England is a Bitch

On Wednesday evening, Irie FM ran a special half-hour feature dedicated to the rioting in the UK over the past week. In typical Irie style, there was no hard-nosed discussion or critical analysis with a bunch of dubious ‘experts’ dragged in to give their two penny’s worth on what was happening – the point was made, simply, humorously and brilliantly, by playing several records by legendary Brixton-based dub poet Lyndon Kwesi Johnson, offering his own scathing assessments of everything he saw wrong with Britain. It was one of the best pieces of radio I’ve ever heard.

Hearing and reading about what is being described as the worst civil rest to hit the UK in living memory from the vantage point of Jamaica has been slightly strange. It is big news here, with updates on all the hourly news bulletins and big sections in the newspapers, evidence that a lot of people here still feel a strong connection with the UK through family and friends living there. The riots are hot topics of conversation, and the general opinion is one of disbelief. ‘Me a cyan’t believe what I’m a-hearing is happening in England,’ was Jayvan’s verdict. ‘I never believed tings like that happened there’. To many Jamaicans, the UK remains a promised land of wealth, opportunity, jobs. Ask them to swap places with the ‘disillusioned youth’ venting their anger on the streets, most would snatch your hand off.

This had a big influence on my reaction to the riots. What exactly are people venting their anger about? What’s the point? Let’s face it, what’s going on isn’t anything like the focused, coordinated protests aimed at achieving genuine social change that have taken place in North Africa and the Middle East this year, as well as in Greece. And do these angry youths really have something to get into such a big beef about? It looks to me suspiciously like old fashioned British hooliganism, violence, robbery and destruction just for the hell of it.

When I first heard the news, I posted on Facebook that it sounded like a bunch of spoilt brats throwing a tantrum. I stand by that. There’s a reason why Australians call us whingeing poms – we British really do love bemoaning our lot in life, always wanting and expecting more. It makes us look pretty ridiculous. Put yourself, for example, in an average Jamaican’s shoes and look at what reasons British youth have for being disillusioned to the point of smashing up their own communities – UK unemployment levels pale into insignificance compared to those here, if you’re lucky enough to get a job wages are poor, there’s no welfare system, no dole. I find myself wondering sometimes how the people around me get by. And as for ‘police brutality’, well one writer in the Jamaican Observer summed it up by pointing out that every Jamaican understands the consequences if people took to the streets here to confront police who carry automatic rifles just when carrying out safety spot-checks on taxis and buses.

As British Citizens, we have life pretty damn good – too good and too easy, perhaps, because it seems the whole country takes its privilege and comfort for granted and is always on the prowl for more. But this is a fundamental part of the shared psychology of British social life, a key organizing principle. Like it or not, Britain is a self-centred and greedy country, where individual rights are emphasized over collective responsibilities. It is a deeply hierarchical society where status and power are achieved through material wealth – how it is achieved is of little concern, hence the rise of the cult of celebrity which represents the complete fetishisation of wealth and fame for their own sakes. Our conception of ‘freedom’ is the ability to gain wealth unhindered by concerns about other people, creating a society riven by competition rather than cooperation seen most clearly in the amoral, dog-eat-dog world of big business. Our economy depends entirely on consumption, so we are brought up with a neurotic need to take, take, take – we demand constant entertainment like it’s our birthright, but are programmed to never be entirely satisfied, ensuring we keep on spending.

Another important factor is that the wealthier a country is, the more obvious the gap between rich and poor. I’ve seen this for myself in the USA, still the richest nation on earth, most starkly in the dozens of destitute homeless I saw living on the streets within a block or two of San Francisco’s glitzy and extravagant Hilton hotel. Britain’s poor might be relatively well-off on a global scale, but in a society where the worship of wealth has become the new religion, reminders of what they don’t have are constant. The resentment those living at the bottom of the pile feel towards those living at the top, and the reciprocal feelings of dismissal, disgust or patronizing pity felt from the top downwards, is a fundamental and inescapable flaw inherent in any hierarchical social system, always simmering beneath the surface, capable of exploding at any moment, and usually only kept in check through calculated, often violent, oppression and indoctrination of the masses by the few. This tension and instability is in fact a necessary condition of the existence of a hierarchical society – the rich need to simultaneously exploit and retain the complicity in their own exploitation of the sections of society they see as justly inferior in order to maintain their superiority. It is a paradox, a sham, that cannot long be upheld without descending into violence one way or another, and why, in terms of human evolution, the hierarchical model of society is primitive and past its sell-by date.

So yes, I still can’t help but see the riots as the actions of a bunch of spoilt brats. But that is to be expected in a culture where we are all, to a greater or lesser extent, spoilt and believe we have some divine right to all the blessings life can bestow on us. Humility, community, awareness of collective responsibility and respect for others are values dangerously lacking at all levels of society, from the rich bastards who dodge paying the same share of taxes the rest of us do to the posturing kids who think it’s cooler to get a criminal record than an education. Maybe it’s a symptom of our now lost Empire – collectively, we can’t quite shake off the Victorian belief that being British means we’re better than everyone else, except now we’re incapable of going out and just taking it, we sit and moan that the world owes us something. Maybe it’s a symptom of the country’s odd mix of a rapaciously capitalist free market economy, liberal culture and socialist welfare system. What should be the crowning achievement of capitalist ideology – what other country has used the profits of global trade to fund universal education, healthcare and state benefits for the sick, unemployed, very young and infirm elderly, to the extent the UK has? – has instead helped to expose the contradictions and inconsistencies in its own system, the paradox of building a social system on greed, self-advancement and the rights of an individual over many, because people expect to be looked after, rather than being thankful for the privilege.

Whatever the reasons, what we’ve seen this week is stark evidence that British society is not happy with its lot. The never-ending cycle of competition and consumption which keeps the greedy heart of our society beating condemns many of us to a painful awareness of the disparity between what we want and what we have which drives us to neurotic, destructive and downright stupid behaviour – I know because I’ve done plenty of it. Ultimately the riots won’t make a blind bit of difference – there won’t be a revolution (I don’t think the British are capable of effective revolt), we’ll have a thousand-plus kids handed punitive criminal sentences to make an example of them and ultimately the powers that be will use it to strengthen their argument to keep things exactly as they are.

Of all people, it was David Cameron who got me thinking of rights and responsibilities by claiming the riots showed ‘sections of society’ wanted the claim the former without recognising the latter. He’s wrong – all sections of our society fail in the responsibilities to one another, Cameron and his rich Eton elite more than anyone. If he was serious about his responsibilities, maybe for a start he’d like to try redistributing wealth from the top down, abolishing the centuries-old bias towards private property on which our legal system is built, encouraging the setting up of community-run cooperatives to replace private with shared ownership (thus instilling values based on communal responsibility), and reforming trade policy to end our centuries-old exploitation of poorer nations. Maybe then he could claim to be taking serious steps to addressing the divisions in our society, replacing greed, selfishness, competition and want with values like cooperation, sharing, inclusion and involvement. Maybe by giving people room to work together to shape their own lives rather than compete to have their lives shaped by what they can get, we really would have a society where people recognized and respected their collective responsibilities. But hey, I know I’m wandering into the realm of fantasy here - we’re more likely to see rioters fire bombing 10 Downing Street from the backs of flying pigs than we are to see that happen, in which case Cameron and all the other clowns can pout and posture all they want, laying down the law and expecting everyone to fall in line with the flawed vision of a ‘good’ society he shares with millions of other brainwashed fellow countrymen because it suits them. The basic truth is this – while you keep people poor while constantly rubbing their noses in what they could have won had their luck been a little different, you will always have to face the prospect of their anger and resentment exploding in your face.