Intolerable Social Conditions will Provoke More Riots Despite Severe Punishment

Professor Fabian Kessl, an academic visitor in London University’s Royal Holloway College, Department of Social Work, studying last year’s English riots, thinks:

As long as the politics in England go in the same direction as we have experienced in the last years—disrespecting people’s everyday needs, demolishing the idea of the public, and strengthening consumer capitalism—the pre-conditions for a new political revolt are a given. It’s just the question of another “trigger” like the death of Mark Duggan on August 4 last year.

Much commentary regarding the cause of the riots has focused on the “opportunism”, but Professor Kessl thinks this takes many forms, the opportunity to…

1. “get back” at the police and an unjfair society
2. be a sovereign consumer for a few hours
3. show their anger at youth and racial discrimination
4. put down the animosities and battles between the gangs for a while in the face of a bigger enemy.

One observer said, “it was about just being visible.”

Kessl believes the riots are symbolic of changes occurring in society, and unless the problems are addressed, it is only a matter of time before further riots occur. Unless the underlying social causes of the riots are tackled politically, August 2011 will happen again, and the Government’s reliance on severe punishment will not stop it:

The extraordinary dimension of punishment—especially in regard to the sentence of young people made by some courts—symbolises the logic of the policy of the current administration. It is authoritarian, not interested in a proper discussion of the context of the riots—present day English society. Fortunately discussions take place anyhow all around the country between those engaged in them, youth workers, artists, researchers, local administration, and so on. This can be a good starting point for a different future politics…

Basic Arguments for Socialism by Tony Benn, former UK Minister

Tony Benn, who was a cabinet minister under Labour Prime Ministers Harold Wilson and James Callaghan, and represents the now disappointly small socialist wing of the Labour Party, has written in his diaries (published 1988):

As a minister, I experienced the power of industrialists and bankers to get their way by use of the crudest form of economic pressure, even blackmail, against a Labour Government (1). Compared to this, the pressure brought to bear in industrial disputes [by trades unions] is minuscule (2). This power was revealed even more clearly in 1976 when the IMF secured cuts in our public expenditure (3). These lessons led me to the conclusion that the UK is only superficially governed by MPs and the voters who elect them. Parliamentary democracy is, in truth, little more than a means of securing a periodical change in the management team, which is then allowed to preside over a system that remains in essence intact (4). If the British (or American) people were ever to ask themselves what power they truly enjoyed under our political system they would be amazed to discover how little it is, and some new Chartist agitation might be born and might quickly gather momentum.

In the present crisis these words mean more than ever:

1. We have given £1 trillion (£1 million million) to banks (mainly) and various industrial groups and scammers
2. The government and press blame trades unionists and workers defending their work and conditions for “living beyond our means”, and all those with low IQs accept it!
3. The money magicked out of the treasury into bankers' coffers is to be replaced, not by taxing bankers and their wealthy chums, but by laying off public servants and cutting benefits for the poor
4. Our so called democracy is smoke and mirrors, intended to pull the wool over the eyes of simpletons. Regrettably, we have a lot of them, mainly yes-men in comfortable jobs, but many who think politicians and the media cannot tell a lie!
5. Both Britain and the USA have a two party system but with only one policy between them—lining the pockets of the rich and powerful, and blaming working people for being idle!

Benn himself had to fight to get a seat in the British House of Commons after he inherited—at his father's death and the previous death in action of his elder brother—the peerage his father had been awarded earlier for his public service. The constitutional point about this is that peers (Lords) were confined to the feudal House of Peers and were, for constitutional reasons, not allowed to stand in the commons. But nor were they allowed to renunciate their peerage to do so. Already an MP for ten years, Benn had tried to introduce renunciation bills to allow those, like himself, who did not wish to inherit a title, they personally had not earned, to renunciate their inheritance. Both houses refused them.

Benn had his parliamentary seat removed, and a by-election was arranged, for which Benn sought and received selection by his local constituency party. Benn then won with a vastly increased majority, but was not allowed to take his seat. Two senior judges were appointed to test Benn's case which was based on some precedent, but mainly on the fact that, in a modern democracy, a properly elected candidate ought to be able to take a seat if constituents had vote for him. The judges found Benn's case inadequate and his losing opponent was given the seat. There was such a public outcry that the government of the day had to introduce a bill allowing a peer to renounce his peerage and take up a legitimately elected seat in the commons. So Benn returned, convinced that the system was designed to maintain the status quo, but that concerted public action could change things.

Benn's call for a new Chartist agitation has been answered in the UK, where there is a charter movement, but unfortunately not strong enough, not least because the non-democratic media tell us nothing about it. Needless to say, the odious sociopathic crook, Tony Blair, partner in murderous crime of the pathetic G W Bush, gets every chance to defend his get-rich-quick policies such as the PFI, as it is called, which has driven large hospitals into bankruptcy and has doubtless put many other public enterprises into the red, all the better for greedy corporations to privatize them.

Benn elsewhere pointed out that the Labour party of 1935 proposed in its election manifesto to nationalize the banks. The crisis then was similar to the one we are experiencing now. The present one is, if anything, worse. Why then is there no demand by the Labour Party to nationalize our banks instead of putting our taxes directly into the share dividends of people rich enough to go without their unearned incomes for years, and still be rich?

There are millions times more people who are poor or only moderately well off, yet so many of them are deluded into thinking they are among the rich. The 1% is richer than most people can imagine, let alone sensibly defend as being in their own best interests. Support a people's charter. You'll probably find there is a charter group near you. If not, draw one up and get your friends and fellow workers to support it. If we do nothing look around the world at what our ruling classes are willing to do to others. Think you'll be any different when push comes to shove? Don't delude yourselves.

Cut the Working Week to Share Out the Work

Our economic system urging both parents to work causes immense damage to children. 20 per cent of young people aged 18-24 are unemployed in the UK, a far higher rate than for the rest of the age range (16-64), which was 8.4 per cent. In the US, the unemployment rate of 16-24 year olds was a staggering 53.4 per cent! Yet the government continually increases the retirement age forcing the elderly to work in the expectation that they will die without ever collecting a state pension, while the youth have zero prospects. Does this make any social sense? It will leave a generation of young people wasting their youths struggling to find work, while the elderly have to work to avoid pension poverty.

It is all part of the One Percent's strategy of bringing on a Third World wage economy by driving people to accept low pay or face losing their jobs in factory closures and switches to the Third World. This was proved by a report from the UK Labour Force Survey which found 5.3 million workers put in an average of 7.2 hours of unpaid overtime a week last year, worth around £5,300 a year per person.

What is needed for social and economic fairness is, first, for the rich One Percent to cough up more of their accummulated wealth—in short, for them to pay their whack to alleviate a crisis brought on by their own greed. Then, second, for everyone else the available work should be shared fairly. A shorter flexible working week would provide more free time, allowing parents to spend more of it with their children, and teenagers more chance to get work skills. 20 hours a week seems a sensible sort of level, but the whole idea flies in the face of orthodoxy. If wage rates remained the same, many people could not afford it, so other changes would have to be made. Readjustments have to be made—increasing pensions and reducing the retirement age, allowing jobs to be released for the young to get essential work experience.

One idea touted for long is that everyone should get a state allowance—rather like the UK Child Allowance—replacing multiple benefits, then those who would rather not work, the elderly, the infirm, yes and those content not to work but live on a low income but be able to develop their personal skills, be educated better, become artists, musicians, develop their own businesses They need not be employed, leaving them free to do as they wished, while those motivated by remuneration could fulfil their own ambitions. In this increasingly technological world, we all, governments too, have to get used to the fact that when robots are doing the work, employment will be at a premium, but businesses and the economy still requires people, employed or not, to be able to spend. Robots do not. Without spending power no one can buy, and no one can make money serving robots!

Media and Ruling Class Undermine Social Values by Labelling Valid Demands as Extreme

Ever wonder why the media will report a few protesters breaking windows or fighting police when a hundred times as many register their protest peacefully? Naturally, like much media focus, it distracts from the purpose of the protest, but new research shows how support for a popular cause can be cut by labeling it as “radical” or “extreme”. Thomas Nelson, co-author of the study and associate professor of political science at Ohio State University, said that is why calling political opponents extremists is so effective, and popular as a political tactic. he added:

The beauty of using this “extremism” tactic is that you don’t have to attack a popular value that you know most people support. You just have to say that its supporters are going too far or are too extreme.

And people fall for it because we mostly consider ourselves civilized, and not at all extreme, and so tend to divorce ourselves from the extreme cause or group, even though we might actually prefer it given a fair chance. Thus people supported a gender equality policy when other supporters were not mentioned, but when the proposers of the same policy were described as “radical feminists”, participants in the study supported the policy much less.

Experiments in Evidence

1. 233 undergraduate students were asked to read and comment on an essay that they were told appeared on a blog. The blog entry discussed the controversy concerning the Augusta National Golf Club’s “men only” membership policy. This policy caused a controversy in 2003 before the club hosted the Masters Tournament. Participants read one of three versions of an essay which argued that the PGA Tour should move the Masters Tournament if the club refused to change this policy:

1. One group read that the proposal to move the tournament was led by “people” or “citizens”.
2. Another group read that the proposal was led by “feminists”.
3. The third group read that the proposal was led by “radical feminists”, “militant feminists”, and “extremists”.

Additional language reinforced the extremist portrayals by describing extreme positions that the groups allegedly held on other issues, such as getting rid of separate locker room and restroom facilities for men and women.

Participants were then asked to rate how much they supported Augusta changing its membership rules to allow women members, whether they supported the Masters tournament changing its location, and whether, if they were a member, they would vote to support female membership at the club.

The findings showed that participants were more supportive of the golf club and its rules banning women, less likely to support moving the tournament, and less likely to support female membership, when the proposal to move the tournament was described in language redolent of extremism and radical feminism. Nelson explained:

All three groups in the study read the exact same policy proposals. But those who read that the policy was supported by “radical feminists” were significantly less likely to support it than those who read it was supported by “feminists” or just “citizens”.

By associating a policy with unpopular groups, opponents are able to get people to lose some respect for the value it represents, like feminism or environmentalism.

2. In another experiment, 116 participants read the same blog entry used in the previous experiment. Again, the blog entry supported proposals to allow women to join the golf club. One version simply attributed the proposal to citizens, while the other two attributed them to feminists or radical feminists.

Next, the subjects ranked four values in order of their importance as they thought about the issue of allowing women to join the club:

1. upholding the honor and prestige of the Masters golf tournament
2. freedom of private groups to set up their own rules
3. equal opportunities for both men and women
4. maintaining high standards of service for members of private clubs.

How people felt about the relative importance of these values depended on what version of the essay they read:

1. Of those participants who read the proposal attributed simply to citizens, 42 percent rated equality above the other three values. But only 32 percent who read the same proposal attributed to extremists thought equality was the top value.
2. On the other hand, 41 percent rated group freedom as the top value when they read the proposal attributed to citizens. But 52 percent gave freedom the top ranking when they read the proposal attributed to extremists.

Observations and Conclusions

Nelson commented:

Tying the proposal to feminist extremists directly affected the relative priority people put on gender equality v group freedom, which in turn affected how they felt about this specific policy. Perhaps thinking about some of the radical groups that support gender equality made some people lose respect for that value in this case.

This tactic of attacking a policy by tying it to supposedly extremist supporters goes on all the time in politics. Opponents of President Obama’s health care reform initiative attacked the policy by calling Obama a “socialist” and comparing the president to Adolf Hitler. Nelson explained:

These tactics can work when people are faced with competing values and are unsure what their priorities should be.

Environmental values, for example, may sometimes conflict with economic values if clean air or clean water laws make it more difficult for companies to earn a profit.

If you want to fight against a proposed environmental law, you can’t publicly say you’re against protecting the environment, because that puts you in the position of fighting a popular value. So instead, you say that proponents of the proposed law are going to extremes, and are taking the value too far.

The problem with this tactic for society is that it damages support of the underlying values, as well as the specific policy. Nelson:

If you use this extremism language, it can make people place less of a priority on the underlying value. People may become less likely to think environmentalism or gender equality are important values.

Maybe that is why supporters of the Republican Party in the USA seem to be utterly immoral and obnoxious in general, although large numbers of them profess Christianity. As their bibles say, if they ever got round to reading them, you cannot serve God and Mammon. They serve Mammon, and so their Christian values, if they had them in the first place, evaporate.

When the media run down anyone whose policies seem fair and right, remember these studies. Even civilized people might have to protest violently to stop the propagation of obnoxious and selfish ones by the 1% and their media and academic lackeys. So look carefully at what extremists are extreme about. You might agree with them.

GBS—The History of the English Parliament—and the American Congress?

What is the historical function of Parliament in this country? It is to prevent the Government from governing. It has never had any other purpose. If you study the constitutional history of this country, you will see that Parliament has grown up out of the old struggle against tyranny.

The Englishman, being a born Anarchist, always calls government tyranny. The result of that generally is that the Government does become a tyranny, because its subjects cannot interfere intelligently with it—they can only riot and get their heads broken.

Parliament was not in the first place an English institution. It was introduced into this country by a Frenchman named Simon de Montfort, whose father was concerned with the Parliament of Toulouse in France. Its object was to resist and disable the King. Its use—the only use it has ever had—was to ventilate grievances, to give the people it represented an opportunity of complaining of how they were being made uncomfortable.

But it never forgot its object of delaying, defeating, and if possible destroying whatever power happened to be governing the country at the time, whether it was the king, the Church, the barons, or the Cromwellian Majors-General. Bit by bit it broke the feudal monarchy, it broke the Church, and finally it even broke the country gentlemen.

Then, having broken everything that could govern the country, it left us at the mercy of our private commercial capitalists and landowners. Since then we have been governed from outside Parliament, first by our own employers, and of late by the financiers of all nations and races.

G B Shaw, In Praise of Guy Fawkes (1932)

GBS—“In Praise of Guy Fawkes”

Neglecting society is the cause of the political mess we find ourselves in. Capitalist society encourages individualism to the neglect of society, and the US’s irrational hatred of communism, fomented by its richest people and their lackeys in academia and the media, has led to “social” becoming a dirty word. The same rich elite buy politicians, so that we no longer have people dedicated to the good of society, but greedy sycophants dedicated to bringing home the bacon for rich men’s dishonest corporations. Look at Murdoch’s News Corp.

We abandon our societies to idle rich dilettantes, overambitious superannuated grocers and car dealers, and the class of three card tricksters and glorified bookmakers who now call themselves bankers, who take our money, giving us little of nothing for leaving it with them, but charging us large amounts of interest to borrow it, and meanwhile gamble with it thereby making the rich richer still without investing a penny themselves. As George Bernard Shaw said, “they are expert in nothing but making private fortunes and doing the other fellow down”!

GBS spoke to the UK Fabian Society in 1932 “In Praise of Guy Fawkes”, whom he thought was before his time for his perception of the need to end Parliament “by an explosion of the hot air which is its chief output”. Hot air is currently being spouted from both benches of Parliament about the riots and arson all over the UK being nothing but theft and thuggery, as if government policies of destroying the future chances of many of our youth through exporting their jobs, exhorbitant educational charges and savagely cutting social services and amenities has nothing to do with it.

The dishonest bought men we call politicians support not just riots but rebellion in countries the rich cannot profit from while ignoring the plain fact that our home brewed riots commonly arise when the burdens of society are being piled on to those who can least afford it. When society is perceived to be blatantly unjust our own youth can take their cues from the cues our grasping hypocritical politicians have given to rioters in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, and especially Libya! If rioting and rebellion can be admirable there, then why cannot it be here?

Where then is the modern Guy Fawkes that Shaw praised to the Fabians all those years ago. Certainly, he is not to be found among the Fabians, for most of them now aspire to making themselves prominent enough to be bought like their hero—not Bernard Shaw!—Tony Blair, accumulating his rewards for supporting the rich oilman's attempt to take over Iraq. Guy Fawkes objected to the government of his day for scapegoating Catholics. All the mini-Guys today object themselves to being scapegoated by our government. When society is unfair, anyone among the oppressed underclasses can become a Guy Fawkes.

That goes for the US even more!