Last weeks London riots were an intersting window into the modern day UK, with the initial riot in Tottenham looking much like past summer riots in Tottenham, Brixton, Toxteth and the like, but the following 3 nights appeared to be something new - random opportunistic looting rather than a venting of political outrage.

Crikey's Guy Rundle has an look at the outburst - People feel like they’ve got a stake through their heart.

We are “all children of Thatcher’”

 — British Foreign Secretary William Hague in an off-guard moment

Yesterday I noted that the most important thing to observe in writing about the “British Riots” was that there was no such thing — there is no single event going on in the UK, with a single meaning. What started as a protest against the police killing of a black man in Tottenham — with an incompetent police frame-up thrown in — became the opportunity for three or four intersecting waves of action to occur.

They were:

1. Wider protests and property damage against racist policing (especially “stop-and-search” powers) in non-white areas of London,

2. Atomist-anarchist property damage (and attacks on media personnel) as part of a strategy of basic disruption

3. Property damage and looting by a “transitional” group — politically-defined anarchists and koukouloforoi (“hooded ones” in the Greek terminology) shading into opportunistic riotous youths

4. Violent, sometimes organised, criminality — systematic looting for on-sale, mugging etc.

5. Racist attacks in multiple directions — between blacks and British-Asians, and by white “vigilante” groups of blacks.

Clearly there are overlaps at the edges of each, and multiple purpose — in some cases to steal a pair of trainers or a plasma TV is an act with a political dimension, but the fact that these are separated processes can be seen by looking at earlier riots/insurrections — such as the Brixton ones of the early 1980s, or the Broadwater Farm (near Tottenham) battles of 1985, where looting and random criminality was marginal or absent.

Thus, not only is there a multiplicity of layers to what is occurring, but some of these work against each other — the organised criminals are preying on the weak while they also empty out chain stores, the looters blunt anti-racist protest by turning it into a free-for-all, and the white English Defence Leagues (and some black gangs, or groupuscules), are attempting to turn it into a racial conflict, when its roots are clearly in the relations between police and public.

When people are banding together to protect their streets against such fluid anomic destruction, you would be foolish in the extreme to construct the event as nothing other than meaningful resistance and get on its side, as some on the Left seem to be doing. But the far greater foolishness is with the Right, who have put the multiple events into one lump, and trotted out their tired old recitative of civilisational decline.

For the Right, the events are the fault of everything from soft policing, to the collapse of traditional moral authority, parents not being allowed to smack their children, the failure to teach proper history in schools, the writings of Michel Foucault, the personal conduct of Amy Winehouse, and so on and so on. Anything, apparently, but the actual events that kicked the whole thing off in the first place — a police killing of a black man who never fired a shot, in a country where poor communities are feeling the effect of deep cuts to social services and community institutions.

There is something not only wearying but wearied about the Right’s recitative — as if they barely believe it themselves, or are divided into whom to turn their hate on more — the people doing the mayhem, or the “political class” alleged to have betrayed the country through spineless failure to assert proper authority etc etc. To blame the latter — which they would dearly love to do — would be, in part, to give a social explanation for the events, and they hate that. But to sheet home individual blame, is to let the “surrender” culture off the hook, and they hate that more.

Some — such as Theodore Dalrymple and Andrew Bolt  — come to a darker solution, and start muttering about an “underclass”, let off the leash by the permissive class, and threatening the class above — goodly workers and lower-middle class people — to be protected by a bit of social cleansing perhaps. The prize probably goes to Melanie Phillips who blames well, everything, absolutely everything, in a hilarious self-parodic recitative that stands as the right’s melt-down.

The short answer to the Right’s self-serving construction of these events would be to say that they are easily falsified by looking at where and when they don’t and didn’t happen. The first and obvious candidate is Scotland — these aren’t British riots, they’re English riots. Why? Because Scotland and Northern Ireland are separately governed for the purposes of domestic spending, and in both cases, the Tories’ cuts have been resisted. People still have a stake in society and riots when they occur have an older political form i.e. sectarianism.

Furthermore when you look to the places where “PC” parenting, policing blah blah has occurred — i.e. Scandinavia, Netherlands etc — you find not merely an absence of riots, but also an absence of the sort of anomie that fuels Britain. Why? Because they’re less unequal places. People still feel they’ve got a stake in their own lives.

In England, people feel like they’ve got a stake through their heart. They didn’t for a while under Labour, as Gordon Brown began to wheel out some sort of social investment state — now that’s been wound up, there is simply a renewed sense of radical isolation.

The form the riots are taking may well be dictated by the nature of postmodern society — the content is still dictated by politics. The Right’s half-arsed theorising on this wont disguise the truth — these are Thatcher’s children, and this is Thatcher’s England, still and again, and in its third decade.

I occasionally have a look at Salon and one column which is always featured prominently is Carey Tennis' counselling column - which featured an outburst of its own this week, when looking at one correspondent's job stress - Am I cut out for my dream job ?.

You are not surrounded by people whose primary thought when they wake up in the morning is how can they make sure you are happy and comfortable. Their thought is how can they get the most out of you so they have to do less themselves. It's not that they're evil. We're all under the same strain. We're organized around the idea of always getting more. So your responsibilities will expand as long as you keep saying yes, and so you need a fundamental shift in your thinking that admits the existence of an adversarial relationship at work. You are working in a supposedly enlightened place, but you have no union. Without a union and workplace rules, you are at the mercy of whatever your boss wants. It is doubly hard to combat this when you are working for a cause you believe in.

But here's the other thing. I'm going to sound angry and crazy when I say it, but whatever. OK, I'll just say it: We have a system that keeps workers in fear.

It's not you. It's the system we've allowed to come into being, and I dare say it's come into being because the people it benefits are powerful enough and clever enough to keep it going, and the people it hurts are well-meaning but frightened and lack the foresight and the practical organizational strength to stop it.

We do not live in a good society. That's another thing.

This is not a society dedicated to the care of others and the pursuit of wisdom. Wouldn't that be an amazing society? But that's not the one we have.

You live in a world that tricks you into believing that if you do what it says you will be happy. You won't. You won't be happier if you get the top spot. You won't be happier if you answer every call.

You say you work for a cause you believe in. You might be happier if you work more directly for your cause. I'm not sure what cause that is, but if it's, say, to create safer conditions for fishermen, you might be happier if you were actually fishing. Or if it's to keep the environment pristine, you might be happier if you were actually in that environment keeping it pristine. Or if it is an organization dedicated to helping people, you might be happier if you were actually helping those people yourself. That's one thing that happens with organizations, is that they alienate us from the ennobling activities they are formed to promote.

So there's that.

And this other thing is about being a person in an adversary relationship to the large economic and social forces that affect you. I grew up in a time when this was clearer. But it is still clear today.

Nothing has changed structurally; we are still a hateful, war-waging culture that denigrates women, celebrates killing, despoils the planet, plunders the resources of less powerful people, keeps a permanent underclass in virtual economic slavery and wages imperialist wars abroad. We're still the same country we were when I was growing up in the 1960s.

We just have better games.

That's it in a nutshell. The "military-industrial complex" Dwight Eisenhower warned us about had a public-relations disaster in the 1960s, when it failed to adequately sell its project to America's youth. Since then, it has learned.

The other day I was walking along wondering about the differences between people in their 20s and 30s today and during the 1960s and 1970s, marveling at the happy, well-adjusted faces I meet in the cafes and clothing stores, and wondering why my anguish and panic at our global state does not dent their cheerfulness, and also thinking about my largely unsupervised youth, unhygienic and renegade, and it occurred to me to see that today's parenting regime seems to have coalesced around the project of keeping youth constantly socialized and trained and busy so that they cannot sit around and wonder what's wrong. Because wondering what's wrong leads to troubling conclusions.

We have responded to the problem of existential anxiety not by confronting it with existential philosophy but by creating an ever-larger and more sophisticated web of 24-hour distraction and socialization training, so that young people are prevented from attaining the socially analytical skills that might lead them to see how they're being fooled. If they saw how they are being fooled they might disrupt the functioning of this system. They might go on strike. They might bring the whole thing crashing down.

Keith Olbermann the other day suggested we take to the streets. What happened? Nothing.

We don't know how to take to the streets. Besides, it looks just awful on television.

So you can go ahead and do your job, but just be aware that you are being conned. You are living in a dishonest and rapacious culture, and you are doing the best you can to make it work for you. Even those of us working for causes we believe in are working in a basically anarchic, amoral system, without the benefit of unions or workplace protections and in an economic system that has no moral foundation.

That's what we do. That's who we are. And that weird anxiety you feel from time to time, that's not a problem. That's just the truth seeping in.

You're OK. It's the world that's messed up.

With the UK's Liberal-Democrats deciding to join the conservatives in government rather than Labour, it will be interesting to see how much of Cameron and Clegg's green rhetoric gets put into practice.

The Lib-Dems seem to be getting a battering from everyone but in my mind are actually on the winning side of the 2 big issues that have defined politics in recent decades - aligned with both free markets and socially liberal thinking - unlike the conservatives and labour. In many ways it surprises me they aren't the largest political bloc already (the vested interests that make up the support bases of the other 2 blocs presumably being the reason why).

Crikey has a look at the coalition deal that was hashed out and some of the malcontents that may yet scupper it - Clegg and Cameron: common interests, common enemies.

Those on the left of the Lib Dems are understandably upset at the coalition deal. But they have to come to terms with the fact that Clegg's options were extremely limited, given the near-impossibility of putting together a stable majority without the Tories. And as I keep pointing out in relation to Australia's Greens, if they aspire to serious influence as a third party, they have to demonstrate some flexibility: they can't afford to be seen as just a permanent auxiliary to one of the major parties.

More interesting is the relentless hostility towards the Lib Dems from certain sectors of the right. At one level, this is not a surprise, since the Lib Dems are in many respects a left-wing party: pro-environment, pro-European, hostile to military spending, strongly supportive of civil liberties, gay rights, and numerous other progressive causes.

But the hostility comes from many people who regard themselves as free marketeers, and who claim to regard the Lib Dems as supporters of "big government", saying they have betrayed their Gladstonian heritage of low taxes and fiscal responsibility. The evidence for this claim, however, is desperately thin: whatever else can be said about them, Clegg and his closest colleagues are free marketeers through and through.

As Helen Dale put it prior to the election:

"Make no mistake: given power, the Liberal Democrats would engage in a 'bonfire of the quangos' the likes of which Britain did not even see under Margaret Thatcher. Their manifesto is riddled with 'abolish', and 'decentralise'. Many Labour voters (and people on the left generally) still do not appreciate that the Liberal approach to achieving fairness and reducing inequality is via a small state and a steep reduction in income tax."

What's going on, it seems to me, is the old bait-and-switch trick on the right: redefining "freedom" to mean support for vested interests -- "pro-business" rather than "pro-market", "private enterprise" rather than "free enterprise" -- and ignoring or being positively hostile to the claims of freedom in other areas. Even when they claim not to care about cultural issues, their distaste for liberalism is tribal, not rational.

The hostility towards the Lib Dems is in fact strangely similar to the hostility to Cameron within the Tory Party. Cameron's attempts to drag the party into the 21st century have made him many enemies (including those who sometimes call themselves Thatcherites, forgetting that Thatcher in her day was a ruthless moderniser), and the coalition with the Lib Dems has given them more ammunition; Paola Totaro's report this morning notes that "some of [Cameron's] right-wing colleagues ... have already started muttering about his agenda."

Don't be surprised if Clegg and Cameron find themselves on the same side in cabinet more often than not.

Charlie Stross has decided to give the new government a break for a while to see how it goes - Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss ... not..

So we have a Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition government (those words, I think, throw the difference between the British and American political weltanschaung into stark relief).

I'm really not a fan of the Conservatives; 18 years of ThatcherMajorism left deep scars. (If you're American and not a fan of George W. Bush, it was like this: Thatcher treated her foes with exactly the same contempt as Bush's people did. And eighteen years of contempt backed up by malice and a legislative sledgehammer leave very bad memories.)

On the other hand, the coalition platform seems to have retained a surprisingly large chunk of the LibDem platform on civil liberties. A lot of the most objectionable illiberal and authoritarian measures of the past decade look likely to be repealed in the early days of the new government. (This isn't as odd as it may sound to outsiders; the Conservatives have long harboured a Libertarian faction, and Cameron appears to identify with them strongly on some issues.) On constitutional reform, it looks like we're getting a fully elected upper house to replace the House of Lords, and a full referendum on electoral reform for the lower house — although the conservatives reserve the right to campaign against their coalition partners. I don't like the cap on non-EU immigration, but I suspect it was politically inevitable, as likely under a Labour government as this one.

All in all ...

We've got a government that, for the first time since the 1930s, more than 50% of the voters voted for. There are a lot of positive policies here, on civil liberties and constitutional reform. There are some stinkers, but fewer than I expected. There is also a systemic weakness, insofar as the extreme fringe of either of the coalition parties have the ability to take down the government. So we're probably going to see lots of compromises. In particular, I'm hoping the Liberal Democrats act as an effective brake on the Conservatives (who I fear are capable of behaving much like Stephen Harper's Canadian tories if governing on their own). But I'm deathly afraid of what the Conservatives are going to do about unemployment and drug usage, to name but two aspects of domestic policy where the doctrinaire right wing model is broken (and unemployment is at its highest level since 1994).

The always entertaining Stephen Fry has an articulate but slightly jaundiced look at the prospects for the Lib-Dems to have the UK electoral system reformed to allow parliament to actually provide a fair representation of the will of the voters - Stalemate: PR and PR, Ice Cream, Bananas and Fudge.

Hermeneutics

One of the most puzzling features of the current unstoppable wave of political punditry that is flooding all channels and outlets at the moment (including this one of course) is the peculiar propensity of commentators to feel qualified to extrapolate from the election results the Manifest Will of Britain. “The people have voted for change”, “The people have told Gordon Brown that he has got to go” , “The people are saying that they don’t really trust any one party”, “The people have said that they want Parliament reformed, the tea room in the House of Commons redecorated, new carpeting in the women’s lavatory of the House of Lords and a vegetarian option in the canteen.” What fevered branch of electoral hermeneutics allows any such interpretations on the basis of the summing of millions of individual’s single votes I cannot imagine. It is possible that people do want real change, but a single cross next to a single name is no way to deduce it.

PR

We only get one vote, one cross to put next to one name. If you put your cross next to Victoria Tory’s name you declare that want her to be your MP, representing you constituency, although it is perhaps also permissible to assume that you are up for her party and her party’s leader winning an overall majority in the Commons in Westminster as well. If the cross is next to Fabian Labour’s name or Libby Dem’s one might be justified in assuming the same there too. There really is almost nothing more nuanced or sophisticated that one can infer from our recent general election except to say that that of the 68% who voted there weren’t enough who wanted Conservatives to win to allow Cameron to claim first prize, and even fewer who wanted to vote for candidates from the other parties. One could deduce a huge amount more if voters were allowed to express their preferences in an intelligent way that reflected how they really feel and think. The Electoral Reform Society is a good place to go for information as to how precisely such a form of voting could be implemented, as it is all round much of the civilised world. My friends at Vote For A Change have also been campaigning for the same thing. Proportional Representation is the prize that many of us hope this “confusing” election will deliver. But there is an obstacle. An obstacle so huge that I cannot see it being overcome.

The Sitch

Here is the situation as I read it.

1. David Cameron’s Conservative Party elders and backbenchers will never allow him to seal a pact with Clegg that guarantees electoral reform in the shape of proportional representation.
2. Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrat Party elders and backbenchers will never allow him to seal a pact with Cameron that that does not guarantee electoral reform in the shape of proportional representation.
3. Cameron will spring an obvious trap by saying, “We’ll see. We’ll look into it. You can have concessions on schools and hospitals.” Children who want an ice cream know that when their parents say “We’ll see, but you can have a banana” it means no ice cream. The Lib Dem and PR pressure groups are perfectly aware of that too. Any talk of “an independent enquiry … a Royal Commission … a committee to look into it” will be treated for what it is. Fudge.
4. Stalemate

It comes down to this: the Conservatives believe that under a PR system they will never achieve full supremacy in the country again. This would mark a sharp reverse in their ambitions. Their manifesto commitment to a 10% reduction in MPs and a consequent redraft of constituency borders would necessarily gerrymander massively in their interest, all but guaranteeing Tory power for the foreseeable future. The idea that they will for one moment countenance PR reform that will see them reduced, as they would interpret it, to the role of Euro-style hedgers, compromisers and pragmatic consensus inclusionists is more than a bitter pill, it is a suicide pill and Cameron knows that he could never induce the party to swallow it.

There can therefore be only two outcomes. Either Clegg blinks and accepts a “We’ll see, dear” fudge which would cause outrage in his party and his own political death or Cameron refuses the deal, demands a new general election and watches grandly, nobly and in a “statesmanlike manner” from the sidelines as Labour attempts to cobble together something with both the Lib Dems and the requisite number of independents and nationalists required to form a majority who could push through an Emergency Budget. Cameron would calculate that the press and public might well see him as the iron man of principal, with the most votes and the most ‘authority’. Clegg would be painted as an opportunistic spoiler: after all his party actually lost ground in the election. Brown, if he stayed, would continue to be portrayed as forlorn, desperate, blundering, out of touch, cynical, greedy, lame and fatally wounded. The media would, I think, successfully raise Cameron and the Conservatives in public estimation: “What principle! What courage! They were not squalid smoke-filled room negotiators, they didn’t strike ugly deals behind closed doors… they deserve the chance to run a stable administration without all this sordid horse-trading. They made handsome and significant concessions on issues that really matter, hospitals and schools, yet instead of seizing this historic opportunity to do something for the country the Lib-Dems insisted, at this time of economic crisis, to fuss about cosmetic changes to the constitution that no decent Englishman understands anyway… nasty European nonsense. Now we see Clegg for what he really is…” You can write the Telegraph and Mail leaders for yourselves. They will argue furthermore that if the Lib Dems and reformers get their way, then the kind of deal-making, compromise and gridlock that we are seeing now will become the norm after every general election and that, they will declare, is no way to run a whelk stall.

The Independent has a report on the reaction against the Liberal Democrats by the Murdoch press in the UK - 'Sun' censored poll that showed support for Lib Dems.

The Sun newspaper failed to publish a YouGov poll showing that voters fear a Liberal Democrat government less than a Conservative or Labour one.

The Liberal Democrats accused the newspaper, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch, of suppressing the finding. The paper, which endorsed Labour in the past three elections, declared its support for David Cameron during the Labour Party's annual conference last October. Like other Tory-supporting papers, it has turned its fire on Nick Clegg over his policies, pro-European statements and expenses claims since he won last week's first televised leaders' debate.

YouGov also found that if people thought Mr Clegg's party had a significant chance of winning the election, it would win 49 per cent of the votes, with the Tories winning 25 per cent and Labour just 19 per cent. One in four people Labour and one in six Tory supporters say they would switch to the Liberal Democrats in these circumstances. The party would be ahead among both men and women, in every age and social group, and in every region. On a uniform swing across Britain, that would give the Liberal Democrats 548 MPs, Labour 41 and the Tories 25.