Anybody who knows me will know that I'm of the pinko-liberal, bleeding heart lefty persuasion. Well in what follows, I make no apologies for sounding like a Daily Mail reader of the worst order.
I of course will not need to inform or remind anybody of the violence going on in cities all over England last night. What I'd like to react to is the bollocks being spouted by some people in reaction to it. Let's be very, very clear first of all. What started as a legitimate and peaceful protest, with a genuine reason for the gathering, in Tottenham has been followed by entirely deliberate, entirely ignoble and entirely inexcusable theft, violence and destruction from kids.
Not disaffected, disengaged, disenfranchised kids, though doubtless there were some with legitimate claim to any or all of those feelings among the number. But what passes for normal kids in large cities these days. Kids who think they're it. Kids who value 'respect', or their own bizarre version of it, and material stuff like the right trainers, the right iPod, the right phone, above pretty much anything else. Just kids - the generation we appear to be bringing up at the moment.
They simply enjoy smashing stuff up, and simply have no conscience or qualms about theft because they live in a society where it has been, for some time in schools for example, unacceptable to individualise punishment. They get away with misbehaving all the time, so why should the last few nights' escalation of that to outright crime be any different in their eyes?
Yet still people seek to excuse them. To pick just one example, Gavin Knight, writing on the Guardian website here, largely gets it spot on with regard to the nature of the 'gangs' that have allegedly perpetrated these acts, but his assertion at the end we are distancing ourselves from the problems of young people who 'desperately need a voice' is frankly laughable. We distance ourselves from them because we are nothing like them. I too am angry - angry at the fear I feel in my own city for the safety of my friends, angry at the destruction, but I don't react in such a manner. Nor do millions of other Londoners just like me, many of whom are fearful and suffering. I don't care if the mindless hoolie dickhead who robbed the injured kid as he was helped to his feet (I'm sure you've seen the footage) has a voice or not - I don't want to fucking hear what fuckwits like him have to say. All he'd do if we listened to him, assuming he could string a fucking sentence together, is seek to excuse himself. Seek to make it somebody else's fault in the way typical of the solipsist arrogance which affects so many of his peers.
If these kids are so deprived, how is it they all have access to Twitter, access to the Blackberry devices by which this mayhem was spread? Did the only gangsta with a mobile go knocking on the door of all the poor kids in the estates to get them together? And what? They all quickly welded pushbikes together like the fucking A-Team in a lock-up, to better expedite their 'insurrection'? I don't bloody think so. Many of them already have the material trappings that are seen as valuable now, but it's not enough. They want more, and they also see a chance to smash some shit up while they get it.
So, on this occasion, I'll hear none of the apologist bollocks. These kids must be made to realise that there are consequences, that there is punishment, for this sort of shit, or it'll go on and on and on.
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