It sometimes feel that decades go by in a year and other times time moves so slowly along and nothing seems to be changing at all.
Well today we are in a period of time where things are changing very quickly indeed. Almost by the day as the governor of the bank of England recently has come our and said. When asked well what’s going to happen next year to the economy he replied I’m not sure what will happen tomorrow let alone next year.
So since the global economic collapse in 2008 ordinary working people can find themselves with all sorts of odd conclusions and ideas where the is a lack of a mass works party as we find ourselves in that situation today.
For a example of this I was in my local pub the other night just casually chatting about politics and the current state of things with Greece and tee economy etc when this guy said to me well I consider myself a Tory always voted for them and feel that it was all labours fault. Maybe labour played their part but they stepped in to save the banks where we were hours away from not being able to use the banking machines and funds drying up. I pointed out they had to do this but should have gone further in fully nationalising the banks under democratic workers control using the banks funds for peoples needs not to save capitalism. But this guy went on although I’m a Tory he claims anyway I don’t agree with all this bonus’s these bankers are still getting it’s a disgrace and should be stopped. So this sort of contradictory idea of apparently being a Tory which in all honesty I’m not sure he was he has probably just been brought up to save and look out for himself which there is some good in that of course but a Tory I think not. By examining the fact that the bankers have run a mock on our economy he points out that even ordinary working class people who you may think don’t get what is going on in the wider picture do get things to a degree. But currently are drawing some wrong conclusions and are perhaps a bit naive in their thinking of how to solve the crisis.
I just find it interesting how consciousness changes and shifts on major shifts in society. As Lenin quite rightly points out consciousness always lags behind reality and this is no different today we are 4 years into the biggest economic crisis in capitalism for a very long time and workers are only now just starting to wake up to the pure class war which is going on in front of our eyes. Workers are starting to rub sleep out of their eyes and look for answers. Unfortunately those answers are possibly not the correct ones at this moment in time but they will learn through experience no doubt.
I can see a situation where when workers or more advanced layers of workers finally realise they have been lead a merry dance for so long that class anger can spill out at a fast rate in unpredictable ways.
Class consciousness is something we as Marxists study constantly looking to see where that build up of pressure is and how it is developing and where that sparks may come where the term the straw that broke the camels back comes into play. There is a build up of anger and frustration by people out there but unfortunately thus far it has only really been shown in the riots of last August which sadly if no proper fight back is forthcoming from the labour movement and the trades unions I could see reoccurring if nothing is offered as an alternative.
I sincerely hope it doesn’t but that lack of an alternative being posed apart from permanent austerity will force people to the conclusions we may not always wish for.
It is important that we as socialists and those who consider themselves Marxists to offer that alternative and bridge that gap in consciousness by raising the ideas and the political understanding with our own ranks but eventually the wider class if we can. It is a hard uphill task but a task we must take up none the less.
subscribe to this blog:
Posts
All Comments
Showing posts with label UK riots. Show all posts
Showing posts with label UK riots. Show all posts
Saturday, 26 May 2012
Tuesday, 17 January 2012
The dangers of the lack of a political alternative
During these tough economic times as we start to feel the bite of the cuts and our living standards slip backwards. The lack of a alternative or a party standing up for people is very evident.
It took the trade unions months to call the first demonstration national demo in London on March 26th last year. They had to be dragged kicking and screaming to do so. They only started organising mass co-ordinated strike action after hard work and lobbying and mass pressure from below by ordinary rank-and-file members.
With the 3 main political parties lib dem, labour and tories all agreeing the need for cuts to some degree people will be left feeling who do we trust now ?
very understandable with no one taking a lead and showing leadership as my post on political leadership last night was about can lead to all sorts of dangers. Not least the idea that we cant affect things and a sense of desperation sets in. Last summers riots were a sign of this. Many young people in poor areas with little opportunities feeling attacked and threatened from every angle felt they had nothing to loose.
As Martin Luther King once said rioting is the voice of the voiceless. Countless generations have been ignored and pushed about, stop and searched as seen as a constant threat but now have even less opportunities with the cutting of EMA and trebling of tuitian fees for university.
Life is a struggle for people from these backgrounds ordinary working class backgrounds who have little hope in finding a job in their area or getting out of the situation they find themselves in.
Youth fight for jobs last year did interveen in these areas to try and offer a constructive programme for youth to get involved in and channel their anger into something constructive and this is helping but still far more needs to be done.
The lack of an alternative for people will also have an affect on peoples political views to the likes of the right and far right for example may find easy picking in areas where there is no alternative to the 3 capitalist parties and play on peoples fears of imigration and heighten those tensions. This could be very dangerous and has already been seen with the senseless murdering of innocent students in Norway last year and the rise of the neo-nazi's in germany.
All this is very worrying and makes the need for a new workers party and a lead to be taken by the unions to offer an alternative right away. They should be acting as the pillars of the communities where political leadership is lacking.
Many confused things will be running through peoples minds at this time but the longer we go on without that clear alternative being made, as socialist alternative the more likely people are to turn to less savoury methods of change which is something as socialists we would not want to see.
It took the trade unions months to call the first demonstration national demo in London on March 26th last year. They had to be dragged kicking and screaming to do so. They only started organising mass co-ordinated strike action after hard work and lobbying and mass pressure from below by ordinary rank-and-file members.
With the 3 main political parties lib dem, labour and tories all agreeing the need for cuts to some degree people will be left feeling who do we trust now ?
very understandable with no one taking a lead and showing leadership as my post on political leadership last night was about can lead to all sorts of dangers. Not least the idea that we cant affect things and a sense of desperation sets in. Last summers riots were a sign of this. Many young people in poor areas with little opportunities feeling attacked and threatened from every angle felt they had nothing to loose.
As Martin Luther King once said rioting is the voice of the voiceless. Countless generations have been ignored and pushed about, stop and searched as seen as a constant threat but now have even less opportunities with the cutting of EMA and trebling of tuitian fees for university.
Life is a struggle for people from these backgrounds ordinary working class backgrounds who have little hope in finding a job in their area or getting out of the situation they find themselves in.
Youth fight for jobs last year did interveen in these areas to try and offer a constructive programme for youth to get involved in and channel their anger into something constructive and this is helping but still far more needs to be done.
The lack of an alternative for people will also have an affect on peoples political views to the likes of the right and far right for example may find easy picking in areas where there is no alternative to the 3 capitalist parties and play on peoples fears of imigration and heighten those tensions. This could be very dangerous and has already been seen with the senseless murdering of innocent students in Norway last year and the rise of the neo-nazi's in germany.
All this is very worrying and makes the need for a new workers party and a lead to be taken by the unions to offer an alternative right away. They should be acting as the pillars of the communities where political leadership is lacking.
Many confused things will be running through peoples minds at this time but the longer we go on without that clear alternative being made, as socialist alternative the more likely people are to turn to less savoury methods of change which is something as socialists we would not want to see.
Tuesday, 6 December 2011
Findings show that summer riots fuled by underlying anger
As we thought back at the time the riots in britain this summer was a outpour of pure frustration and anger in various fashions and for various different reasons. experts have been pouring over the evidence from then on and have come up with some startling findings.
Widespread anger and frustration at the way police engage with communities was a significant cause of the summer riots in every major city where disorder took place, the biggest study into their cause has found.
Hundreds of interviews with people who took part in the disturbances which spread across England in August revealed deep-seated and sometimes visceral antipathy towards police.
In a unique collaboration, the Guardian and London School of Economics (LSE) interviewed 270 people who rioted in London, Birmingham, Liverpool, Nottingham, Manchester and Salford.
The project collected more than 1.3m words of first-person accounts from rioters, giving an unprecedented insight into what drove people to participate in England's most serious bout of civil unrest in a generation. Rioters revealed that a complex mix of grievances brought them on to the streets but analysts appointed by the LSE identified distrust and antipathy toward police as a key driving force.
Details of the research findings, which are also based on an analysis of an exclusive database of more than 2.5m riot-related tweets, will be unveiled in a series of reports over the next five days. Monday's findings include:
• Many rioters conceded that their involvement in looting was simply down to opportunism, saying that a perceived suspension of normal rules presented them with an opportunity to acquire goods and luxury items they could not ordinarily afford. They often described the riots as a chance to obtain "free stuff" or sought to justify the theft.
• Despite David Cameron saying gangs were "at the heart" of the disturbances, evidence shows they temporarily suspended hostilities. The effective four-day truce – which many said was unprecedented – applied to towns and cities across England. However, on the whole, the research found gang members played only a marginal role in the riots.
• Contrary to widespread speculation that rioters used social media to organise themselves and share "viral" information, sites such as Facebook and Twitter were not used in any significant way. However, BlackBerry phones – and the free messaging service known as "BBM" – were used extensively to communicate, share information and plan riots in advance.
• Although mainly young and male, those involved in the riots came from a cross-section of local communities. Just under half of those interviewed in the study were students. Of those who were not in education and were of working age, 59% were unemployed. Although half of those interviewed were black, people who took part in the disorder did not consider these "race riots".
• Rioters identified a range of political grievances, but at the heart of their complaints was a pervasive sense of injustice. For some this was economic: the lack of money, jobs or opportunity. For others it was more broadly social: how they felt they were treated compared with others. Many mentioned the increase in student tuition fees and the scrapping of the education maintenance allowance.
Although rioters expressed a mix of opinions about the disorder, many of those involved said they felt like they were participating in explicitly anti-police riots. They cited "policing" as the most significant cause of the riots, and anger over the police shooting of Mark Duggan, which triggered initial disturbances in Tottenham, was repeatedly mentioned – even outside London.
The most common complaints related to people's everyday experience of policing, with many expressing deep frustration at the way people in their communities were subjected to stop and search. An independent panel set up by the government in the aftermath of the riots identified stop and search as a possible "motivation factor" for black and Asian rioters.
In findings released last week, the panel – which took evidence from riot-hit communities and victims, but did not speak to rioters – concluded there was no single cause for the riots, but urged police to improve the way stop and search is conducted. "Where young law-abiding people are repeatedly targeted there is a very real danger that stop and search will have a corrosive effect on their relationship with the police," it said.Of those interviewed in the Reading the Riots study, 73% said they had been stopped and searched in the previous 12 months. They were more than eight times more likely to have been stopped and searched in the previous year than the general population in London.
This goes to show that the actions of a tory government at the helm with savage deep cuts being driven through in local areas such as Tottenham by their new labour collaborators in local councils such as Tottenham. Many of the findings confirm what we as socialists have thought all along about the riots and that the conclusions drawn by the government to claim we need harder tougher policing is entirely the wrong thing to do and would only anger young disenfranchised people even more.
With a estimate of 1.2 million young people out of work and not in training and with this figure only a estimate and set to rise i sadly can only see the repeat of such events we witnessed this summer. They may not be started the same way or triggered in a similar fashion as this summers riots but no doubt the anger still lives on in those communities.
Widespread anger and frustration at the way police engage with communities was a significant cause of the summer riots in every major city where disorder took place, the biggest study into their cause has found.
Hundreds of interviews with people who took part in the disturbances which spread across England in August revealed deep-seated and sometimes visceral antipathy towards police.
In a unique collaboration, the Guardian and London School of Economics (LSE) interviewed 270 people who rioted in London, Birmingham, Liverpool, Nottingham, Manchester and Salford.
The project collected more than 1.3m words of first-person accounts from rioters, giving an unprecedented insight into what drove people to participate in England's most serious bout of civil unrest in a generation. Rioters revealed that a complex mix of grievances brought them on to the streets but analysts appointed by the LSE identified distrust and antipathy toward police as a key driving force.
Details of the research findings, which are also based on an analysis of an exclusive database of more than 2.5m riot-related tweets, will be unveiled in a series of reports over the next five days. Monday's findings include:
• Many rioters conceded that their involvement in looting was simply down to opportunism, saying that a perceived suspension of normal rules presented them with an opportunity to acquire goods and luxury items they could not ordinarily afford. They often described the riots as a chance to obtain "free stuff" or sought to justify the theft.
• Despite David Cameron saying gangs were "at the heart" of the disturbances, evidence shows they temporarily suspended hostilities. The effective four-day truce – which many said was unprecedented – applied to towns and cities across England. However, on the whole, the research found gang members played only a marginal role in the riots.
• Contrary to widespread speculation that rioters used social media to organise themselves and share "viral" information, sites such as Facebook and Twitter were not used in any significant way. However, BlackBerry phones – and the free messaging service known as "BBM" – were used extensively to communicate, share information and plan riots in advance.
• Although mainly young and male, those involved in the riots came from a cross-section of local communities. Just under half of those interviewed in the study were students. Of those who were not in education and were of working age, 59% were unemployed. Although half of those interviewed were black, people who took part in the disorder did not consider these "race riots".
• Rioters identified a range of political grievances, but at the heart of their complaints was a pervasive sense of injustice. For some this was economic: the lack of money, jobs or opportunity. For others it was more broadly social: how they felt they were treated compared with others. Many mentioned the increase in student tuition fees and the scrapping of the education maintenance allowance.
Although rioters expressed a mix of opinions about the disorder, many of those involved said they felt like they were participating in explicitly anti-police riots. They cited "policing" as the most significant cause of the riots, and anger over the police shooting of Mark Duggan, which triggered initial disturbances in Tottenham, was repeatedly mentioned – even outside London.
The most common complaints related to people's everyday experience of policing, with many expressing deep frustration at the way people in their communities were subjected to stop and search. An independent panel set up by the government in the aftermath of the riots identified stop and search as a possible "motivation factor" for black and Asian rioters.
In findings released last week, the panel – which took evidence from riot-hit communities and victims, but did not speak to rioters – concluded there was no single cause for the riots, but urged police to improve the way stop and search is conducted. "Where young law-abiding people are repeatedly targeted there is a very real danger that stop and search will have a corrosive effect on their relationship with the police," it said.Of those interviewed in the Reading the Riots study, 73% said they had been stopped and searched in the previous 12 months. They were more than eight times more likely to have been stopped and searched in the previous year than the general population in London.
This goes to show that the actions of a tory government at the helm with savage deep cuts being driven through in local areas such as Tottenham by their new labour collaborators in local councils such as Tottenham. Many of the findings confirm what we as socialists have thought all along about the riots and that the conclusions drawn by the government to claim we need harder tougher policing is entirely the wrong thing to do and would only anger young disenfranchised people even more.
With a estimate of 1.2 million young people out of work and not in training and with this figure only a estimate and set to rise i sadly can only see the repeat of such events we witnessed this summer. They may not be started the same way or triggered in a similar fashion as this summers riots but no doubt the anger still lives on in those communities.
Wednesday, 31 August 2011
Against David Blunketts right wing youth volunteer scheme
This piece below is a example of what labour and tories have in store for our youth and their way of dealing with the riots as they put it. They see it as a break down in responsibility and a lazyness of the youth to do anything with their lives. Their disgraceful vile and smears of young people in this piece below i totally condemn but wanted to highlight it as it is not just tories proposing these ridiculous hard line right wing ideas. It is labour too. David Blunkett represents labour and as so we can assume they would be in support of such a proposal. For a labour polititian to be writing in the Daily Mail says much for how far to the right they have shifted over the years and how far they cannot be trusted by working class communities.
David Blunkett today launches an ambitious plan for a national volunteering scheme to help restore the values of duty and respect among teenagers.
The former home and education secretary said a major programme was needed to tackle the growing ‘culture of irresponsibility’ among young people which was exposed after the riots that rocked the country this month.
Speaking to the Mail last night, the senior backbench Labour MP said the riots showed many young people had a ‘severe disregard for property and community’ and lack the ‘ethics of personal responsibility’. He added: ‘I was horrified that people could get involved in the wanton destruction of their communities.
‘The culture of irresponsibility is growing. The neighbourliness, the extended family, the reinforcement of positive values have been eroded very badly over the last 50 years.
‘We have an opportunity to do something now that will make a difference in the long term.’
His blueprint for a National Volunteer Programme proposes giving hundreds of thousands of youngsters nine-month community service-style placements costing £7,000 each.
people who won't sign up should be denied benefits)
A deeply divided kingdom: Scots each get £1,600 more state cash a year spent on them
Individuals who signed up would help elderly people, clean up their local areas and do other good works.
In return they would be given money off university tuition fees or job training. Anyone who refused could have their benefits taken away.
Writing for the Mail, Mr Blunkett said the Government shouldn’t ‘bankroll’ those who refuse to face up their responsibilities.
The scheme would help tackle the problem of workless households and give young people out of work and not in education a ‘reason to get up in the morning and a pattern of daily life,’ Mr Blunkett said.
The scheme would help the young people involved in the riots. Some are seen here looting a Carhartt store during the disturbances
In the long term, it could be paid for by selling off the Government’s stake in the RBS and Lloyds TSB banks, which were bailed out during the financial crisis, he suggests, although recent falls in the stock market mean the value of these shares has fallen.
Mr Blunkett said the scheme would, like national service in the Fifties, become a rite of passage for young people growing up in Britain.
It is needed because the institutions that traditionally helped instil values, such as the Church and the traditional two-parent household, were ‘in decline as instruments of moral guidance’, he said.
This article is a disgrace in so many ways it is like forced labour and it isnt even paid. It is much like slave labour i'd suggest. Forcing the youth into work that is unpaid and threatening them if they do not take this they could have their b enifits removed is a absolute disgrace. Makes my skin crawl to hear things like this and hear polititians suggesting schemes like this. But i am not surprised at the same time. Blunkett and is labour mates have been on a rightward course for years now and this is as close to a tory idea as ever i saw one.
This scheme if it or anything similar comes to reality must be rigoursly opposed and fought with the upmost urgency. The trade union labour movement should take a lead now and start the ball rolling in representing young people. Offering them a alternative for young people to get behind. They have let our youth down too by offering no such alternative to cuts, unemployment, homlessness and a life on benifits.
It is now time the labour movement stood up for what is right and condemns labour and plans like this and stands with these young people who have been marginilised from society.
David Blunkett today launches an ambitious plan for a national volunteering scheme to help restore the values of duty and respect among teenagers.
The former home and education secretary said a major programme was needed to tackle the growing ‘culture of irresponsibility’ among young people which was exposed after the riots that rocked the country this month.
Speaking to the Mail last night, the senior backbench Labour MP said the riots showed many young people had a ‘severe disregard for property and community’ and lack the ‘ethics of personal responsibility’. He added: ‘I was horrified that people could get involved in the wanton destruction of their communities.
‘The culture of irresponsibility is growing. The neighbourliness, the extended family, the reinforcement of positive values have been eroded very badly over the last 50 years.
‘We have an opportunity to do something now that will make a difference in the long term.’
His blueprint for a National Volunteer Programme proposes giving hundreds of thousands of youngsters nine-month community service-style placements costing £7,000 each.
people who won't sign up should be denied benefits)
A deeply divided kingdom: Scots each get £1,600 more state cash a year spent on them
Individuals who signed up would help elderly people, clean up their local areas and do other good works.
In return they would be given money off university tuition fees or job training. Anyone who refused could have their benefits taken away.
Writing for the Mail, Mr Blunkett said the Government shouldn’t ‘bankroll’ those who refuse to face up their responsibilities.
The scheme would help tackle the problem of workless households and give young people out of work and not in education a ‘reason to get up in the morning and a pattern of daily life,’ Mr Blunkett said.
The scheme would help the young people involved in the riots. Some are seen here looting a Carhartt store during the disturbances
In the long term, it could be paid for by selling off the Government’s stake in the RBS and Lloyds TSB banks, which were bailed out during the financial crisis, he suggests, although recent falls in the stock market mean the value of these shares has fallen.
Mr Blunkett said the scheme would, like national service in the Fifties, become a rite of passage for young people growing up in Britain.
It is needed because the institutions that traditionally helped instil values, such as the Church and the traditional two-parent household, were ‘in decline as instruments of moral guidance’, he said.
This article is a disgrace in so many ways it is like forced labour and it isnt even paid. It is much like slave labour i'd suggest. Forcing the youth into work that is unpaid and threatening them if they do not take this they could have their b enifits removed is a absolute disgrace. Makes my skin crawl to hear things like this and hear polititians suggesting schemes like this. But i am not surprised at the same time. Blunkett and is labour mates have been on a rightward course for years now and this is as close to a tory idea as ever i saw one.
This scheme if it or anything similar comes to reality must be rigoursly opposed and fought with the upmost urgency. The trade union labour movement should take a lead now and start the ball rolling in representing young people. Offering them a alternative for young people to get behind. They have let our youth down too by offering no such alternative to cuts, unemployment, homlessness and a life on benifits.
It is now time the labour movement stood up for what is right and condemns labour and plans like this and stands with these young people who have been marginilised from society.
Monday, 29 August 2011
The brilliant work and thoughts of Ken Loach
Ken Loach is a well known left wing film director and has produced many great well made films on some very tough subjects. Ken dares to go where no one else does. Ken highlights working class struggles in his films and really gets his audience thinking. There is a recent article in the Guardian with a interview from him. I thought i'd share parts of it here. Ken talks on the recent riots in the UK and the political situation in this country too. He speaks so much sense and raises some excellent points that we can all take on board i feel.
The leftwing film director talks about the riots, his early work on television and the documentary he made for Save the Children 40 years that is about to be screened for the first time
About halfway through our interview, I call Ken Loach a sadist. The mild-mannered, faintly mole-like film director blinks hard, chuckles, and carries on. We are discussing a key aspect of his film-making: the element of surprise. Loach has spent his career depicting ordinary people, telling working-class stories as truthfully as possible, and he works distinctively – filming each scene in order, often using non-professional actors, encouraging improvisation.
Save The Children Fund Film
Production year: 1969Country: UKRuntime: 50 minsDirectors: Ken Loach.
Actors don't tend to see a full script in advance, and move through his films as confused as the audience about what lurks around the next corner. I ask Loach which surprise was most memorable, and he laughs incongruously through a few examples. He talks about an incident when an actor walked through a door, on-set, to discover his co-star in a bath, her wrists apparently slashed. "Surprise is the hardest thing to act," says Loach, "and his response was just very true." On another occasion an actor only found out during the filming of a battle scene that her character was to be shot and killed. She was not especially pleased.
Most surprisingly of all, Crissy Rock, the lead in Ladybird, Ladybird (1994) – a brilliant, devastating gut-wrencher of a film – was convinced she was starring in a happy, upbeat, redemptive story. "She thought it would turn out to be about a couple successfully raising children together," says Loach, smiling. It is actually about a woman's kids being taken, one by one, by the social services. In the scene where they come for the final child, Rock "couldn't believe it," says Loach. "She was just wrecked."
It's at this point I laugh and call Loach a sadist. But it's probably more accurate to call him uncompromising, with both his actors and his leftwing politics. Loach turned 75 in June, and next month the BFI is showing a retrospective that will take viewers from his early television work Рincluding the harsh, effective, 1966 expos̩ of homelessness Cathy Come Home Рto his most recent film, Route Irish, about the experiences of private security contractors in Iraq. I ask which of his films he's most proud of, and he can't choose. "There's quite a few I cocked up, but that's another matter."
His documentary The Save the Children Film, part-funded by the charity, is being shown for the first time; made in 1969 for TV, it was never broadcast. The film was commissioned for the charity's 50th anniversary, and it's easy to imagine what they might have been expecting: a gauzy portrait, light on analysis, strong on praise.
Loach took a different tack. The documentary looks at the potential problems of aid, the ways those in a position to be charitable are often patronising and paternalistic. He took his cameras to a school run by Save the Children in Kenya, for homeless boys from Nairobi, for instance, that was set up along the lines of a British public school; the children are shown blowing bugles, marching, reading books including The Inimitable Jeeves and Tom Brown's Schooldays. A group of young Kenyan activists appear in the film, one of whom notes he can't think of another school in the world where the mother tongue isn't allowed.
The documentary moves beyond the charity's work to show British expatriates in Kenya; one stompingly posh woman remarks they have "a wildly gay time" there, and she feels that "even in their poverty, [the Kenyan people] are basically happy". Raising their living standards might just upset things, she adds. The film is full of issues that remain pressing: the limits of philanthropy, the patronage relationships fostered by aid, the subtle and not-so-subtle problems of colonialism. It ends with the comment that we "must change the property relationships of society, and then we change man. That's the only real solution, and all the rest is propaganda."
The documentary was made for LWT and only one-third funded by the charity, so Loach thought he and his crew could "take an independent view, and the TV company would support us. But they didn't." There are moments when he seems to have the naivety that derives from an inflexible moral backbone. "When the people that ran the Save the Children Fund said they would sue us, the television company wrote off their investment, and didn't back us at all."
It isn't the only one of his documentaries to have been pulled; Questions of Leadership, a TV series critiquing the response of the trade union top brass to Thatcherism, made in the early 1980s, was never shown – apparently for political reasons. I ask whether it upsets him when his films are censored or withdrawn, and he says: "It makes you angry, not on your own behalf, but on behalf of the people whose voices weren't allowed to be heard. When you had trade unions, ordinary people, rank and file, never been on television, never been interviewed, and they're not allowed to be heard, that's scandalous. And you see it over and over again. I mean, we heard very little from the kids in the riots. You hear some people being inarticulate in a hood, but very few people were actually allowed to speak."
Loach's films are often either a call to arms (a reminder of the rotten, vicious circumstances many people face) or portraits of specific political movements. The Wind That Shakes the Barley was about the Irish war of independence, Bread and Roses was about a group of office cleaners in Los Angeles campaigning for just wages, Land and Freedom was about a young, unemployed Liverpudlian man, a member of the Communist party, who heads to Spain to fight in a militia against Franco.
Land and Freedom has all the obvious elements of a great film: a passionate protagonist, beautiful heroine, a romantic relationship, battle scenes. And yet its most gripping moments involve an extensive conversation between a communist militia and the people of a Spanish town about the merits of collectivism. Should the town's land be carved up and shared among the people? Should some remain private? All of it? When I ask whether Loach would describe his politics as socialist, he says it's a difficult word, because it's much devalued, and you can't "make sense of it without Marx – but if you say you're a Marxist, then the rightwing press just uses it as a brick to hang around your neck." He is the rare film-maker who brings questions of political structure flamingly alive.
Loach is a quiet, gentle man – that streak of sadism aside – who seems entirely without vanity; he comes across like the most caring teacher in school. We talk more about the riots, and the subsequent heavy-handedness of the courts. "They'll shoot people for stealing sheep next, won't they?" he says. "But, in a way, whenever something dramatic happens, you know that everybody retreats to their comfort zone – so the Tories retreat to cutting benefits, pulling people out of their houses, savage prison sentences. They want that anyway. So whatever happens is an excuse for them to do what they want to do."
I mention the two young men put away for four years each, after trying to provoke rioting through their Facebook pages. Loach notes, with a shrug, that their cases will probably go to appeal, then adds: "It's the ruling class cracking the whip, isn't it? It's disgusting. We've got to organise. In the words of the old American trade unionist Joe Hill: don't mourn, organise."
He continues, apologising occasionally for "lecturing" me. "I think the underlying factors regarding the riots are plain for anyone with eyes to see … It seems to me any economic structure that could give young people a future has been destroyed. Traditionally young people would be drawn into the world of work, and into groups of adults who would send the boys for a lefthanded screwdriver, or a pot of elbow grease, and so they'd be sent up in that way, but they would also learn about responsibilities, and learn a trade, and be defined by their skills. Well, they destroyed that. Thatcher destroyed that. She consciously destroyed the workforces in places like the railways, for example, and the mines, and the steelworks … so that transition from adolescence to adulthood was destroyed, consciously, and knowingly.
"I don't recall the nihilism among kids now, 40 or 50 years ago," he says. "Now there is no place for kids, period. So I think despite the material advances, we're worse off." We also don't seem to have a political class that understands, on any level, what it's like to face unemployment. "No, the Bullingdon boys have never had to confront that," says Loach. "The Bullingdon boys will wreck restaurants and …" he pauses. "Just throw some money at it?" I say. "Yes, or their parents will throw money at it."
I ask whether he aims to provoke political change with his films, and he says he hopes they make people "see things in a different way. That they see there were possibilities for change in Spain, for instance, and one of the things that destroyed it was sectarianism on the left. That you can organise trade unions, we do have strength, things can be different, and here are stories from the past that show it."
It's difficult to imagine young people risking their lives for leftwing ideals now as they once did in Spain though, isn't it? Loach disagrees. "You get the international volunteers who go and put themselves in Gaza … Those are the sort of people who would have gone to Spain. People will resist, and they will fight back, and they do feel solidarity."
Does he think there's a chance of a revolutionary moment in the UK, after the financial crisis, the MPs' expenses scandal, the phone hacking revelations, and the exposure of the cosiness between the police and the Murdoch empire? "It just needs leadership," he says. "It's like a head of steam. The steam won't drive anything unless there's an engine, and somebody to stoke it, and to drive the wheels around." The moment in recent history, he thinks, when a proper movement could have been launched, was at the march against the Iraq war in 2003.
"At the end there should have been a hundred tables, here's a pen, give us your name, we're anti-privatisation, anti-war you know – it's Lenin's bread, land and peace. If you sign up to that, you'll be organised and it'll be democratic and there will be no vain personalities trying to take it over, and we can articulate a programme and a movement that might become a party on that basis. There was a huge feeling across the country. None of the politicians spoke for us. That was the moment, but it was missed."
As a child growing up in the industrial town of Nuneaton, his paternal grandfather a miner, his father a foreman in a machine tool factory, Loach had little interest in politics. His father read the Daily Express, and was a working-class Tory, and Loach, an only child ("not because they didn't want more children, but because it wasn't possible for some reason"), fell in love with the theatre. They lived 30 miles from Stratford-upon-Avon, "so once I got the bug, aged about 12 or 13, I used to go there and see plays". He fainted once, standing at the back watching Titus Andronicus, starring Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh. "She has her tongue cut out, and she came on with streams of red, and I'd had this long cycle ride, so I fell over."
Loach went to the local grammar school, which took in "60 boys each year, out of a town population of about 70,000. It was very lucky to go, because it was good, but it was at the expense of hundreds of boys the same age who, from the age of 11, would have no way into higher education." If you didn't get into the grammar school, your academic career would almost certainly fade fast. Loach wanted to be a lawyer; I ask if this was out of a striving for justice, and he laughs. "By no means. I just fancied the frocks really. I was really stage-struck, but I thought that going into the theatre would be unrealistic."
After a couple of years of national service with the RAF, he studied law at Oxford, and spent all his time performing. "I didn't go to a lecture for over a year. It was an absolute disgrace. I got an actor's degree – I swotted for six weeks at the end." He and a friend came close to starting a theatre afterwards, but when their funding fell through, he ended up understudying a comedian who was playing opposite Kenneth Williams. "I was totally incompetent, so thank God I never had to go on." Williams "was quite friendly", says Loach, "but if he was not in a good frame of mind, he could destroy you, and I was a young innocent abroad."
He emphasises that he was a poor actor ("I wouldn't have employed me") and so became an assistant director at Northampton Rep for a year, then in 1963 landed a job as a trainee director at the BBC. "It was a huge stroke of luck to be there, because the BBC was in quite a liberal mood, with Hugh Carleton Greene as the director general." Loach was soon influenced by the political passion of those around him, and began reading widely about leftwing ideas.
He started off directing Z Cars, and was then asked to join the Wednesday Play; in his first year he directed about six films, "original scripts, going out at peak viewing, straight after the news, when there were only two and a half channels. So everybody watched it. It was an incredible opportunity." He worked with strong writers, including Nell Dunn, Jeremy Sandford and David Mercer; Jimmy O'Connor wrote a film about capital punishment, Three Clear Sundays. "He himself had been arrested and convicted of murder and sentenced to hang, and was reprieved with days to go. He was a very good writer."
Over four or five years, he made such classics as Up the Junction, Cathy Come Home, and his first feature film, Poor Cow, all stories of working-class life. He and his peers gravitated to these stories for a number of reasons. "One is that the drama is most intense among people who have got little to lose," he says. "They live life very vividly, and the stakes are very high if you don't have a lot of money to cushion your life. Also, because they're the front line of what we came to call the class war. Either through being workers without work, or through being exploited where they were working. And I guess for a political reason, because we felt, and I still think, that if there is to be change, it will come from below. It won't come from people who have a lot to lose, it will come from people who will have everything to gain." He pauses, and smiles. "They also have the best jokes."
Loach says that period at the BBC was "hugely intoxicating" not just because of the enormous audiences, but because the directors had to defend their work, and politics. "Not only did you get reviews, but if you had a play on, you'd go on a programme called Late Night Line-Up, and there would be a critic, and a discussion, and you'd be torn to shreds, so you had to know your stuff. We always felt we were in politics, even though we were doing drama. A lot of directors now, I notice, when people take issue with them, they say: 'Oh no, it's not political, we didn't mean that, and they back off.' Well, we never backed off, you know, and why would you?"
The BFI's Ken Loach retrospective launches at BFI Southbank on 1 September with the premiere of The Save the Children film and continues until 12 October. Ken Loach at the BBC is available on DVD from 5 September.
The leftwing film director talks about the riots, his early work on television and the documentary he made for Save the Children 40 years that is about to be screened for the first time
About halfway through our interview, I call Ken Loach a sadist. The mild-mannered, faintly mole-like film director blinks hard, chuckles, and carries on. We are discussing a key aspect of his film-making: the element of surprise. Loach has spent his career depicting ordinary people, telling working-class stories as truthfully as possible, and he works distinctively – filming each scene in order, often using non-professional actors, encouraging improvisation.
Save The Children Fund Film
Production year: 1969Country: UKRuntime: 50 minsDirectors: Ken Loach.
Actors don't tend to see a full script in advance, and move through his films as confused as the audience about what lurks around the next corner. I ask Loach which surprise was most memorable, and he laughs incongruously through a few examples. He talks about an incident when an actor walked through a door, on-set, to discover his co-star in a bath, her wrists apparently slashed. "Surprise is the hardest thing to act," says Loach, "and his response was just very true." On another occasion an actor only found out during the filming of a battle scene that her character was to be shot and killed. She was not especially pleased.
Most surprisingly of all, Crissy Rock, the lead in Ladybird, Ladybird (1994) – a brilliant, devastating gut-wrencher of a film – was convinced she was starring in a happy, upbeat, redemptive story. "She thought it would turn out to be about a couple successfully raising children together," says Loach, smiling. It is actually about a woman's kids being taken, one by one, by the social services. In the scene where they come for the final child, Rock "couldn't believe it," says Loach. "She was just wrecked."
It's at this point I laugh and call Loach a sadist. But it's probably more accurate to call him uncompromising, with both his actors and his leftwing politics. Loach turned 75 in June, and next month the BFI is showing a retrospective that will take viewers from his early television work Рincluding the harsh, effective, 1966 expos̩ of homelessness Cathy Come Home Рto his most recent film, Route Irish, about the experiences of private security contractors in Iraq. I ask which of his films he's most proud of, and he can't choose. "There's quite a few I cocked up, but that's another matter."
His documentary The Save the Children Film, part-funded by the charity, is being shown for the first time; made in 1969 for TV, it was never broadcast. The film was commissioned for the charity's 50th anniversary, and it's easy to imagine what they might have been expecting: a gauzy portrait, light on analysis, strong on praise.
Loach took a different tack. The documentary looks at the potential problems of aid, the ways those in a position to be charitable are often patronising and paternalistic. He took his cameras to a school run by Save the Children in Kenya, for homeless boys from Nairobi, for instance, that was set up along the lines of a British public school; the children are shown blowing bugles, marching, reading books including The Inimitable Jeeves and Tom Brown's Schooldays. A group of young Kenyan activists appear in the film, one of whom notes he can't think of another school in the world where the mother tongue isn't allowed.
The documentary moves beyond the charity's work to show British expatriates in Kenya; one stompingly posh woman remarks they have "a wildly gay time" there, and she feels that "even in their poverty, [the Kenyan people] are basically happy". Raising their living standards might just upset things, she adds. The film is full of issues that remain pressing: the limits of philanthropy, the patronage relationships fostered by aid, the subtle and not-so-subtle problems of colonialism. It ends with the comment that we "must change the property relationships of society, and then we change man. That's the only real solution, and all the rest is propaganda."
The documentary was made for LWT and only one-third funded by the charity, so Loach thought he and his crew could "take an independent view, and the TV company would support us. But they didn't." There are moments when he seems to have the naivety that derives from an inflexible moral backbone. "When the people that ran the Save the Children Fund said they would sue us, the television company wrote off their investment, and didn't back us at all."
It isn't the only one of his documentaries to have been pulled; Questions of Leadership, a TV series critiquing the response of the trade union top brass to Thatcherism, made in the early 1980s, was never shown – apparently for political reasons. I ask whether it upsets him when his films are censored or withdrawn, and he says: "It makes you angry, not on your own behalf, but on behalf of the people whose voices weren't allowed to be heard. When you had trade unions, ordinary people, rank and file, never been on television, never been interviewed, and they're not allowed to be heard, that's scandalous. And you see it over and over again. I mean, we heard very little from the kids in the riots. You hear some people being inarticulate in a hood, but very few people were actually allowed to speak."
Loach's films are often either a call to arms (a reminder of the rotten, vicious circumstances many people face) or portraits of specific political movements. The Wind That Shakes the Barley was about the Irish war of independence, Bread and Roses was about a group of office cleaners in Los Angeles campaigning for just wages, Land and Freedom was about a young, unemployed Liverpudlian man, a member of the Communist party, who heads to Spain to fight in a militia against Franco.
Land and Freedom has all the obvious elements of a great film: a passionate protagonist, beautiful heroine, a romantic relationship, battle scenes. And yet its most gripping moments involve an extensive conversation between a communist militia and the people of a Spanish town about the merits of collectivism. Should the town's land be carved up and shared among the people? Should some remain private? All of it? When I ask whether Loach would describe his politics as socialist, he says it's a difficult word, because it's much devalued, and you can't "make sense of it without Marx – but if you say you're a Marxist, then the rightwing press just uses it as a brick to hang around your neck." He is the rare film-maker who brings questions of political structure flamingly alive.
Loach is a quiet, gentle man – that streak of sadism aside – who seems entirely without vanity; he comes across like the most caring teacher in school. We talk more about the riots, and the subsequent heavy-handedness of the courts. "They'll shoot people for stealing sheep next, won't they?" he says. "But, in a way, whenever something dramatic happens, you know that everybody retreats to their comfort zone – so the Tories retreat to cutting benefits, pulling people out of their houses, savage prison sentences. They want that anyway. So whatever happens is an excuse for them to do what they want to do."
I mention the two young men put away for four years each, after trying to provoke rioting through their Facebook pages. Loach notes, with a shrug, that their cases will probably go to appeal, then adds: "It's the ruling class cracking the whip, isn't it? It's disgusting. We've got to organise. In the words of the old American trade unionist Joe Hill: don't mourn, organise."
He continues, apologising occasionally for "lecturing" me. "I think the underlying factors regarding the riots are plain for anyone with eyes to see … It seems to me any economic structure that could give young people a future has been destroyed. Traditionally young people would be drawn into the world of work, and into groups of adults who would send the boys for a lefthanded screwdriver, or a pot of elbow grease, and so they'd be sent up in that way, but they would also learn about responsibilities, and learn a trade, and be defined by their skills. Well, they destroyed that. Thatcher destroyed that. She consciously destroyed the workforces in places like the railways, for example, and the mines, and the steelworks … so that transition from adolescence to adulthood was destroyed, consciously, and knowingly.
"I don't recall the nihilism among kids now, 40 or 50 years ago," he says. "Now there is no place for kids, period. So I think despite the material advances, we're worse off." We also don't seem to have a political class that understands, on any level, what it's like to face unemployment. "No, the Bullingdon boys have never had to confront that," says Loach. "The Bullingdon boys will wreck restaurants and …" he pauses. "Just throw some money at it?" I say. "Yes, or their parents will throw money at it."
I ask whether he aims to provoke political change with his films, and he says he hopes they make people "see things in a different way. That they see there were possibilities for change in Spain, for instance, and one of the things that destroyed it was sectarianism on the left. That you can organise trade unions, we do have strength, things can be different, and here are stories from the past that show it."
It's difficult to imagine young people risking their lives for leftwing ideals now as they once did in Spain though, isn't it? Loach disagrees. "You get the international volunteers who go and put themselves in Gaza … Those are the sort of people who would have gone to Spain. People will resist, and they will fight back, and they do feel solidarity."
Does he think there's a chance of a revolutionary moment in the UK, after the financial crisis, the MPs' expenses scandal, the phone hacking revelations, and the exposure of the cosiness between the police and the Murdoch empire? "It just needs leadership," he says. "It's like a head of steam. The steam won't drive anything unless there's an engine, and somebody to stoke it, and to drive the wheels around." The moment in recent history, he thinks, when a proper movement could have been launched, was at the march against the Iraq war in 2003.
"At the end there should have been a hundred tables, here's a pen, give us your name, we're anti-privatisation, anti-war you know – it's Lenin's bread, land and peace. If you sign up to that, you'll be organised and it'll be democratic and there will be no vain personalities trying to take it over, and we can articulate a programme and a movement that might become a party on that basis. There was a huge feeling across the country. None of the politicians spoke for us. That was the moment, but it was missed."
As a child growing up in the industrial town of Nuneaton, his paternal grandfather a miner, his father a foreman in a machine tool factory, Loach had little interest in politics. His father read the Daily Express, and was a working-class Tory, and Loach, an only child ("not because they didn't want more children, but because it wasn't possible for some reason"), fell in love with the theatre. They lived 30 miles from Stratford-upon-Avon, "so once I got the bug, aged about 12 or 13, I used to go there and see plays". He fainted once, standing at the back watching Titus Andronicus, starring Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh. "She has her tongue cut out, and she came on with streams of red, and I'd had this long cycle ride, so I fell over."
Loach went to the local grammar school, which took in "60 boys each year, out of a town population of about 70,000. It was very lucky to go, because it was good, but it was at the expense of hundreds of boys the same age who, from the age of 11, would have no way into higher education." If you didn't get into the grammar school, your academic career would almost certainly fade fast. Loach wanted to be a lawyer; I ask if this was out of a striving for justice, and he laughs. "By no means. I just fancied the frocks really. I was really stage-struck, but I thought that going into the theatre would be unrealistic."
After a couple of years of national service with the RAF, he studied law at Oxford, and spent all his time performing. "I didn't go to a lecture for over a year. It was an absolute disgrace. I got an actor's degree – I swotted for six weeks at the end." He and a friend came close to starting a theatre afterwards, but when their funding fell through, he ended up understudying a comedian who was playing opposite Kenneth Williams. "I was totally incompetent, so thank God I never had to go on." Williams "was quite friendly", says Loach, "but if he was not in a good frame of mind, he could destroy you, and I was a young innocent abroad."
He emphasises that he was a poor actor ("I wouldn't have employed me") and so became an assistant director at Northampton Rep for a year, then in 1963 landed a job as a trainee director at the BBC. "It was a huge stroke of luck to be there, because the BBC was in quite a liberal mood, with Hugh Carleton Greene as the director general." Loach was soon influenced by the political passion of those around him, and began reading widely about leftwing ideas.
He started off directing Z Cars, and was then asked to join the Wednesday Play; in his first year he directed about six films, "original scripts, going out at peak viewing, straight after the news, when there were only two and a half channels. So everybody watched it. It was an incredible opportunity." He worked with strong writers, including Nell Dunn, Jeremy Sandford and David Mercer; Jimmy O'Connor wrote a film about capital punishment, Three Clear Sundays. "He himself had been arrested and convicted of murder and sentenced to hang, and was reprieved with days to go. He was a very good writer."
Over four or five years, he made such classics as Up the Junction, Cathy Come Home, and his first feature film, Poor Cow, all stories of working-class life. He and his peers gravitated to these stories for a number of reasons. "One is that the drama is most intense among people who have got little to lose," he says. "They live life very vividly, and the stakes are very high if you don't have a lot of money to cushion your life. Also, because they're the front line of what we came to call the class war. Either through being workers without work, or through being exploited where they were working. And I guess for a political reason, because we felt, and I still think, that if there is to be change, it will come from below. It won't come from people who have a lot to lose, it will come from people who will have everything to gain." He pauses, and smiles. "They also have the best jokes."
Loach says that period at the BBC was "hugely intoxicating" not just because of the enormous audiences, but because the directors had to defend their work, and politics. "Not only did you get reviews, but if you had a play on, you'd go on a programme called Late Night Line-Up, and there would be a critic, and a discussion, and you'd be torn to shreds, so you had to know your stuff. We always felt we were in politics, even though we were doing drama. A lot of directors now, I notice, when people take issue with them, they say: 'Oh no, it's not political, we didn't mean that, and they back off.' Well, we never backed off, you know, and why would you?"
The BFI's Ken Loach retrospective launches at BFI Southbank on 1 September with the premiere of The Save the Children film and continues until 12 October. Ken Loach at the BBC is available on DVD from 5 September.
Monday, 15 August 2011
London Rioting: The Tabloid Right and the Trendy Left Join Hands to Misrepresent Working People
This excellent article recently published on the Portsmouth socialist party's blog is a good read and assesment of the riots and the subsequent response to the rioters from the press and some otehrs on the left. It is not meant to come across as sectarian at all and should not be read in that way.
“Only a blinkered left-winger fuelled by Marxist dogma could pretend that looting from a carpet store represents heroic blows against a racist establishment” declared Daily Express columnist Leo McKinstry to the ever dwindling number of readers his newspaper manages to either appeal or be given away to. Paltry as his readership may be he’s not entirely wrong. Even the most ardent supporter of the ultra-left would struggle to paint the pinching of some carpet as a classic revolutionary moment of proletarian struggle, without resorting to phrases such as ‘revolutionary moment of proletarian struggle.’ Yet both the ultra-left and the tabloid-right clamour to offer us the polar extremes with their interpretation of the rioting which has brought further misery to some of London’s most deprived boroughs.
Inevitably The Express and the Mail stand up for the largely mythical ‘hang ‘em, flog em’, deport ‘em – but not before cutting their benefits brigade’ while the ultras plumb the depths of the rhetoric they wheeled out for the student protests. Its ‘criminal irresponsibility’ and ‘opportunistic thievery’ here and ‘smash the police’, ‘London’s burning’ there. So familiar, so tired and so irrelevant.
Clearly the rioting was neither A nor B. There were no armed gangs waiting outside Carpet World in the off chance that a riot would grant them the opportunity to fit out their hallway, but neither was the violence a calculated or conscious rejection of capitalism in favour of a socialist alternative. Indeed it is the very lack of socialist consciousness and the very lack of that alternative as a viable option which leads to such scenes of urban violence.
Through the damnation of the feckless represented by the tabloids and the lionisation of the mob by the ultra-left you can see the two frames through which the middle class view the working class when the mask slips. On one hand you see the prejudice against working people which spawned the phrase ‘chav’ and the stomach churning impressions of teenage mums by millionaire ‘comedians’. The disorder and poverty in these communities are a result of feckless irresponsibility we are told. At worst it leads to criminality and at best it leads to a life of sponging from the welfare state.
This is the interpretation which keeps a straight face when blaming rioting on individual criminals or even on Twitter. Brace yourselves, we are warned, the lower orders have the internet and they can now communicate instantly – it’s anarchy in 140 characters! No doubt, the skinny latte sipping blackberry owners feel as their ancestors once felt when the plebs got their hands on the printing press or the vote. Democracy and communication: brilliant tools for the well heeled and responsible, but a dangerous weapon in the hands of angry prols.
The worst offenders for peddling this overt prejudice against the working class are, as always, the professional bile spewers of the Daily Mail and the Daily Express, who are of course paid to flout artificial levels of conceit and malice to the least fortunate in society. We shouldn’t be surprised when they lead the way in calling for water cannon, rubber bullets, martial law or capital punishment. It doesn’t even come as that much of a shock when these commentators start comparing rioters to animals, thereby du-humanising the disenfranchised with the sort of rhetoric reminiscent of the Victorian era.
What does come as a surprise is how quickly variations of these views are repeated by otherwise sane and rational people when events such as the riots unfold. Let’s take two examples from the world of twitter:
» Hi, i’m British & you see those people rioting out in the streets? Yeah? Well they’re chavs, the most hated people in the UK.
» Good idea burning down your country to steal an Adidas tracksuit you stupid brainless chavs.
Both have been re-tweeted multiple times, but now replace ‘chav’ with Nigger, Paki, Queer, Chink or any one of a hundred deliberately insulting words for a section of society and suddenly most of us would not only refuse to say it, we’d berate someone who would.
The demonization of the working class is truly one of the last acceptable faces of open hatred and prejudice. While such casual hatred has been elevated to the mainstream over the past few years, this lazy stereotyping has now been coupled to a very visible threat through the rioting. Suddenly it is acceptable to say you’re afraid that ‘they’ may come down from the estates and loot your house or that ‘they’ are feral or animalistic. Fall into that mindset and you fall in alongside Max Hasting and Leo McKinstry.
For the ultra and trendy left, a stereotype which also predominantly harks from the middle classes, the riots appear to be a glorious moment of theory made flesh. Smash Vodaphone! Nick from Nike! Punish the Police! To the trendy left the riots are considered some sort of conscious uprising, a raw anger of the masses kicking out against the oppression of the police. This understanding could not be more wrong.
The rioting is not a rough and raw version of the working class self-organisation that we saw in Egypt when people spontaneously defended their neighbourhoods from the police or linked arms to protect Cairo’s antiquates museum from looters. It’s the very inverse. Far from a glorious insurrection, rioting demonstrates the very depths that capitalism can push people to. It’s the violent, selfish and angry side of the very system we’re looking to overthrow. Rioting is the worst face of capitalism, something socialists want to abolish, not encourage.
Another justification from this section of the left is that the violence of the riots is tiny in comparison to the greater crimes of the system. “What’s the crime of looting a discount sportswear store compared to the crime of founding one?” the Facebook friends of one sect member were asked. The other example being wheeled out is that of the bankers. The looting of Debenhams is nothing compared to the looting by the banks! Indeed that’s true, but it’s not the same. Capitalism encourages one but makes the other illegal and therein lies the point. A truly just system, which is what we are looking to build lest we forget, would deem both illegal.
This misunderstanding appears to be a world away from Leo McKinstry’s hatred, but is ignoring the reality of the violence to make it fit a delusional and glorified narrative purely for your own excitement really any better than condemning it with hateful rhetoric in order to flog a few more papers?
The underling social causes behind the violence have already been clearly presented here: http://www.socialistparty.org.uk/articles/12498/08-08-2011/tottenham-riots-fatal-police-shooting-sparks-eruption-of-protest-amp-anger
While the only way forward is spelled out here: http://www.socialistparty.org.uk/articles/12510/09-08-2011/as-inner-cities-erupt-a-mass-workers-movement-is-needed-to-defeat-the-government
It is clear that just as political and social alienation can lead the politically conscious youth of Madrid and Athens to the camps of the Indignados, that same alienation, coupled with the dire social and material conditions of places like Tottenham make these communities a tinderbox. This time it’s a police shooting which started the fires, but as austerity measures kick in this will not be the last time that we see the depths people can be pushed to by capitalism.
“Only a blinkered left-winger fuelled by Marxist dogma could pretend that looting from a carpet store represents heroic blows against a racist establishment” declared Daily Express columnist Leo McKinstry to the ever dwindling number of readers his newspaper manages to either appeal or be given away to. Paltry as his readership may be he’s not entirely wrong. Even the most ardent supporter of the ultra-left would struggle to paint the pinching of some carpet as a classic revolutionary moment of proletarian struggle, without resorting to phrases such as ‘revolutionary moment of proletarian struggle.’ Yet both the ultra-left and the tabloid-right clamour to offer us the polar extremes with their interpretation of the rioting which has brought further misery to some of London’s most deprived boroughs.
Inevitably The Express and the Mail stand up for the largely mythical ‘hang ‘em, flog em’, deport ‘em – but not before cutting their benefits brigade’ while the ultras plumb the depths of the rhetoric they wheeled out for the student protests. Its ‘criminal irresponsibility’ and ‘opportunistic thievery’ here and ‘smash the police’, ‘London’s burning’ there. So familiar, so tired and so irrelevant.
Clearly the rioting was neither A nor B. There were no armed gangs waiting outside Carpet World in the off chance that a riot would grant them the opportunity to fit out their hallway, but neither was the violence a calculated or conscious rejection of capitalism in favour of a socialist alternative. Indeed it is the very lack of socialist consciousness and the very lack of that alternative as a viable option which leads to such scenes of urban violence.
Through the damnation of the feckless represented by the tabloids and the lionisation of the mob by the ultra-left you can see the two frames through which the middle class view the working class when the mask slips. On one hand you see the prejudice against working people which spawned the phrase ‘chav’ and the stomach churning impressions of teenage mums by millionaire ‘comedians’. The disorder and poverty in these communities are a result of feckless irresponsibility we are told. At worst it leads to criminality and at best it leads to a life of sponging from the welfare state.
This is the interpretation which keeps a straight face when blaming rioting on individual criminals or even on Twitter. Brace yourselves, we are warned, the lower orders have the internet and they can now communicate instantly – it’s anarchy in 140 characters! No doubt, the skinny latte sipping blackberry owners feel as their ancestors once felt when the plebs got their hands on the printing press or the vote. Democracy and communication: brilliant tools for the well heeled and responsible, but a dangerous weapon in the hands of angry prols.
The worst offenders for peddling this overt prejudice against the working class are, as always, the professional bile spewers of the Daily Mail and the Daily Express, who are of course paid to flout artificial levels of conceit and malice to the least fortunate in society. We shouldn’t be surprised when they lead the way in calling for water cannon, rubber bullets, martial law or capital punishment. It doesn’t even come as that much of a shock when these commentators start comparing rioters to animals, thereby du-humanising the disenfranchised with the sort of rhetoric reminiscent of the Victorian era.
What does come as a surprise is how quickly variations of these views are repeated by otherwise sane and rational people when events such as the riots unfold. Let’s take two examples from the world of twitter:
» Hi, i’m British & you see those people rioting out in the streets? Yeah? Well they’re chavs, the most hated people in the UK.
» Good idea burning down your country to steal an Adidas tracksuit you stupid brainless chavs.
Both have been re-tweeted multiple times, but now replace ‘chav’ with Nigger, Paki, Queer, Chink or any one of a hundred deliberately insulting words for a section of society and suddenly most of us would not only refuse to say it, we’d berate someone who would.
The demonization of the working class is truly one of the last acceptable faces of open hatred and prejudice. While such casual hatred has been elevated to the mainstream over the past few years, this lazy stereotyping has now been coupled to a very visible threat through the rioting. Suddenly it is acceptable to say you’re afraid that ‘they’ may come down from the estates and loot your house or that ‘they’ are feral or animalistic. Fall into that mindset and you fall in alongside Max Hasting and Leo McKinstry.
For the ultra and trendy left, a stereotype which also predominantly harks from the middle classes, the riots appear to be a glorious moment of theory made flesh. Smash Vodaphone! Nick from Nike! Punish the Police! To the trendy left the riots are considered some sort of conscious uprising, a raw anger of the masses kicking out against the oppression of the police. This understanding could not be more wrong.
The rioting is not a rough and raw version of the working class self-organisation that we saw in Egypt when people spontaneously defended their neighbourhoods from the police or linked arms to protect Cairo’s antiquates museum from looters. It’s the very inverse. Far from a glorious insurrection, rioting demonstrates the very depths that capitalism can push people to. It’s the violent, selfish and angry side of the very system we’re looking to overthrow. Rioting is the worst face of capitalism, something socialists want to abolish, not encourage.
Another justification from this section of the left is that the violence of the riots is tiny in comparison to the greater crimes of the system. “What’s the crime of looting a discount sportswear store compared to the crime of founding one?” the Facebook friends of one sect member were asked. The other example being wheeled out is that of the bankers. The looting of Debenhams is nothing compared to the looting by the banks! Indeed that’s true, but it’s not the same. Capitalism encourages one but makes the other illegal and therein lies the point. A truly just system, which is what we are looking to build lest we forget, would deem both illegal.
This misunderstanding appears to be a world away from Leo McKinstry’s hatred, but is ignoring the reality of the violence to make it fit a delusional and glorified narrative purely for your own excitement really any better than condemning it with hateful rhetoric in order to flog a few more papers?
The underling social causes behind the violence have already been clearly presented here: http://www.socialistparty.org.uk/articles/12498/08-08-2011/tottenham-riots-fatal-police-shooting-sparks-eruption-of-protest-amp-anger
While the only way forward is spelled out here: http://www.socialistparty.org.uk/articles/12510/09-08-2011/as-inner-cities-erupt-a-mass-workers-movement-is-needed-to-defeat-the-government
It is clear that just as political and social alienation can lead the politically conscious youth of Madrid and Athens to the camps of the Indignados, that same alienation, coupled with the dire social and material conditions of places like Tottenham make these communities a tinderbox. This time it’s a police shooting which started the fires, but as austerity measures kick in this will not be the last time that we see the depths people can be pushed to by capitalism.
Friday, 12 August 2011
Why i feel evicting families of rioters would be a wrong route to take
As a number of Councils and Housing Associations in London, Manchester, Salford and Birmingham say that they intend to evict tenants involved in rioting (and Grant Shapps has jumped in to back them, as has David Cameron),
I firmly believe still that social housing should be a right not a privillage as David Davies argued last night on question time. We have a duty to house our residents and prevent homelessness. Evicting a whole family due to one person in that particular family chooseing to voice their anger and frustration by rioting is punishing the whole lot.
I do feel the right has been far too quick to jump into many reactionary views be that removing rioters benifits or putting teh army on the streets to rubber bullets. Peopl are angry rightly so no one appreciates having their house or local shops smashed up. But by jumping into tackling theis issue by just considering it a mindless criminal act on a mass scale kind of avoids the point to me. Allowing police to go out and shoot rioters is bringing us right back to why these riots originally started. A suspected police shooting on a innocent man in Tottenham. Failing to tackle the root cause of these riots which i put firmly at the door of deep inequality in our society is failing to learn from the mistakes of history.
I do feel that these riots will happen again if nothing is done to help communities and youth's who feel disenfranchised by society and have no hope or future.
Although not excusing the rioters or condoning this i do feel we'd be missing a big point if we dont look at the root causes and why people choose to riot in the first place.
But back to the point of evicting rioters families would have big legal consequences and could even trigger a bigger backlash as the poor are demonised even further and driven into ghetto's in affect.
The relevant grounds for an eviction would be Ground 2 of Schedule 2 of Housing Act 1985 (for secure, Council tenants) or Ground 14 Schedule 2 Housing Act 1988 (for assured, housing association tenants). These are pretty much identical, both read:
The tenant or a person residing in or visiting the dwelling-house—
(a)has been guilty of conduct causing or likely to cause a nuisance or annoyance to a person residing, visiting or otherwise engaging in a lawful activity in the locality, or
(b)has been convicted of—
(i)using the dwelling-house or allowing it to be used for immoral or illegal purposes, or
(ii)an indictable offence committed in, or in the locality of, the dwelling-house.
Both are discretionary grounds, which mean that the Court must also be satisfied that it is reasonable in the circumstances to make a possession order and that the court has a further discretion to impose a postponed or suspended possession order with conditions.
There can be little doubt that rioting and/or looting would be likely to cause a nuisance or annoyance. There are likely to be large numbers of convictions for indictable offences as well. However, the nuisance or the offence must be in ‘the locality’ of the tenanted property. ‘Locality’ is not defined in either Act or elsewhere. I would anticipate that there may well be some difficult cases on what constitutes a locality to come, where the offence/nuisance is not within the immediate neighbourhood of the property. But certainly an offence committed in another borough is highly unlikely to count.
We should note in passing that Grant Shapps, a housing minister whose knee is never knowingly un-jerked, has today suggested that the ‘locality’ condition should be scrapped so that those found guilty of ‘being involved in rioting’ in another area could be evicted. The trouble with that is it would simply mean being convicted of an arrestable offence, even if wholly unrelated to the home or to housing, would be a ground for eviction. That may just be a step too far for all kinds of reasons, not least Article 8. Mr Shapps also points to his desire to introduce a mandatory ground for possession for those convicted of ASB – but this wouldn’t apply to offences committed outside the locality as they would not be ‘housing related’.
If the rioter was in the locality but is not the tenant, e.g. a member of the household, or even a visitor, the tenant would still potentially be caught by these grounds. This would be the case even if the tenant had no involvement at all, or didn’t even know that the other person did. So parents, partners etc. could well face eviction proceedings. While the court can consider the circumstances of non-offending occupiers and the relationship between the offence and the landlord-tenant relationship, the court must also consider the seriousness of the offence and its effect on others, and the likelihood of further offences.
Anyone wondering about a proportionality issue under Article 8 should note that these are discretionary grounds (at least to date!) and that the Court’s consideration of whether it is reasonable to make an order has been previous considered to be in effect an application of the principle of proportionality (E.g. Lord Brown in Kay v Lambeth).
Of course if the rioter (or tenant of rioters household) is on an introductory or demoted tenancy, things are quite different. There isn’t time to go through the whole process, but there, on an otherwise mandatory possession order, proportionality defences would come into play.
So i do think we should be very careful in moving into these areas of removing benifits and housing as these people some of them have very little and taking what they do have will only force them more into crimes.
I firmly believe still that social housing should be a right not a privillage as David Davies argued last night on question time. We have a duty to house our residents and prevent homelessness. Evicting a whole family due to one person in that particular family chooseing to voice their anger and frustration by rioting is punishing the whole lot.
I do feel the right has been far too quick to jump into many reactionary views be that removing rioters benifits or putting teh army on the streets to rubber bullets. Peopl are angry rightly so no one appreciates having their house or local shops smashed up. But by jumping into tackling theis issue by just considering it a mindless criminal act on a mass scale kind of avoids the point to me. Allowing police to go out and shoot rioters is bringing us right back to why these riots originally started. A suspected police shooting on a innocent man in Tottenham. Failing to tackle the root cause of these riots which i put firmly at the door of deep inequality in our society is failing to learn from the mistakes of history.
I do feel that these riots will happen again if nothing is done to help communities and youth's who feel disenfranchised by society and have no hope or future.
Although not excusing the rioters or condoning this i do feel we'd be missing a big point if we dont look at the root causes and why people choose to riot in the first place.
But back to the point of evicting rioters families would have big legal consequences and could even trigger a bigger backlash as the poor are demonised even further and driven into ghetto's in affect.
The relevant grounds for an eviction would be Ground 2 of Schedule 2 of Housing Act 1985 (for secure, Council tenants) or Ground 14 Schedule 2 Housing Act 1988 (for assured, housing association tenants). These are pretty much identical, both read:
The tenant or a person residing in or visiting the dwelling-house—
(a)has been guilty of conduct causing or likely to cause a nuisance or annoyance to a person residing, visiting or otherwise engaging in a lawful activity in the locality, or
(b)has been convicted of—
(i)using the dwelling-house or allowing it to be used for immoral or illegal purposes, or
(ii)an indictable offence committed in, or in the locality of, the dwelling-house.
Both are discretionary grounds, which mean that the Court must also be satisfied that it is reasonable in the circumstances to make a possession order and that the court has a further discretion to impose a postponed or suspended possession order with conditions.
There can be little doubt that rioting and/or looting would be likely to cause a nuisance or annoyance. There are likely to be large numbers of convictions for indictable offences as well. However, the nuisance or the offence must be in ‘the locality’ of the tenanted property. ‘Locality’ is not defined in either Act or elsewhere. I would anticipate that there may well be some difficult cases on what constitutes a locality to come, where the offence/nuisance is not within the immediate neighbourhood of the property. But certainly an offence committed in another borough is highly unlikely to count.
We should note in passing that Grant Shapps, a housing minister whose knee is never knowingly un-jerked, has today suggested that the ‘locality’ condition should be scrapped so that those found guilty of ‘being involved in rioting’ in another area could be evicted. The trouble with that is it would simply mean being convicted of an arrestable offence, even if wholly unrelated to the home or to housing, would be a ground for eviction. That may just be a step too far for all kinds of reasons, not least Article 8. Mr Shapps also points to his desire to introduce a mandatory ground for possession for those convicted of ASB – but this wouldn’t apply to offences committed outside the locality as they would not be ‘housing related’.
If the rioter was in the locality but is not the tenant, e.g. a member of the household, or even a visitor, the tenant would still potentially be caught by these grounds. This would be the case even if the tenant had no involvement at all, or didn’t even know that the other person did. So parents, partners etc. could well face eviction proceedings. While the court can consider the circumstances of non-offending occupiers and the relationship between the offence and the landlord-tenant relationship, the court must also consider the seriousness of the offence and its effect on others, and the likelihood of further offences.
Anyone wondering about a proportionality issue under Article 8 should note that these are discretionary grounds (at least to date!) and that the Court’s consideration of whether it is reasonable to make an order has been previous considered to be in effect an application of the principle of proportionality (E.g. Lord Brown in Kay v Lambeth).
Of course if the rioter (or tenant of rioters household) is on an introductory or demoted tenancy, things are quite different. There isn’t time to go through the whole process, but there, on an otherwise mandatory possession order, proportionality defences would come into play.
So i do think we should be very careful in moving into these areas of removing benifits and housing as these people some of them have very little and taking what they do have will only force them more into crimes.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)