Possible response to the UK riots?
I’ve been thinking a lot about this, and think that some of the causes are to do with a lack of discipline, a lack of responsibility, and a lack of community.
And, the other night, in my insomniac hours on a trip to Singapore, I mulled over what I might do if I were Cameron.
How about:
1) Declare a state of emergency – and admit that we, as a society, have got a lot of things wrong, especially in how we treat young people;
2) Bring back, immediately, national service – not necessarily military – but a (minimum) year-long, compulsory, “boot-camp” for 16 or 18 year olds, to learn that life is not just about getting what they want, that life is also about responsibility to a wider community, of which they are a part, where they learn the value of service and contribution. There are plenty of socially useful tasks that could accompany such service. Give people a sense that they have something to give, a sense of purpose.
3) Support the above with plenty of public education about community taking priority over the individual.
4) Make all public role models, politicians, the police and judiciary, and the media, accountable to a council of elders (eg House of Lords), and force them to comply with the same standards of contribution to community.
What, overall, I think is needed is a more paternalistic approach – all this hatred of “the nanny-state” and focus on the individual, as well as the prioritising of individual over community good, have created a culture where no-one gives a shit, and no-one is willing to take authority any more.
Although I profess to be (very) left-wing, there is something that the right used to have which was a belief in the importance of discipline and community. That’s been jetisoned in the pursuit of quick profit in the last fifty years or so.
People, I think, only act so selfishly and (self-)destructively because they feel, rightly or wrongly, that the world has little to offer them. We’ve been selling people a fake dream for the last fifty years or so. No wonder there’s so much nihilism around.
Of course, there are other problems to address, but I do think we have to change at the root, and that change will take a generation.
There are no quick fixes here.
Calling the House of Lords a council of elders is stretching it Aboodi… I once heard a member of the House of Lords say she was their through the process of natural selection and had some sort of divine right to keep us proles in line .
Don, I was referring to a possible development for the House of Lords, rather than describing how it is today.
Hi Aboodi I have been thinking about the responce to the riots quite a lot and one of the problems for me is that we try and “solve” the problem by looking it the past and come up with slighty amended versions of the 50′s, old tribal systems etc as its our way of making sense of things… When the world has changed radically and it needs new solutions but thats the problem no-one has really the answer, certainly gtom my generation .It will come from Gen Y. What do you think ?