Harry Paterson

The recent disturbances, riots, call ‘em what you will, have, for those with eyes to see, revealed many things. A divided society, actually a country with several societies; haves and have-nots, the included and the excluded and, most ominously, a society now comprised of those ‘for’ and those ‘against’ violence, lawlessness and social order.

This last is particularly dangerous because it has revealed an almost Orwellian hijacking and subsequent redefining of what is considered acceptable during public discourse. The right have manoeuvred the debate onto a terrain where those people who seek greater understanding of the causes of the riots and wish to consider mechanisms whereby their reoccurrence can be prevented, have somehow been painted into a rhetorical corner where to ask such questions equates to being soft on criminals, soft on law and order and, unquestionably, to condone the horrific acts carried out by hooded and masked bandits in city centres across the country.

Of course, this is utter nonsense and, ironically, displays a mob mentality, similar in its mindlessness, to the one the hard right would have us believe it so implacably opposes. Hysteria, knee-jerk demands to hang ‘em, flog ‘em and string ‘em up from the nearest lamp post might well be effective in restoring short term order and allow the state to regain control of the streets but, ignoring the immorality, the crassness and the hypocrisy of demanding the police break the law and behave like barbarians to counter, well, breaking the law and acting like barbarians, it offers absolutely nothing by way of preventing a reoccurrence.

Ordinary people on the estates and towns across England are rightly outraged by the wanton destruction of their property and quite understandably feel great anger at a lifetime’s honest hard work going up in smoke at the matches of a seemingly feral and lawless mob. They are entitled to feel that way. No one would ague otherwise.

The Tory backwoodsmen of the 1922 committee, however, the cabinet, the police and the state have quite different motivations and an altogether more self-serving agenda. In the same way the international outcry over 911 paved the way to ever more repressive legislation, curbing people’s freedoms and civil liberties, all craftily disguised as the necessary measures  needed to combat the war on terror, so Cameron and his cronies will seize on recent events to introduce yet further measures to stifle channels of lawful and democratic protest as he and his crooks quietly get on with the business of robbing the country blind and making their pals in the boardrooms and the City ever richer at the expense of an ever more deprived ‘underclass’.

Appropriation of the language of public discourse, along, of course, with the irredeemably reactionary propaganda spewing from the media, now make the riots simply a question of are you with us or are you against  us? You oppose what we say? You disagree with our methods? Then you are condoning anarchy and you are supporting rampaging mobs of sociopathic hoodlums.

Seamus Milne, in today’s Guardian, touches on this phenomenon and traces its genesis to the post-911 hysteria, where George Bush starkly declared we were either with the US or against them. To oppose their rotten, cynical and disgusting middle eastern adventures was to brand oneself a terrorist. To be a supporter of radical Islam, a moral degenerate happy with the imposition of Sharia law and hordes of savage darkies trashing the holy trinity of mom, apple pie and the American way.

I’d argue it goes further back than that, at least in modern times. In the UK, Thatcher deployed the same strategy during the miners’ strike. Then, we were told, the miners were the ‘enemy within’ and compared with the ‘enemy without’. At a stroke, hundreds of thousands of working class men, women and even children, intent only on defending an entire industry and thousands of communities from an annihilation based on nothing more than sheer class hatred, were demonised and transformed into sinister proxy agents of Reagan’s Evil Empire, the Soviet Union.

And so to today where it isn’t enough, anymore, to brand opponents of selfish, destructive, unfettered capitalism and the riots it, not us, produces, as ‘do gooders’ or ‘bleeding heart liberals’. No, now we have somehow crossed an invisible rubicon and we actively support violence, looting and vandalism.

Against a backdrop of thieves and robbers in pin-striped suits, somehow elevated to a higher moral plane than the thieves and robbers in track suits, while the wholesale corruption right at the heart of the establishment and engulfing all its main wings, media, government, the Metropolitan Police and the City, reveal the disease coursing through the British body politic, the future is a bleak place indeed.

The only outcome of this pernicious process, with lawful channels of dissent cut off still further, and the commandeering of the language to deride and criminalise its opponents, the government is ensuring only one thing; there will be more riots, more unrest, more inequality and more injustice.

Aneurin Bevan once astutely observed that the reason you never hear the Tories talking about class war is because they’re too busy fighting it. No shit…