Broken Society

Congratulations to David Cameron, you have broken me.

After years of carefully sitting on the fence, of trying to consider every possible angle and, most of all, of refusing to blog in either rage or a too-overt political position, our Prime Minister has pushed me over the edge.  I am now officially disgusted by our government.

It’s the fallout from the riots that have done it.  It’s the knee-jerk reactions, the posturing, the wild declarations of draconian measures, the bigotry, the shit-stirring, the entirely false ‘Dunkirk spirit’, the condemnation of youth as if we were all, all of us, mad bad and dangerous, the sheer stupidity of the responses, the sudden declaration of ‘gang warfare’ where there has been none – it’s Broken Society.  It’s our government blaming its people for not being moral enough, upright enough, nice enough, it’s our government condemning families for being broken instead of poor, or the police for being restrained instead of violent.  It’s our government forgoing all responsibility for its actions, it’s our government – our government of the comfortable and the secure, no less – declaring that its ideological bugbears are the cause of disturbances that have absolutely nothing to do whatsoever with middle management or bureaucracy or whatever thin illusion Cameron claims it is he is determined to cut. Because this is how he sells the cuts to us – not constables vanishing from the streets or doctors from the wards, but a mysterious crowd of ‘middle men’ vanishing from ‘behind the scenes’, whoever they are, and wherever they work.  Perhaps they’re secretaries handling the emails to the Chief of the Met Police?  Maybe they’re forensic officers in laboratories who aren’t seen on the streets riding police bicycles and therefore can’t be doing much.  Or perhaps a few late-night nurses – hell, they’re probably foreign anyway and who needs care for the sick after midnight?  How dare our government tell me that the experts, the doctors and the cops, the scientists and the careful watching academics who’ve spent their lives studying the system, how dare my government tell me that all its experts are wrong and it, with its ideology and determination to win elections, is right. How dare they demean the intelligence of others and the common sense of everyone.

And not just our government.  Headlines such as ‘all foreign rioters to be deported’ are a stupid, jingoist bit of posturing that sounds as earnest as it does inane.  Tabloid journalists who bemoan the failure of our police force to knock down the doors of suspects and throw those dangerous youths, some of them as old as eleven, behind bars – let them live in the past, let them go back to a time when the police could do exactly these things and Brixton rioted and Stephen Lawrence was killed and the price of protesting could be a broken leg and no one in the community felt any urge at all to talk to their bobbies.  ‘All benefits to be cut to rioters and their families’ – what?  And where, when there is no money and no home and no prospects for these families blighted by a criminal record and no support, where are they going to go and what are they going to do?  Who will embrace them, now that we have not, except more crime and more poverty that breeds more crime?  Don’t talk to me about the moral breakdown of our society, don’t tell me that youth – my generation – are morally bankrupt and must be controlled!  We are inheriting a country where the gap between the rich and the poor has grown to obscene proportions, where the public services that our parents took for granted are being slashed, where education costs more than it has for over sixty years and healthcare creaks under the strain of unpatched holes.  We are inheriting a country that went to war for a lie, and fought that war without a plan for what happened next; we are inheriting a country whose ethnic minorities are being blamed for not integrating and are not integrating because they are being blamed; we are inheriting a planet whose ice caps are melting and whose mean temperature is crawling steadily higher; we are inheriting seas full of jellyfish and rivers devoid of fish.  It is a lie , it is a fiction, it is deceit to say that every family stricken by poverty has the opportunity to make something better of itself without the assistance of the government.  Every single one?  When the schools are bursting and the buses are creaking and the cheapest food is the stuff that kills you and sports are costly and the community centre is closing and the local authorities are retreating and the police are being slashed and the doctors are being harried and the benefits by which you live, the very act of survival, are being cut?  You tell me how, in between scraping together the means to live, the poorest of our society are going to also scrape together the learning, the knowledge, the money and the will to go to universities whose tuition fees are £10,000 a year.  You tell me how our ‘Big Society’ will work when paid experts are suddenly made redundant volunteers, and knowledge becomes second to ideology.

You, my government – you speak honestly to me.  You speak honestly of the things that must be and the things that have gone before.  And when I speak back, you listen, and you learn, and you adapt.  Because right now, I see no sign that any of the above is happening, I too am getting angry.