Lower IVth cut short summer hols to do some swotting
The growing disturbances show that the Establishment’s virtual policies and gesture politics simply can’t cut it.
The Parliamentary Opposition and the Left generally are having a field day at the moment: hot on the heels of Camerlot getting a comeuppance over its corrupt media and police relationships, its policy of cuts has been ‘shown up’ by a futile military operation in North Africa, and a series of inner-city riots. Just as the EU debt crisis has become plunging global markets, so too the Tottenham riots are now the London riots….and spreading.
But just as the likes of ultra-conservative Nile Gardiner blaming the US crisis is on Obaman ‘big government’ is pathetic, so too is blaming socio-economic meltdown on a rag-tag mix of oil-and-water legislators with fifteen months of power under their belts. Labour’s blamestorming is the worst kind of cynical opportunism: as some kind of ‘explanation’ of what’s going on, it doesn’t even make it to scratching the surface of the problem: it is, to be blunt, simply scratching around for something to say.
What we are seeing across the board in recent world events is an important and profound lesson for every actual and would-be legislator on the planet, and in summary it is this: the days of ignoring and pretending and promising and name-calling are over. This is the cold light of dawn, and present political practices will be worse than useless in the future: if anything, they will only serve to fan the flames.
Take for starters the role of the police. Over the last thirty years, this has been hijacked by the political class – first in order to break strikes, and then to reflect the ‘progressive’ agenda that remains so divorced from a practical understanding of the world. This has led both the last and this Administration to imagine that policing is some kind of ‘extra’ that can be selected or not depending on the contents of the Treasury. The Slog’s predecessor nby started up to raise awareness of this truly sick desire to change the police function, and to help leaders grasp that tolerance of casual crime (while blaming that on lack of money) would end in disaster.
We may have thousands of officers who lead the field in cultural diversity, a fine police record on sexual hate crime, hundreds of new rape investigators, and an improved detection rate for homophobia. But what we didn’t have on the streets of Croydon last night was any coppers. Just as the People’s Republic of Lambeth in the 1980s was too busy sending fraternal greetings in Moscow’s direction to get round to gritting the streets in winter, so too we have a pc Met Police today that hasn’t quite gotten round to pacing the streets. It is, veritably, the Metaphorical Police force, because first up it exists as an effective law and order unit only in the heads of Parliamentarians and local councillors; and second, it is a metaphor for our times: replete with mission statements, management bollocks, zero tolerance, top brass, liaison committees, targets and training courses….but also full of corruption, fiddling, very poor morale on the ground, and a belief among the officer class that careerist arse-licking can be any substitute for a calling.
We are going to find the same as the NHS unravels, because this too is based on fantasies about entrepreneurial GPs of impeccable honesty, and hospitals able to run on half the funding they used to get while the same big-haired people continue to walk around armed with files, and have meetings about critical path analyses. Libya has already shown us that a lack of focus in military spending has led to a sort of Zen Armed Forces set that can neither afford to refuel its battleships, nor mount any kind of meaningful land-based operation. Ironically, there are now calls for the ‘army’ to be drafted in for special duties against rioters. Army? What army? It’s in Iraq and Afghanistan – the result of Blair’s quest for a glorious legacy.
In the economic and fiscal arenas, we see an Opposition that overspent for seven years blaming looting on cuts that haven’t taken effect yet, and a Government with no iota of a clue about economic reconstruction arguing (Osborne in the Telegraph yesterday) that we are ‘leading Europe out of recession’. Growth? What is there to grow outside of derivatives time bombs?
Last but not least, in education we see a largely unsupported Michael Gove dealing with the important, while the urgent distracts his colleagues. In this his mission, Gove (like Duncan-Smith at Welfare) is under fire on all sides from an incompetent Establishment that gave us schools where nobody fails….and thus a society where poor kids never succeed. Their answer to this devastating muddle of social thinking? Quotas of the thick going to University.
Enough is, at last, proving to be enough. “Not getting it” has become the Opposition’s new mantra. What globalist commerce, American Congressmen, eurocrats, European MPs and irresponsible media are rapidly facing is the collapse of their world – but none of them get it. We, as always, are the ones getting it: in everything from unemployment and lousy healthcare through to crap television and having our houses torched by morons.
Related: Looting in Tottenham and Tooting in Norton, A history of amoral mediocrity, Amy Winehouse was a symptom.
The Slog 