were out of school due to summer holidays saw this as a chance of beginning to loot and rampage. These young gangs are all equipped with 3G phones and can twitter and get on Facebook or YouTube easily. As they move around the city,they tell each other as to where the police are and move on. Gangs who don’t normally befriend each other co-operate in dodging the police.

The police have been reorganised over the last few years in much more desk work and much less footpounding on streets. They have been focused on counter-terrorism to blunt the Islamist threat. There is also cyber-terrorism which requires high powered desk personnel. There are fewer old style police around.

Once the riot started in one borough,it spread to other boroughs and later cities,all of whom have a high proportion of Black and poor White population. Here typically family structures lack stability. Indeed the rules of entitlement of the British Welfare State neither insist on marriage nor stable households as a condition for receiving welfare payments. This is in one way helpful to the less well-off as it frees them to make their life choices. But it means that their children,often from different partners,lack supervision. They also see that their parents have been out of work and living on benefits. Thus,they see themselves as joining those jobless ranks and hence do not care about education.

None of this is necessarily immoral or illegal though it may be anti-social. Over the years,progressive governments,my own Labour Party ones including,have made the rules of entitlement more liberal. We have allowed people a lot of freedom and little compulsion.

We all know that the Welfare State needs reform as the present government is doing,but it will take time. This is because the incentives as of now are perverse. Anyone out of a job has little reason to take up a job since he loses a lot of benefits and does not earn much more.

The same logic has applied to education. Again for perfectly liberal reasons,we have restricted the right of teachers to admonish,let alone punish misbehaving pupils. The structure of human rights legislation,introduced for good reasons,has been misused by parents to attack schools who discipline. The better off escape such schools by choosing to live in areas where there are good schools or send their children to Public Schools at vast expense. So the effects of educational experimentation falls on the less well-off. It is the students of these schools who are rioting out there.

The police will regain control,but the deeper problems of the country need attention. Of course,in all these dimensions—welfare,education,family relations,the Coalition government has embarked on a legislative programme. But the economy is also suffering from a slow recovery. In order to avoid a US style downgrade UK has decided to eliminate the budget deficit over one Parliament. That has made money tight.

There is much debate on these issues across the political spectrum. But the riots have been deplored by all sides. The restoration of London’s reputation is the priority. After all the Olympics are only a few months away.