It was the year that sticking it to the status quo re-entered the mainstream after an all-too-long long hiatus.
And yet 2011 showed just how far that resistance remains from mounting a serious challenge to the Tories, let alone giving capitalism much to worry about, four years into its worst crisis since the Great Depression. But the foundations have been laid – leaving 2012 all to play for. Continue reading
Have they taken leave of their senses? Has their moral compass got jammed? There was always an element within the Tory party which was vindictive, but to punish people twice for the same offence and to dock benefits or tax credits or even evict which affects everyone else in the family (and not just the parents) exposes an ugly punitive streak which is now coming to the fore amongst Tory MPs and Tory Councils. It also underlines the Tory insistence that there’s nothing wrong with the system itself or with social inequality, it’s just a feral underclass which, if it breaks the rules and riots, must now be crushed into submission by any draconian measures available. Continue reading
The August riots have left an ugly mood. Communities across England felt besieged and even terrorised by the arson, vandalism and looting. There are worrying signs that right-wingers intend to manipulate people’s understandable fury by pushing a reactionary social agenda, repackaged as “family values” – just as they transformed the crisis of the banks into one of public spending. This time, the left needs to be prepared. Above all, we need to take on the one-dimensional view of what a family is. Continue reading
The August riots were, to some degree, a national trauma. For most, they represented a baffling and unexpected disruption to normal life. Thousands felt terrorised in their communities – often in some of the poorest areas in the country; and the disorder provoked an inevitable backlash, boosting support for tough law-and-order policies. Single mums, people on benefits and – as I witnessed first hand – black people were made scapegoats for the unrest. Continue reading
Well, well, well. Who said “there are deep problems in our society that have been growing for a long time: a decline in responsibility, a rise in selfishness, a growing sense that individual rights come before anything else”? Cameron. And where does he think the selfishness and fixation on individualism came from, if not from Thatcher who claimed society never really existed and made selfishness and greed the cardinal aims of life? Yet still he insists that the problem was “criminality, pure and simple” and obsesses about the “moral decline of Britain” as though society and economy were not the issue, only the misbehaviour of individuals.
Blair is equally muddle-headed when he puts the riots down to alienated, disaffected youth outside the social mainstream and argues there’s no social or moral decline, only a need for intense family intervention and dealing with anti-social behaviour and gangs, as though the social and economic structures he championed had nothing to do with creating the alienation and disaffection in the first place. Continue reading
