On the riots
I posted the following comment in response to Sarah Carr's excellent and touching blog post about the London Riots. It turned out to be more or less the blogpost I've been incubating for the past 24 hours, so I reproduce it here.
I lived at the top of Crystal Palace park for a year and a half when I moved back to London from Cairo at the end of the 1990s. Couldn’t afford to live closer in, so commuted from there to work in the centre. Commuting was one of the reasons I quit my (safe, government) job 18 months later and moved to the US. Croydon was soul-destroying then, but not as grungy and run-down as you describe it here.
On my last few visits to Austerity Britain(TM) I have been struck by both increasingly visible poverty and increasing electronic surveillance, particularly in urban areas. Public spaces are tense, fearful, surveilled. You can’t pull out a camera at a station. But their cameras are watching you from several angles. It’s not healthy at all. Orwellian, alienated.
Some on Twitter etc have been evoking the start of the Thatcher era. It strikes me that what Thatcher started, her successors have been working to complete. She proclaimed that ‘there is no such thing as society’ and then did all she could to make that true. Community, solidarity, egalitarianism – all dying or dead, for the most part. I suspect if you could ask the rioters what they’re doing, they would give some variation on a nihilist theme. Why destroy? Because they can. We have trained our young people to be acquisitive, atomized, unempathetic.
The smugness of Egyptian commentators may be unattractive or misplaced. The Egyptian state and its security agents are far, far worse than anything Britain has ever come up with. But I think Thatcher would have been laughed at for proclaiming that there is no such thing as society in Egypt. #jan25 was in part Egyptian society asserting itself against a predatory state. What we see in the UK at the moment is large-scale predation within society itself. I just hope that the clean-up crews, Turkish ‘popular committees,’ and other assertions of positive social solidarity prevail and signal the start of a different kind of rebalancing in the UK – the rebirth of real society (not Cameron’s goofy Big Society malarkey).
