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Riots Report Blames Bent Britain On Political Elites

One Click Note: An important new academic report on the British riots has been published by researchers from the University of Essex and Royal Holloway University of London. With inequality coming out as the major socio-economic trigger for the riots, the report firmly points the finger at the behaviour of politicians, endemic police harassment in certain areas where the riots took place and the cuts that will hit the poorest hardest as the catalyst combination for the recent public disorder in Britain. With every good reason, swathes of the electorate possess a deep mistrust of our political elites. Knee jerk ConDem government reaction to the riots has been to incarcerate thousands in prisons that are already bursting at the seams and clearly cannot cope with the influx. Britain is the society where approximately 40% those leaving primary school at the age of eleven cannot read, write or add up adequately. These early statistics are translated into the fact that our prison population has an illiteracy and innumeracy rate of some 75%. Welcome to disenfranchised Bent Britain delivered to us by successive governments. ‘There will be burning and a-looting tonight’: The social and political correlates of law-breaking1 Sarah Birch and Nicholas Allen ONE CLICK EXTRACTS In the aftermath of the August 2011 riots, politicians and commentators offered a range of explanations for the social unrest and wanton violence. Drawing on survey and focus-group data, this paper tests those explanations by analysing how socio-economic, normative and political factors shape contemporary attitudes towards law breaking in Britain. The paper finds that both economic deprivation and personal moral values help to explain attitudes toward illegal behaviour but citizens' mistrust of political leaders and their disengagement from public affairs are also an important factor. The findings suggest that politicians who want to provide moral leadership need to do so through their actions as well as their words. It is political factors that have the strongest impact on people's expressed willingness to engage in illegal activity; engagement with public affairs and confidence in politicians depress tolerance of law breaking. These results should be sobering for politicians. If those at the bottom of society are to refrain from engaging in violent disorder, more needs to be done to build public confidence in the integrity of those at the top of British government. Inequality that was the most important socio-economic driver for the disturbances. Economists Tim Horton and Howard Reed estimate that the combined effect of the Coalition Government's changes to taxation, the benefits regime and public spending have had a highly regressive effect, hitting the poor much harder than the rich. ....a history of institutionalised racism within London's Metropolitan Police Service, combined with well-documented racial, age and gender profiling by police on the beat, has led to a widespread perception in many of the areas affected by the August riots (for example, Tottenham, Hackney and Brixton) that the police systematically harass and victimise young black men. These long-standing histories of racialised confrontation with police and police brutality may well have been instrumental in stoking the flames—literally and metaphorically. ....poverty appears to be the most important determinant of people?s willingness to commit illegal acts. If people's willingness to abide by the law is compromised by their jaundiced view of state institutions and their mistrust of political elites, an effective response will have to address political engagement in general and perceived breaches of public trust by those in power in particular. "It's the judges and the politicians, there's so much collusion or rivalry. The politicians are so far above the people, they have their own rules. Politics have run wild. There's no system, because governments govern themselves." (Woman, Hackney) "They [politicians] are supposed to show people respect... [they abide by a] different sets of rules. We?d get imprisoned for acting like that and they don?t get punished for anything." (Woman, Bradford) Though it would be an over-simplification to say that lack of confidence in the political system caused the August 2011 riots in any straightforward way, the evidence presented here suggests that there is something about the functioning of the British political system and the behaviour of its political elites that draws a significant minority of people toward a moral stance that makes them potentially available for participation in acts of mass illegality. FULL TEXT ‘There will be burning and a-looting tonight’: The social and political correlates of law-breaking1 Sarah Birch and Nicholas Allen, University of Essex ********** Related Links: * ‘There will be burning and a-looting tonight' The social and political correlates of law-breaking Sarah Birch and Nicholas Allen, University of Essex * Riots stoked by mistrust of politicians, says report Andrew Grice, The Independent * Wrong Answers On Bent Britain Eidtorial, The New York Times