Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime

Tony Blair famously promised to be tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime, but the current wave of riots and social unrest can be seen as a direct consequence of Labour’s failure to reverse Thatcherite neo-liberalism. Cameron’s draconian cuts may have triggered these events – with Mark Duggan’s shooting the catalyst – but the cuts alone are insufficient explanation for the remarkably swift spread of violence. A more robust rationalisation is Blair’s continuation of Thatcher’s legacy which crystallised social fragmentation through growing wealth inequality.

As Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett argue in the empirical masterpiece The Spirit Level – Why Equality is Better for Everyone all social problems – such as crime, obesity, mental illness, ill health, teenage pregnancy – are more prevalent in unequal societies.

Wilkinson and Pickett cite the American psychiatrist James Gilligan who argues that acts of violence “are attempts to ward off or eliminate the feeling of shame and humiliation – and replace it with its opposite, the feeling of pride”. Although Gilligan is discussing individual criminals, we can extrapolate this to whole communities. It is no surprise that violent riots have occurred in areas of poverty, mass unemployment and decimated youth services. In Tottenham, for instance, 75% of the youth services budget has been cut.

People feel alienated, shamed and humiliated because they cannot find work to provide for themselves or their families. The mob mentality – and the adrenaline-fuelled rush of consumerist ecstasy experienced through the looting of a plasma television – provides the panacea of temporary pride and purpose. The solution, therefore, is not to compound their humiliation through tabloid caterwauling and the removal of benefits.

Although the government refuse to admit it, there is strong correlation between violence and wealth inequality and, as Wilkinson and Pickett assert:

… violent behaviour comes from young men at the bottom of society, deprived of all the markers of status, who must struggle to maintain face and what little status they have, often reacting explosively when it is threatened

Seumas Milne – in a compelling Guardian article – contends that David Cameron must maintain that unrest has no cause except criminality otherwise the political establishment might be held responsible. Milne contrasts the behaviour of the rioters with bankers that:

publicly looted the country’s wealth and got away with it… it’s not hard to see why those who are locked out of the gravy train might think they were entitled to help themselves to a mobile phone.

Our society is predicated on unjust and unfair treatment which has reckless and dangerous consequences. If you dehumanise and alienate people – by cutting their services, demonising them in popular culture and undermining their quality of life – then it is no surprise that people react against it. If you treat someone like an animal then they will start behaving like one – and there’s nothing more dangerous than a wounded animal.

But the same is true of the other end of the spectrum. If you treat people – like bankers and media moguls – as though they are above the law then they start to believe they are above the law. If governments pander to their whim, then they believe they are above government and they become reckless, arrogant and aloof – as demonstrated by hackgate and the financial crisis.

This unfair treatment creates a more unequal and hierarchical society. Those at the bottom lack the social capital to achieve self-respect and status and this creates volatile and violent results. Those at the top lack restraint and ride roughshod over others. The true crime, for any Labour supporter, is that the gap between the richest and poorest increased under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. This is the key long-term factor for the recent explosion of destruction.

Of course violence is deplorable – and it is clear much of the unrest lacks political consciousness and represents nothing more than criminal opportunism – but it would be wrong to ignore the economic and socio-political context which has created this civil disobedience. As economic recovery stagnates and unemployment rises, so too will social alienation and the chance of further violence. Just like the financial crash, it is the selective blindness of the political establishment to the ills of neo-liberalism which endangers us all. The irony is that while Thatcher sought to create a stake-holder capitalism to appease working people, the vast majority of the population now has no interest in a dysfunctional and misfiring economic model.

If we don’t fully engage with the reasons behind the riots – and the government continues its naïve economic program – then we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of our past. It’s time we got tough on the causes of crime and tackled growing wealth inequality.

Class war on fat people is too much to stomach

Obesity is increasing rapidly in the Western world. In the 1980s, approximately 40% of the UK population were overweight and less than 10% were obese. Now two-thirds of adults are overweight and more than a fifth are obese.

In the monumental book Spirit Level, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett dedicate a fascinating chapter to exploring the causes behind this “obesity epidemic” and conclude that obesity levels tend to be lower in countries where income differences are smaller.

This plague of portliness has caused a major health crisis in the developed world as higher obesity levels has seen the ballooning of those suffering from heart disease, diabetes and various cancers. Increasing numbers of obese children will lead to lower life expectancy and place additional strain on an already underfunded and undervalued NHS. Furthermore, obesity further erodes psychological and mental well-being.

Historically, being fat has been associated with being rich. Rich people didn’t need to engage in manual labour and they could afford to gorge on various decadent delights. Conversely, the poor would work long, strenuous days and could afford, if anything, only the most basic food. Whilst the rich were often fat cats; the poor were more likely to be malnourished and suffer from debilitating disease.

As the Western world has moved to a post-industrial economy, however, obesity has changed its social distribution. For a variety of reasons – as laid out in Spirit Level – working-class people are now far more likely to be overweight than middle-class people.

This phenomena has been coupled with an overt and covert media assault on the corpulent classes. We have seen an explosion of voyeuristic television programmes laughing at a variety of (usually working-class) overweight subjects – Too Fat Too Young, The 34 Stone Teenager, Fat Club, Big Meets Bigger, The Biggest Loser, Can Fat Teens Hunt? – in a grotesque echo of the Victorian freak show. Tabloid newspapers, trashy magazines, the fashion industry and celeb culture fortify the maxim that thin is beautiful and fat is horrible. The ubiquitous media tells us that fat is wrong but, at the same time, the omnipresent advertising industry tells us to devour more and more unwholesome junk. Well you can't have your cake and eat it! Or maybe you can...

As Polly Toynbee notes, “fat is a class issue” – but this pervasive demonisation is much more subtle than overt class war and is compounded by the media’s desire to reduce everything to the lowest common denominator. Like an exquisite meal, everything the media regurgitates has to be easily digestible.

A prime example of this is the clever satire of Have I Got News For You relentlessly attacking John Prescott – one of the few working class members of Blair’s government – for being overweight. Prescott was never overtly mocked for being working class, but that was the underlying subtext – especially when scoffing at Prescott’s lack of lingual dexterity. The implicit implication is that politics is no place for people who haven’t had a public school or Oxbridge education. Indeed, the whole media feeding frenzy around fat people is thinly veiled class war and represents another way for the establishment to both profit from and undermine the working-class.