NY Times August 10, 2011 Cameron's Broken Windows By RICHARD SENNETT and SASKIA SASSEN
[...] An old-fashioned Marxist might imagine that the broken windows and burning houses expressed a raging political reaction to government spending cuts - but this time that explanation would be too facile. The last time Britain saw widespread rioting, in the 1980s, street violence came after a long and failed political struggle against the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher, which suppressed trade unions and decimated social services. Today, the rioters seem motivated by a more diffuse anger, behaving like crazed shoppers on a spree; while some of the shops looted are big chains, many more are small local businesses run by people who are themselves struggling through Britain's economic slump. There has been a change in national temperament that has affected decent citizens as well as criminals. The country's mood has turned sour. Indeed, the flip side of Britons' famed politeness is the sort of hooliganism that appears at soccer matches and in town centers on weekend nights - an unfocused hostility that is usually fueled by vast quantities of alcohol. Fears of anarchic urban mobs date from Shakespeare's time, and Prime Minister David Cameron has summoned these old fears, describing the present conflagration as "senseless." Mr. Cameron was good at selling people on the idea of cutting costs, but he has failed to make the case for what and how to cut: efforts to increase university fees, to overhaul the National Health Service, to reduce the military and the police, even to sell off the nation's forests, have all backfired, with the government hedging or simply abandoning its plans. In attempting to carry out reform, the government appears incompetent; it has lost legitimacy. This has prompted some people living on Kingsland Road to become vigilantes. "We have to do things for ourselves," a 16-year-old in Hackney told The Guardian, convinced that the authorities did not care about, or know how to protect, communities like his. A street of shuttered shops, locked playgrounds and closed clinics, a street patrolled by citizens armed with knives and bats, is not a place to build a life. Americans ought to ponder this aspect of Britain's trauma. After all, London is one of the world's wealthiest cities, but large sections of it are impoverished. New York is not so different. The American right today is obsessed with cutting government spending. In many ways, Mr. Cameron's austerity program is the Tea Party's dream come true. But Britain is now grappling with the consequences of those cuts, which have led to the neglect and exclusion of many vulnerable, disaffected young people who are acting out violently and irresponsibly - driven by rage rather than an explicit political agenda. [...] full: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/11/opinion/when-budget-cuts-lead-to-broken-windows.html _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
