Home / Dave Brockington / Social Unrest, British Edition

Social Unrest, British Edition

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Over the past few days, I have heard several MPs assign responsibility for the riots in England as a failure of individual responsibility rather than any “complicated sociological explanation”.  While I wish I could find such a quote this morning, as sadly these were all on the radio (BBC5 and NPR) but this quote by Mark Reckless, Conservative MP for Rochester and Strood, on his own blog, will suffice in a pinch:

This disorder is not caused by social deprivation, as Ken Livingstone disgracefully sought to suggest on Newsnight last  night. Rather, as Shaun Bailey so rightly riposted, it follows too long a period in which we have taught youth everything about their rights, but next to nothing about their responsibilities.

As two commenters to Paul’s post on the riots point out, Henry Farrell over at Crooked Timber brings to our attention a recently-released paper that suggests a relationship between periods of fiscal austerity and social unrest.  Shocking, I know.  I’ve skimmed the paper, and while the methods look sound to me at first blush, I’ve not given it a thorough ‘manuscript review oriented’ treatment.

UK Polling Report offers some fresh data on public opinion vis-a-vis the riots.  The “public” seem to be pretty pissed off about things (of course, this is the same public that wants the death penalty reinstated).  Again, shocking:

Asked if the police should be able to use various tactics in response to riots provoked some pretty gung ho responses – 90% of people thought they should be able to use water cannon, 84% mounted police, 82% curfews, 78% tear gas, 72% tasers, 65% plastic bullets, 33% live ammunition. 77% thought that the army should be brought in.

I heard on Radio 4 last night (PDT) that there are no water cannon on Great Britain; they’re all in Northern Ireland for some reason.  When one looks at the cross-tabs for this recent poll, there is basically no relationship between social class and support for more draconian responses.  Nor is there any relationship between social class and belief in the “main cause” of the riots, with government cuts (read: austerity) third at 8%.  The only significant difference here is that the middle / professional classes view “criminal behaviour” first at 45% to 24% for “gang culture” (what’s the difference?), whereas only 38% of the working classes believe criminal behavior to be the primary cause, with 28% blaming gang culture.

Finally, we have this banal piece from Michael McCarthy writing in The Independent.  Shorter: “back in my day, we had civility and cultural norms that prevented such behavior, but this generation, and these people, don’t accept Britishness.  And our music was better”.  Of course, the lazy comparisons with the Yanks, in order to demonstrate British exceptionalism, have to be deployed as well:

This is in sharp contrast to a society like that of the United States, for example, which is largely a rule-bound society. To give just a single instance: drinking alcohol in the street used to be rare in Britain, because it was frowned upon – but in the US there are local laws specifically forbidding it. The rule-bound society, which is the reason for the vast proliferation of lawyers in the US, arose in America because the founding fathers created a new nation from scratch, starting with a written Constitution that set out the first principles and then writing down and proscribing everything else about people’s behaviour.

Britain, whose governing process evolved slowly and organically, does not even have a written constitution, merely a set of understandings about how things ought to be done.

Right.

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