Doug PollardLondon travel notes - paying off the mob
I’ve laid off talking about the UK riots till now. Although I am British, I haven’t lived there for years, and now when I do visit, it’s only for wedding and funerals.
There’ve been the usual predictable responses from
- the stuck-up snobby upper class Tory moaners about kids with no manners, poor English, lack of respect for property and their betters, calling for hard policing and stiffer punishments – nothing to do with the withdrawal of funding for education, benefits, youth clubs
- the chav in the street complaining about foreigners/blacks coming over here and taking our jobs, if there were any jobs to take in the first place, and having their benefit cut
- the angry voter complaining that the police aren’t doing their job
- the lamenting liberal sympathising with the downtrodden, poor, uneducated, repressed underclass
None of which was new or added anything to our understanding. You could probably find similar responses throughout history, ever since the Emperor Augustus complained about the cost of keeping the mass of ordinary Romans quiet.
The riots – and the riots and demonstrations in Greece, Spain, Israel, France – with or without a racial dimension – are all fundamentally about one thing.
The breaking of the contract that underpins every civilisation. The contract between the rulers and the mob.
The mob is not egalitarian. Its members know, by and large, they they’re nothing special, will never own a flash car, or a big house, or be adored by millions of TV viewers.
Some of them will, by joining a gang and robbing and fighting their way out. Boardrooms are full of them. Some of them will win talent contests and get record contracts. Some will win out through football or cricket. But most of them know they are destined to be nothing more than the mulch in which civilisation grows.
And most of them are, if not happy, at least content enough not to take out their disappointment and frustration on the rest of us.
Until their rulers start pulling up what few ladders they have.
Until a trigger-happy policeman shoots one of them, and the rest try to cover it up with lies about being shot at first.
Until their rulers cut their already meagre wages and benefits even further, making it impossible to buy the things that are constantly advertised to them as essential to happiness, unless they turn to crime.
And so on.
There is no excuse for lotting, robbing, killing and burning. But there are reasons these things happen.
Riots didn’t happen in Scotland and Northern Ireland: they have their own local parliaments and so far they’re largely quarantined from the cuts.
And the local pollies there are not Old Etonians and Oxbridge graduates who used to spend three and a half thousand pounds each on a special suit to wear to a dining club whose speciality was to hire a restaurant for an evening, get riotously drunk, and trash it. And then pay for the damage in cash.
UK PM David Cameron and London Mayor Boris Johnston were both members of the Bullingdon Club. Google it.
Riots happened in England because the contract between ‘the mob’ and the ruling class has been systematically torn up. Shredded, piece by piece.
The contract says that the ruling class will ensure that the mob have enough to eat, a place to live, and work to do, on not too onerous conditions. And will not needlessly harass them.
In exchange for which the mob will not be too violent, not damage too much property, and generally stand around sullenly tugging their forelocks without ever challenging authority directly.
The Romans paid off the mob with bread and circuses
Post-war European governments paid them off with full-employment, in which the best and brightest worked in business, the not quite so clever worked for state owned industries, and the utterly unemployable had welfare.
Then came Thatcher, and smashed this by and large successful, if rather sleepy, system.
In the name of efficiency and ideology, state owned businesses were sold off at knockdown prices to business, who cherry picked the best people and dumped the rest, cut services, jacked up prices, and made their new owners and shareholders very happy.
Then the government began withdrawing from social housing, selling it off where they could, and building no new stock.
Fewer and worse, mostly part-time jobs, Fewer, and mostly worse, and more expensive housing. Less, and dearer, public transport.
And on, and on . . . .
It was a massive transfer of social equity from the underclass to the middle class.
Meanwhile business people paid themselves more and more, the government spent billions of the peoples taxes bailing out bankers who trashed the economy, and MPs kept their snouts firmly in the trough. Fiddling expenses in parliament, followed by lucrative business appointments for desert.
Still, there was always the dole.
University was still just about affordable for the few with the aptitude.
And then came the Tories, aided by the Lib Dems, and slashed healthcare, education, welfare .........
...... all it took was that one shot in Tottenham and up went the pyre.
The ‘feral rats’ poured out of their foetid dens and came out to have some grim, vicious fun at the expense of the people above them. Time to remind those tossers that if you want safe peaceful streets and an orderly society, you do not getting by trashing the lives of millions and stealing most of the good things in life for yourself.
In essence, Britain has stopped paying the protection money, and the mob are reminding them it’s overdue.
As if his actions had not already proved what a fool he is, the British Prime Minister has now turned on the police, blaming them for letting things get out of hand.
What’s more, the scheduled cuts to the police numbers and funding will go ahead. And to the fire service, and the ambulance men: less money, less staff.
Who then, will protect the middle class from the mob? And Cameron and co from the middle class?
Not the government.
Not the police and the firemen - they're already overstretched.
Enter the vigilantes: “We’re here on the streets of Enfield to protect our families,” yelled the white yob, chasing a carload of blacks down the street.
I’m so glad I don’t live there any more.
This is not over yet by a long way.
