Mayhem in Middlesbrough (2026)

From the October 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

The recent horrifying car crash on the A66, which took seven lives, has shone a light on the community in Middlesbrough and its conditions. Five young men and boys and two police officers lost their lives, when the young men – in a car with cloned plates – tried to avoid police pursuit by going the wrong way on a dual carriageway at three o’clock in the morning. The two officers had not been involved in the chase, they were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

After the smash, it became clear that wider criminality had been involved, with the police swooping down and arresting 12 people on various organised-crime charges. Another car had been rammed into the house of the father one of the boys, and there is a suggestion that they took to the roads in response to this.

The immediate response was one of outpouring of sympathy for the dead officers. A suggestion by local MP, Anna Turley, that all of the victims be remembered was met with politicised rage. The right-wing hate machine of X (formerly Twitter) began by making suggestions that the five were from a traveller community, then quickly pivoted to calling them underclass scum when it turned out that they did not belong to any ethnic minority.

Instead, calls for the police or the army to be sent in to sort them out and remove them from the community became the agreed line (the machinery of social media bots and trolls is a swarm learning system that tries various tacks until if finds something that works and gets traction and responses). This line then fed into the response to the families of the five beginning to commemorate their loss. They held ‘balloon releases’ to remember their lost loved ones. The fact that the grieving families were themselves innocent of killing the policemen was lost in the vituperation of those who demanded a form of damnatio memoriae for the five.

When their funerals were held, the case became a national controversy, as local schools closed because of the perceived risks to the children from the disruption they may cause. Young men on quadbikes and motorbikes formed part of the funeral corteges. At one of the funerals, a sort of Viking send off of burnt stolen cars was arranged. Some of the friends of the five maintained that the police had killed them.

In the 1990s, it was commonplace to find burnt out cars on school playing fields in Middlesbrough. The twockers, as they were called, sometimes avoided charges of theft by giving back the cars they ‘took without owners consent’ (the origin of the word twoc). Burning them destroyed the evidence of who had taken the car for a joyride. Any large carpark around Teesside could become a venue for handbreak turns and reckless driving. The young men who did that then are the spiritual (if not biological) fathers of those who died on the A66.

Middlesbrough is a community in visible decline. Linthorpe Road, once an arterial row of useful shops has become a long stretch of fast-food outlets: the larger department stores have closed down. The industries upon which the area was built – steel and shipbuilding – have disappeared. Whilst it retains a lot of brownfield space recovered from its industrial past, which is useful for building new industries, any new activities are far from labour-intensive.

It is a feature of the wages system that whilst some are subjected to arduous toil, others, necessarily, are condemned to idleness. A reserve army of labour is required for several reasons. The reserve provides recruits to work when necessary and holds down wages. The threat of being thrown on the scrapheap serves as a visible reminder of what can happen to anyone who challenges the rule of capital. It can also serve as a source of political shock troops.

The more enterprising and energetic of the long-term unemployed can show an entrepreneurial flair by turning to crime, and finding means of getting hold of money that doesn’t involve themselves becoming employees. There is a plausible case that the young men in the car had themselves been ‘groomed’ into criminality. We’re a long way from getting to the bottom of what exactly happened.

The knock-on effects of long-term decline are a spiral of lack of incentive to educate or get educated, much less to try and integrate into a society that seems hell-bent on controlling people it sees more as a problem than as fellow citizens. It’s not a wonder that many of the young men see the police as a hostile force. The neglect begins early, and the children’s services on Teesside are overstretched and dealing with multi-generational neglect.

It shouldn’t be overlooked that there was serious anti-immigrant rioting in Middlesbrough, and there will be an overlap between that and the current wave of disorder. The people without access to the high-skilled jobs market, left behind by the current system and in an insular community, will have been easily incited to campaign about in-comers.

The objective effect of last year’s disorder and that around the funerals will be as if there has been a form of collective bargaining by riot, the public authorities will try to buy social peace, while at the same time putting more resources into policing. Far-right opposition will rail against giving anything to those who cannot even be seen to be useful to the labour market ‘surplus population’, while there is little prospect of attracting any new industry that could absorb (or make it worth training) the available labour pool.

Technological advances on a global scale means that an area built on mass industry has had to reassess its identity and the way in which it organises itself. Instead of writing off whole areas and the individuals within it, we can end the wages system and enable free co-operation instead of idleness characterised by police and criminal organisations.

Pik Smeet

 

 

Blogger's Note: 

Readers might be interested in the Socialist Standard article, Dreaming spires and screaming tyres, by Iain Jamieson, that dates from December 1991, which touches upon some of the same issues raised in Pik Smeet's article.

Private lives (1977)

From the October 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

A correspondent in Greater Manchester asks a series of questions beginning: ‘‘What is the socialist view of the regulation and control (if any) of sexual activity within a Socialist society? Please deal individually with the questions of marriage, divorce and its family consequences, the age of consent, homosexuality (male and female), rape.” Further questions are who would have the say in the bringing-up of children, and would children be ‘‘disciplined” as now to make them conform; on individual rights to privacy, quietness, etc.; and finally, whether Socialism would not need some enforcement machinery for these matters.

They all represent aspects of the individual’s relationship to the community—but putting it that way distorts things at the outset. The basic social relationships are created by the structure of society itself. A complex of subsidiary relationships grows within them, with ideas attached. Yet these ideas in turn react on society; they produce endless changes of detail, and also the desire for new relationships which can only be obtained by developing society further. Thus, the socialist view is not that we shall have common ownership and then try to improve existing relationships. It is that with the end of class society, the relationships and attitudes which are parts of it also end, and entirely new ones grow up on the basis of common ownership.

The social pattern of sexual activity has changed from one society to another: for an account of it, read Engels’s The Origin of the Family. Within the “pairing” marriage changes have taken place. The “extended” family which included all close relatives has given way to the “nuclear” family of one couple and its children, and the social importance of this in turn has declined. The reasons are simply economic: division of labour makes the experience and life-style of one generation alien to the next. Along with this goes the separation of sexual pleasure from reproduction, which is by no means a modern idea but has been scientifically perfected in the 20th century.

What will happen in Socialism is that people will live together without having to seek a licence and part if and when they want to. A good many attempt this today, within the limits of convenience and approval allowed by capitalism. Those limits are removed when property society is abolished: social relations of equality and freedom make personal ones possible.

It is the question of parting that causes concern, of course — the “family consequences”. The paramount factor among them is one which will be absent from Socialist society: money, unending worries over it, the need for it to keep a family housed, clothed and fed. In capitalist society the break-up of a marriage almost invariably causes hardship in those terms, and divorce and separation proceedings are chiefly about financial provisions to support the individuals who are “dependent” under the existing family system. But this takes us back to the foundation of the relationship. When it involves material dependence it clearly is not an equal partnership, and it isn’t surprising that resentment is common.

Other consequences cannot be separated from material ones. Children (like adults) want stability and affection, and in present-day society those things are associated with a conventional home-life. There is no reason why they should not be had, fully, in different arrangements. This is not a case of one regime replacing another, but of being able to make choices which capitalism does not allow. Socialism will be a responsible society precisely because it means freedom to choose. Class-based, authoritarian society gives no such freedom; the choices are imposed, and the individual has to be exhorted into responsibility towards them. When they are made personally or communally, with knowledge and without coercion, true responsibility is felt and exercised.

Not much joy

Sex is both a natural impulse and a supreme pleasure. What sort of world is it whose “regulation of sexual activity” denies satisfaction to large numbers of people, and persuades many more that it is intrinsically shameful? In recent years emphasis has been laid on frankness about sex. Whatever the merits of this, it has produced —inevitably, in capitalism—the commercial exploitation of desires which society does not let be fulfilled. It is impossible to have the best from this area of life without decent material conditions. Privacy, hot water, warmth and some degree of comfort, and not being worried or tired, are the minimum requirements; simple as they sound, they add up to a standard of housing and general well-being which the majority of working people cannot get.

Change this, and there is no need to argue for a right to privacy. Our correspondent links it with “a place of one’s own”, and asks if that does not presuppose private property; but owner-occupiers generally are no better off than council-house tenants in this respect. Of course sexual satisfaction (and the enjoyment of life in many other respects) is heavily obstructed by living between cardboard-thin walls through which the neighbours or the children can hear every word and creak. The privacy problem is a matter of bricks-and-mortar environment, the result of a class-divided society and production for profit. Houses built for use instead of money will embody different assumptions.

There is another aspect of this. Privacy, like its opposite, is not supposed to be a permanent situation; lonely people would say they get too much of it. It is a field for the choice which capitalism refuses, except to the privileged minority. There are times when any of us needs to be alone and undisturbed, other times when company and noise are desired. It is a striking indictment of our society that relatively few can choose like that, and a great many lead thoroughly miserable lives because they are condemned to one position or the other.

The age of consent, homosexuality and rape are run together inappropriately by our correspondent, presumably because they all appear as “problems” to do with sex. The first is a matter of social custom which varies from country to country, and its legal force is bound up with the definition of persons below their majority as “minors” or “infants”. Would such a rule be necessary in Socialism, with the same ostensible purpose of protecting the immature? It does not “protect” them now from sexual experience if they have it in mind. But maturity has cultural as well as physical components: sexual pressure on little girls of nine comes not from hormones but from big business (watch the TV advertisements). The sex drive makes itself known sharply at puberty, but the situation in society as a whole determines the direction it takes. It will be the absence of exploitation that shapes conduct in Socialism, not the absence of laws.

Homosexuality is an offence against social custom (its legalization “in private between consenting adults” has not stopped day-after-day prosecutions of homosexuals who cannot arrange the needed privacy). There is no space here for such questions as whether it is a genetic or an environmental phenomenon; but if we accept that it is constitutional in some people and will therefore exist in Socialism, the only remark to make is that it will be regarded as nobody’s concern except those involved. It is worth recalling the scheme of the early socialist Fourier to cater for sexual variations, which he thought Socialism would accommodate cheerfully: each person with a “mania” would carry a card naming it, to facilitate finding partners.

Rape falls into a different category, because it is an act of delinquency with a sexual content. As delinquency, its roots are similar to those of other forms; it is a deliberately injurious reaction against society in general. The particular expression of the reaction shows what has been learned from society, and in that connection the novelist Jacky Gillott wrote recently in a women’s magazine that rape was “just a surface marker indicating a vast and tangled undergrowth of mythologies, resentments and ignorance that still persisted beneath the unspoken—and often unconscious—views men and women have of one another” (Cosmopolitan, September 1977).

Because Socialism will not have the resentment-breeding divisions which cause delinquency, or an “undergrowth of mythologies” obscuring relationships, we believe it will be free of ugly marks like rape. However, it must be made clear that socialists do not imagine everybody will be automatically made “good” once common ownership is established; or, alternatively, that any individual may do his own thing to the detriment of others. Socialism means a democratic organization of society in which the wishes of the majority prevail. Of course there will be problems; but in that sort of society we shall be able to deal with them as capitalism cannot.

Growing up

Last, about the upbringing of children. Our correspondent asks what is “the socialist psychology” in this matter. We haven’t one; possibly, when we are nearer to establishing Socialism, it will appear. The important thing, however, is not just possessing the insights but being able to put them into practice. A chronic frustration for teachers of all age-groups today is to be clearly aware of what needs to be done and to know also that it is impossible in the present system. As regards obtaining conformity by force, the dominant ideas of an age are, as Marx said, those of its ruling class; force is the method of class rule, reflected in (and so re-created through) its everyday conduct. Socialists do not need that.

Who will make the decisions about children—well, who makes them now? The working class have to accept the dominance of the state education system (the wealthy in general get rid of handling their children, first to nannies and then to schools away from home). Certainly, in any social system children have to learn basic skills required by society and for themselves; under capitalism, because its education is geared to the value of labour-power, the outcome for a high proportion is abysmal and recalls Mr. Weller’s question “vether it’s worth goin’ through so much to learn so little”. We do not envisage a sane society trying to impose a single mode of upbringing and learning for all children—that is the capitalist sausage-machine. The “decisions” are choices, which children and parents and their associates will make in different ways at different times.

Robert Barltrop

Pathfinders: Dark factors and dodgy populists (2025)

The Pathfinders Column from the July 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

With all the far-right demagogues, mad dictators and murderous wars in the news, people may be inclined to lean into their own confirmation bias and say ‘What do you expect? People are just evil’. You can’t make a silk purse or a functional liberal democracy, much less world socialism, out of a sow’s ear. But a new Copenhagen study of nearly 2 million people across 183 countries, as well as all 50 US states, concludes that people are more likely to be nasty, or in the terminology, display ‘aversive, “dark” personality characteristics such as selfishness or spitefulness’ if they happen to live in ‘prior aversive societal conditions’ (ASC), which is to say ‘societies characterized by corruption, inequality, poverty, and violence’.

According to the research authors, there has been a lot of previous work on the various types of aversive behaviour, and ‘Recent advances in personality research have provided strong evidence for the existence of a single disposition underlying all aversive traits.’ They define this disposition, which they call ‘The Dark Factor of Personality’, or ‘D’ for short, as ‘the general tendency to maximize one’s individual utility—disregarding, accepting, or malevolently provoking disutility for others – accompanied by beliefs that serve as justifications’.

Thus, D is ‘the essence of aversive (“dark”) personality traits such as narcissism, psychopathy, and sadism’, so the study looked at data from multiple countries and states in combination with individual behavioural questionnaires. It found higher ‘D’ levels in high-ASC countries, ie, ‘in societies where rules are broken without consequences and where the conditions for many citizens are bad’, such as Indonesia and Mexico, and interestingly also Louisiana and Nevada. D was correspondingly lower in countries or states perceived to have better societal conditions, for example Denmark and New Zealand, and US states such as Utah and Vermont.

They go on to discuss the various ways that this correlation reinforces itself, through ‘customs, daily practices, norms’, ‘situational affordances and demands’, and ‘state-behaviour feedback loops that reinforce or discourage certain behaviors’.

So the society you grow up in is a strong influential factor on your character. Well, ‘duh’, you might say. Everyone knows that a badly treated dog is more likely to be savage and dangerous than a well-treated one. Even those hippy chimps, bonobos, have been known to turn violent when confined in zoos. But from a socialist perspective, this study is worth noting. Last month’s Socialist Standard cover feature dealt with that favourite go-to of the anti-socialist, human nature, and the received wisdom that the human ‘inner demon’ is only kept in check by authoritarian rule. If that were really true, socialism would be impossible.

What the Copenhagen study shows is that humans have what it calls ‘adaptive phenotypic plasticity’, which is to say that we model our behaviour on our social surroundings. So the correlation of high state-level ‘corruption, inequality, poverty, and violence’ with high individual levels of anti-social traits must be largely causative too. Individuals wouldn’t be antisocial if the society they live in wasn’t also antisocial. Even so, couldn’t the causation be the other way around, ie, that antisocial people make for an antisocial society? This hardly seems likely, given that antisocial personality disorders are estimated to affect only around 1-4 percent of the population . Mind you, the capitalist rich elite are probably only 1-4 percent of the population, and they are a walking, talking antisocial disorder.

None of this constitutes empirical proof, of course. The problem with personal questionnaires is that one can’t be certain how truthful the respondents are being. Are people in ‘nasty’ cultures generally more prone to being nasty, or are they simply less inhibited about admitting it, compared to ‘nice’ cultures where such behaviour is presumably frowned upon and thus potentially more covert? This is the same subjectivity problem that plagues ‘Happiness Index’ and many other such lists. A 2016 list of the 63 most and least empathetic countries, based on the same kind of personal questionnaires, revealed that Ecuador was the most empathetic, and Lithuania the least. This is bafflingly counter-intuitive. Ecuador has experienced years of ‘iron fist’ authoritarianism, and high levels of drug-related gang violence, whereas Lithuania has low crime, affordable living costs and a high standard of healthcare. Even stranger is the fact that Saudi Arabia, notorious for public executions and judicial maimings, scores second place, and the UAE, another authoritarian monarchy with no democracy and little press freedom, scores fifth. One might attempt an intellectual contortion by proposing that workers in violent or repressive states are more likely to stick together. But Denmark, once again near the top at number 4, is very hard to explain, while its not wildly dissimilar neighbours Sweden, Norway and Finland wallow deep down in the low forties and fifties, along with the UK. Can one really learn anything useful from such studies?

Perhaps more encouraging for socialists and others is a recent Basel study which looked at 30 years of data from 26 European countries to determine the stability or otherwise of populist governments, or those including a significant populist element. They focused on governments whose ‘term of office ended prematurely’, interpreting this ‘as a sign of instability.’ The study found ‘that cabinets with populist parties break up more often and sooner—regardless of the type of coalition’ and that ‘The probability of early government dissolution is about 60% to 65% higher for alliances involving populist parties than for those without.’ This wasn’t about the specific left or right-wing ideologies though, it was about how populists tend to operate. They have a strong centralised leadership, with little internal democracy, and they adopt radical and uncompromising positions that no other groups can work with. ‘Populism proved to be a constant indicator of government breakdown throughout the study period, irrespective of other influencing factors such as economic crises’.

To sum up, there is evidence that a prosocial society like socialism fosters prosocial behaviour, and that populist governments tend to collapse. Take that, Nigel Farage.

Paddy Shannon

Letter: Socialists 'shying away'? (1996)

Letter to the Editors from the July 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialists 'shying away'?

Dear Editors,

In May’s Socialist Standard Jonathan Clay writes that "evil” has social roots, rather than being some theologically explicable external force ("Dunblane—a Question of Evil?"). Let’s take "evil" as meaning acts of gross inhumanity, and let’s accept this as a sound argument. As capitalism becomes more effective in undermining our essential humanity as states and companies are increasingly free of restraint on their use of our lives for their purposes, then it seems that random acts of "evil" by individuals become more common.

This makes perfect sense to me, and finds an echo in Erich Fromm’s study of "evil"— Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. In this superb work, Fromm reasons that commercial and corporate life produces certain character types who have a tendency towards sadism as a solution to the draining away of meaning and human contact from their lives. It is a commonplace in psychology that such tendencies are more likely to be actively expressed if the person is subjected to pressure, and who can deny that modern capitalism produces an abundance of stress and pressure on everyone subjected to it?

I wonder, however whether Clay's picture might be incomplete in a vital areas of inquiry. There is a sense of omission here for me which feels important, and which is shared, to do Clay credit, by Fromm’s approach. The omission concerns our incomprehension of how antisocial pathology is actually formed in an individual character. Clay put it this way:

"The formation of an individual is on extremely complex, open-ended process which, even will all possible information about that individual at our disposal, can never be adequately grasped."

Is this so, I wonder? We as Socialists certainly feel that we can arrive at, at least, an "adequate” grasp of social mechanisms, in spite of their complexity and opacity. The fact is that there is a body of work available now which shines a good deal of light into the hitherto dark region of enquiry encompassed by the word "evil’’.

John Bowlby’s work on attachment and loss, in which he built upon insights gained through a study of hospitalised children, has given birth to whole field of investigation called Attachment Theory, which is proving fruitful in the understanding of antisocial behaviour and even acts of gross savagery. For example. it shows that violent rage stems from a disrupted attachment in infancy or early childhood, from a breakdown in a carer’s ability to provide a "secure base" for the child, for whatever reason, we are not talking about judgements here, but about explanations.

Experiments carried out by Ainsworth. Mary Main and others show that even among under-five's it is possible to prove a connection between the quality of attunement and boundary setting provided by a parent for an infant, and that infant's behaviour in an observed play setting. The better the connection the parents are able to offer the child, the more the child will play sociably and as an equal with its peers, whereas infants of parents who are neglectful will be disruptive and perhaps bullying. For an excellent overview, expanding and in my view deepening Fromm’s masterpiece, anyone interested might read Felicity De Zulueta's From Pain to Violence—The Traumatic Roots of Destructiveness (Whurr 1993).

Socialists tend to shy away from such work. They fear that it implies the abandonment of societal explanations for personal ones. We think what we hear is—"society isn’t sick— you are!" We are suspicious because we think such thinking is simply the blaming of the powerless for the abuse of the powerful. the shackling of working-class mothers with the responsibility for all the ills of the world.

This is not so. The understanding of the origins of pathology is not the same thing as judging. Under capitalism in many ways adequate parenting can become almost impossible.

Of course suspicion is healthy here. I’m not arguing for the shifting of responsibility from capitalists onto hard-pressed parents, but let us not turn our backs on new thinking which casts light on, not only gross crimes, but also the psychological mechanisms which help to produce our assent for abuse and exploitation.

I want to look at Jonathan Clay’s description of reality under capitalism for a moment He talks of: "Fragmentation, powerlessness. alienation, anxiety and despair, in a world which is chaotic beyond all our attempts at control."

This accurate description of how capitalist society can feel is also a beautiful and harrowing evocation of how it must feel to be a helpless neglected child. Such a child, as an adult, may well feel driven to inflict those unbearable emotions on others now less powerful than himself. Such logic does not excuse his behaviour, but it may well explain it.

All of the foregoing is not intended to blame the powerless or shift the spotlight off capitalist society, but with gaining a better understanding of abuse power, which is, surely, the essence of capitalism. Abusive power masquerading as its opposite.

Clay quotes Camus, saying “Children will still die unjustly, even in a perfect society." Well, maybe we as Socialists have more to offer in illuminating this problem than Jonathan Clay thinks, at least if we can be more open to, and less afraid of. the more intimate "people sciences". To paraphrase him— "Do we really want to understand less?"

Peter Rigg, 

Nelson, Lancs

50 Years Ago: War, Crime and Punishment (2003)

The 50 Years Ago column from the June 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

Recently two young soldiers were convicted at Berkshire Assizes of robbery with violence. Instead of sentencing them straight away the judge gave them a choice – volunteer “unconditionally” for Korea or go to gaol. After they had a night to think it over their counsel told the judge: “They are eager to take advantage of your lordship’s leniency, and volunteer for overseas service.”

An editorial in the Daily Mirror (9th May) strongly criticised the judge’s action. The Mirror asks how the choice of the convicted men could be unconditional in such circumstances,. But there are other aspects of the matter that should be brought out, and the main theme of the editorial (An Insult to the Army) is of little consequence compared to the deeper questions concerning the cause of crime and war in our present society.

The comments of the judge Mr. Justice Hilbery are indicative of the conventional attitude to crime. “You have been convicted of a very grave crime. When you robbed and attacked as you did each was not showing his true nature. Each of you is a better fellow than that. See active service and turn yourselves into men of courage.”

From this it would appear that when people rob and attack others without the sanction of the law they are not showing their “true nature.” If, on the other hand, they take part in organised attack and robbery against other nations (for what else is war?) then they are turned into “men of courage.”

The Daily Mirror believes that the men risking life in Korea are undertaking a high and honourable duty, and that it is not for courts to confuse military service with crime and punishment. In extenuation of the courts it should be pointed out that in the circumstances the confusion is pardonable. “War crime” is a name given, by the nation in a position to inflict punishment, to certain of the “military services” performed by the forces of other nations.

[From an article by “Stan”, Socialist Standard, June 1953.]

Life & Times: Road rage (2025)

The Life and Times column from the March 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

In this column not long ago I wrote about the ever-increasing number of vehicles on the road and how that was causing ever-increasing difficulty in finding places to park them. I pointed out that this was a function of the capitalist system’s relentless quest for ‘growth’ – growth of all goods and services and at all levels. I also pointed out that people having more or even better things doesn’t in itself lead to satisfaction or happiness and doesn’t have the power to tame or overcome all the negative factors that may arise from the instability and unpredictability of the system we live under (job reorganisation, unemployment, recession, poverty, war, etc., etc). All ‘growth’ does is to satisfy the system’s built-in quest for profit that never stops regardless of social need or long-term consequences.

Angry and not so angry

What has all this got to do with ‘road rage’? Well, journalist Sophie Gallagher recently wrote an article in the i newspaper entitled ‘I was a victim of road rage – it is everywhere and getting worse’. She explained how a driver wanting to overtake her ‘exploded with rage’ when he couldn’t and then tailed her for several minutes, managing to box her in and then getting out of his car and approaching her threateningly before she was able to pull away. This brought a considerable response from readers agreeing with her and recounting their own experiences of other angry road users. Her article also happened to coincide with an incident I was involved in myself when sitting in my parked car in a local shopping centre behind a large van. The van suddenly started to back up and it worried me that the driver might not have seen the car behind him and would back into me. I hooted in warning – just in case. The driver then stopped his van, got out and walked towards me. When he got to my car, though he did not threaten me, the look on his face told me he was angry, and there was a hint of intimidation in his voice as he told me that, yes, he’d seen me and that his van had ‘loads of cameras’. As he walked way, got back into his van and drove off, I thought I should have replied that I’d hooted ‘just to be on the safe side’. Hindsight is a fine thing.

But, on reflecting afterwards, I also thought how rarely this kind of thing actually happens – and what that says about ‘human nature’ considering how stressful driving is these days and how often awkward situations arise involving more than one vehicle. The fact is that on the road most people most of the time are extremely patient and even go out of their way to be considerate, civil and helpful to others – whether drivers or pedestrians. And that is the general expectation, so that, when something untoward does happen (ie, when another driver behaves in an unkind, inconsiderate, or angry way), we’re taken by surprise, and that may loom inappropriately large in our overall mental picture of what driving a car is like.

News, bad and good

This would go some way towards explaining the journalist’s generalising conclusion that, because she has experienced anger or threatening behaviour a couple of times when driving, ‘it is everywhere and getting worse’, and for her then casting around for ‘evidence’ of this from newspaper reports, insurance companies and various academic ‘experts’. Not surprising either that her article also brought considerable feedback from readers, announcing that they’d had similar bad experiences on the road and thereby ‘confirming’ the journalist’s conclusions. Yet, turning this on its head, is it not also worth asking the question how effective her article would have been if she had stated the opposite reality, ie, that very few people indeed experience road rage from other drivers and that ‘road kindness’ rather than ‘road rage’ was motorists’ predominant experience? The fact is that, for the media, news overwhelmingly means ‘bad news’.

One of the academics consulted by Sophie Gallagher is quoted as saying that ‘driving is dangerous and anxiety-provoking’ – something most people would agree with. That being the case, is not the most noteworthy thing that relatively rarely do drivers manifest anger, or even irritation, towards others road users, even when they find themselves in untoward situations or where someone else’s manoeuvre or decision clearly leaves something to be desired. On the whole, we live and let live – and usually help and cooperate if we can – just as human beings do in most daily interactions, even when these are manifestly stressful.

Everyday socialism?

And in fact, regardless of the ‘bad news’ that the news media tend to focus on, people do also like ‘good’ news, as shown by the countless examples posted every day on social media which show people coming together to help members of their community and generally to assist others in difficult circumstances. So, when socialists put forward the idea of a whole society organised this way (ie, on the basis of voluntary cooperation and from each according to ability to each according to need), it can be hard for us to understand that people should scoff, as they sometimes do, and say things such as that it is against ‘human nature’. As the sometimes mundane but countless day-to-day examples, on and off the road, of what has been labelled ‘everyday communism’ (perhaps we should call it ‘everyday socialism’) show, such a society could work – but only when a majority of workers across the world have developed the consciousness and understanding to bring it into being and to organise production and distribution of everything that people need according to socialist principles.

Howard Moss

Greasy Pole: The Respect That Makes Calamity (2005)

The Greasy Pole column from the November 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

When was it that Tony Blair decided that Respect would be an attractive, vote-catching election theme? Was it a long time ago, before he had felt the first stirrings of political ambition and was merely a rebellious, disrespectful schoolboy? Or later, when he was safely ensconced in Downing Street and his son was collected from a West End gutter after disrespectfully celebrating the end of his exams? Whatever the truth of this, the theme now looks about to become another New Labour obsession. Here is Blair, speaking on the steps of Number Ten after his victory in the 2005 election, vowing to bring back “A proper sense of respect in our schools, in our communities, in our towns and villages”. And here is Charles Clarke, a Labour Home Secretary doing his best to forget his past as a stroppy left winger: “Tackling disrespect in our society is an absolute priority for the government”.

Blair has made it clear where he thinks the blame lies for any shortcomings in this matter: “it is in the family that we have to come to terms with the idea of give and take and respect for other people”. And what if the family does not come up to these expectations? Well, “People need to understand that if their kids are out of control and they are causing a nuisance to the local community, there is something that is going to happen”. And that “something” is to apply Parenting Orders, now to be extended and strengthened, which force parents to be instructed in how to bring up their children – teaching them to respect others, give up their bus seat to an old lady, stand up when the national anthem is played, always wear their full school uniform and obey the general laws and orders of capitalist society. If the parents succeed in this and their kids behave in an orderly, respectful way, Blair will be a happier man and, the argument runs, New Labour will win yet another election.

Straw

This is all very well, but as a spokesperson for the children’s charity Barnado’s pointed out, it is not only children who are the cause of nuisance behaviour and it is not only in family homes and schools that the problem reveals itself. There was the recent example of Labour Party member Walter Wolfgang, who was so lacking in respect for figures of power and authority that he recklessly called out, slumped in his seat at Labour’s conference, that Foreign Secretary Jack Straw was a liar. At the time Straw was only doing his job, giving the conference (which was very sparsely attended at the time) the Labour Party line, perhaps flavoured by a Foreign Office brief, that Iraq was attacked in order to get rid of Saddam Hussein and establish a modern democracy there, whatever the Iraqi people thought about it. Now, the Foreign Secretary holds one of the great offices of state, is a person of considerable influence and standing in society (although in the unusual case of Jack Straw his standing, for reasons connected with the ruthless game of politics, is rather lower than is the custom) who should command respectful silence when he is telling lies. It is no excuse for Wolfgang to argue that he was carried away by the contrast between Straw’s original doubts about the invasion of Iraq and his passionate support of it now. It is an essential of being respectful to keep extremes of emotion – like outrage at a blatant, cynical betrayal – strictly under control.

It was especially unwise of Wolfgang to interrupt Jack Straw who, when he was Home Secretary, was liable to become excited in discussing the symptoms of social disturbance. It was Straw who first publicly condemned the “squeegee bandits” – people who, without the driver asking, cleaned the windscreens of cars which were halted at traffic lights. We never did hear what happened to all those dangerous criminals who went about their nefarious business with wet sponges in their hands – and Straw forgot about them as well. Then he complained about his evening drive home from the office being marred by the spectacle of young people out on the streets later than a respectable Home Secretary thought they should be. That particular neurosis lingers on, in the ASBOs and the campaign about respect. And it was Straw who had to take his son to a police station after he had been exposed by a tabloid newspaper for offering controlled drugs for sale. Not, in other words, someone for Wolfgang to tangle with. It is just as well that Straw was so effectively protected from him.

Casey

Unfortunately, when Wolfgang embarked on his one-man campaign to wreck Labour’s conference there was not enough time to refer him to his local branch of the new anti-social behaviour units (of which more later), with a view to cracking down on his parents who, as Blair has told us, must be held responsible for raising so disruptive a character. This was clearly considered an unrealistic option when Labour’s spin doctors were told about Wolfgang’s age. So it was entirely appropriate – indeed there was no other way – for a couple of impressively beefy, enthusiastically respectful, Labour Party members who had volunteered to police the conference, to eject him from the hall. Along with another member who was disrespectful enough to protest at an 82-year-old man having his collar felt in that way. Perhaps now Wolfgang, like other offenders against the law, will be taught to keep his place by being deprived of his state benefits under the rules dreamed up by David Blunkett, who used to be Home Secretary but is now in charge of the Department of Work and Pensions.

Meanwhile the new task force with the job of teaching respect to people who heckle government ministers is getting down to its vital work. At its head is Louise Casey, who was already in charge of the Anti-Social Behaviour Unit. Her new job requires her to “focus” (a word much loved by New Labour hopefuls) on “working together on the neighbourhood renewal and anti-social behaviour agendas, highlighting respect for others and respect for the community.” Whatever talents Casey can bring to this task, sensitive public relations is not among them. A few weeks before her new appointment, when she was merely the ASBO tsarina, she informed an audience of Home Office staff and senior police officers that

“Doing things sober is no way to get things done…I suppose you can’t binge drink any more. I don’t know who bloody made that up. It’s nonsense…There is an obsession with evidence-based policy. If Number Ten says bloody evidence-based policy to me one more time I’ll deck them and probably get unemployed.”

Questions

All over the country breath will be bated while we learn what kind of “respect” Casey will introduce us to. Wolfgang will probably be particularly apprehensive. Meanwhile Labour has been most generous in its response to his deplorable lack of respect for one of their senior politicians. One minister after another queued up to offer their humblest apology to him. Party chairman Ian McCartney went so far as to promise to take him out for a meal – a traditionally pacifying treat for stroppy pensioners – although whether eating in company with the myopically loyal Labourite McCartney would be nutritious and mollifying, or further punishment, was not clear. As the dust settled it had to be asked whether the apologies and the threatened dinner with McCartney were motivated by the fact that the Labour stewards had so clumsily committed their assault on Wolfgang in full view of the TV cameras. For some viewers it was reminiscent of Mosley’s infamous fascist rally at Olympia in 1934. If there had not been the same damning TV exposure, would all those ministers have been so eager to grovel?

There are other questions which need to be asked in the whole matter of “respect”. What kind of “respect” was shown by Jack Straw when he changed his mind over something as important as the war in Iraq? What sort of “respect” is shown by the Blair government’s drive to undermine the established legal rights of people who are arrested by the police? And on the other side, what degree of “respect” do we find in the attitude of someone like the heckling Wolfgang, who undisturbedly keeps his membership of both CND and the Labour Party, although he must know that there is no prospect of this government, or any future Labour government, agreeing to throw away their nuclear weapons? Let it be clear. Having respect for people and our environment – acknowledging and caring for each other’s strengths, needs, weaknesses, ambitions – is not compatible with capitalism’s essentially competitive, repressive nature. Capitalism makes heroes of those who rise to the top, no matter how ruthlessly they achieve that. Tony Blair, for example, did not get where he is by allowing himself to be diverted through any respect for truth and human interests. And then what about the people – the working class – who in their millions support capitalism’s political parties through thick and thin, disaster and triumph, contempt and respect? They need to understand that in the mouth of a politician “respect” is a fine but meaningless word. Unhappy and disillusioned people like Wolfgang should know this because they have experienced “respect” at the sharp end.

Ivan

'Terror in our schools' (2006)

From the November 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

For the media, reports of bad behaviour, assaults, stabbings, teenage drinking, attacks on the elderly and the like are daily fare.

This was the headline covering the front page story in the Belfast Telegraph on 12 August. The story was under the by-line of Linda McKee but the editor obviously thought it deserved greater exposure because the same story in almost the same words and sensational statistics appeared again on page 7 under the name of Dan McGinn.

We learnt from a screaming sub-heading that 1,000 pupils in Northern Ireland had been suspended from school for attacking staff. The body of the news item reduced the stridency of the headline by telling us that the figure of 1,000 was for a period of three years and that only 14 of the cases concerned merited expulsion. Statistically the article could have said that less than 0.047 per cent of pupils in Northern Ireland were accused of abusive behaviour towards teachers every year and between four and five of the complaints on each of the three years were serious enough to merit expulsion. The truth, however, has less impact than the sensational and it is the sensational that sells newspapers and makes profits for the self-interested moguls whose papers have such an important input into the formation of our opinions.

In this case the front page author was not only skilled in sensationalising but she was able to tell her readers how to resolve the problem. She tells us that the dreadful happenings she depicts happened ‘without proper punishments’ leading us to the assumption that punishment – by definition an act of violence – is the answer to the problem of violence.

Influenced youth culture

For the media, reports of bad behaviour, assaults, stabbings, teenage drinking, attacks on the elderly and the like are daily fare. Good behaviour is rarely news, perhaps because it is much more common than the stuff the press reports and, indeed, is what the public regard as normal despite frenetic media persuasion to the contrary.

That said, it is true that violence against the aged, alcohol- and drug-induced violence and muggings have become unsavoury aspects of social concern. Now there are burglar alarms where often people were careless about locking their doors at night and a night-time fear of errant behaviour often imposes a curfew on the elderly and the timid in many town and city centres.

We have to examine the causes of these patterns of behaviour against the background of the present way of life and to show that they are part of the myriad problems for which capitalism has no answer and another reason for considering the rational socialist alternative to the way we live.

Capitalism created a need for those employed in the production and distribution of its goods and services to posses a basic knowledge of what became known as the Three R’s: reading, writing and arithmetic. Accordingly the capitalist state institutionalised basic education as a legal requirement. But at that stage education beyond the basic was all the system required of working class children. ‘Their betters’, the scions of the rich, could have their educational horizons widened at universities to enrich their lives and prepare them as ‘leaders’ of society. Giving the working class the ability to read, however, opened the floodgates of knowledge and speeded the debunking of many of the myths on which religious morality is based.

Demand of the labour market

It is probably true to say that the capitalist political administration in its urgency to provide a more technically efficient labour force now robs the young of an important segment of childhood. Children are forced into the educational process at a younger age and within a few years their educational apprenticeship into the competitive demands of the labour market means that they are working at school and at home for a greater part of each day than those actually at work.

Now the schools have become educational factories, with harassed teachers themselves under compulsion to justify capitalism’s investment in what is still quaintly referred to as education and pupils induced to sacrifice their vital formative years in the hope that it will make them more competitive – by definition more aggressive and with fewer social concerns – in the hard world of capitalism.

Because education in capitalism is about creating the most efficient varieties of wage slaves those deemed by early audit to be a poor educational investment are rejected and stigmatised as failures. Further attendance at school in these cases often becomes a form of punishment and it is easy to see how young people, rejected and labelled failures, can build antagonisms towards teachers, schools and towards the society that has branded them.

The effect of New Labour’s charges on third-level education – the mountains of debt now facing working class students who earned the right to compete for the more specialised jobs – has not yet worked its way through the system. It is not hard, however to appreciate the disillusion and alienation of a qualified teacher, for example, with a debt of £20,000 who can’t get a job and finds him- or herself filling supermarket shelves.

In the wider field, news true and false is now an intensive, heavily-capitalised, industry pumping out all sorts of information twenty-four hours of every day while concealing anything that might reveal the real cause of most of the news that is reported. Without exception, all the major news media, print and electronic, promote the patriotic fervour that is so utterly meaningless and shallow; even commercialised sport, art, culture or any other human activity is used as a conduit to an aggressive xenophobic competitiveness that blights understanding between peoples. Hence, we get things like football hooliganism, so roundly condemned by those who do most to promote it.

Political clout

The search for the news commodity is borderless and inexorable: media lies and hype make politicians celebrities just as media lies and truth can strip them and castigate them when there’s kudos in a story or when they threaten some interest of the parasites who own a section of the news media. We hear how the results of a general election can be determined by the owner of a rag like the Sun and how governmental consideration is given to policies that might not find sympathy with some media mogul with more political clout than a million voters.

We are well, if not accurately informed; however disinterested we might be we cannot escape the knowledge that social democracy does not exist and our political democracy is at the level where political parties do not win elections; their opponents simply lose them while millions do not vote because they have abandoned the idea that their votes are of any real value.

Meanwhile, the wars go on somewhere every day; so does the competitive brutality of the marketplace, its money shuffling, and corporate swindling and corruption. The disgusting self-interest of leading politicians and public figures the swingeing poverty of social services and the application of Anti-Social Behaviour Orders to the problem of errant youth, visionless, disillusioned, often intellectually deprived and now, under New Labour, left to the tender mercies of the police.

Richard Montague

Problem children (1949)

From the October 1949 issue of the Socialist Standard

The clouds of glory formerly trailed by children on their advent to the world have lately darkened into clouds of approbrium. The child delinquent is a problem of our age. It is symptomatic of a social disintegration which concerns socialists as closely as supporters of Capitalism.

Socialists, of course, approach the subject from a standpoint vastly different from that of the orthodox investigator, who wishes to preserve a moral code and set of standards incompatible with a modern industrial society. Socialists are glad to see them questioned, but we know that some belief and conscious purpose to change society must grow up in their place if they are discarded. Few adults have any such conscious purpose and the children in their revolt against authority are merely reflecting the behaviour of their elders who in this instance subscribe to the tenet, “ Don’t do as I do. Do as I tell you.”

We know that to abstract the delinquent from his social environment, to give him psychiatric treatment, to make him the subject of educational experiments is a waste of time. But we cannot doubt that those who do this are genuinely concerned.

Currently in progress we find a conference at County Hall called expressly for scientific investigation of child delinquency and the Child Health Section of the B.M.A. also concerned with this problem at their meetings in Harrogate. The national .and local press is full of letters from teachers, magistrates and parents, many of whom think to find the solution in a return to the old doctrine of “spare the rod and spoil the child”

At first glance some of the things that worry them may appear propitious for us. Children to-day it appears have no respect for the church, their teachers or parents, and that old bogey, the policeman, is a figure of fun. But this is merely destructive and is no basis for a conscious adult revolt against the system. The children's rebellion is not and cannot be a conscious one since the power to reason is undeveloped. Children act instinctively and imitatively. In fact they are as they always were, neither angels nor devils, but, like every human being, an inextricable mixture of qualities. Idealists believe with A. S. Neill in the inherent goodness and good sense of children but this view is just as one-sided and just as much a religious conception as the church doctrine of original sin. The goodness and badness and all the other characteristics come out in response to the external stimuli of the environment. We cannot alter the inherited personality, nor do we expect what is called a change of heart. To subject the child to a changed environment in order to effect a cure and then to return him to the same old jungle is an illogical procedure which ill accords with the scientific pretensions of the psychologists. We do not need new reform schools, but a new society.

The behaviour of all children, delinquent or not, is patterned on that of the adults with whom they come into contact and a reaction to the world as it impinges on them. Victorian children of wealthy families, restrained by fixed habits, cumbersome clothes and fear of punishment meted out by parents and teachers similarly restrained, were able to release their energy in a nursery far from the ears of Papa and Mama. The children of the new industrial working class and the agricultural labourers had no vitality to spare after their undernourished little bodies had completed a working day as long and strenuous as that of their parents. In a social pattern as complex as ours, however, there are many more colours than black and white. The old, simpler demons have gone, but so many intangible fears lie behind our everyday life that there is no security anywhere. In “Ape and Essence” Aldous Huxley says “ . . . fear is the very basis and foundation of modern life. Fear of the much touted technology which while it raises our standard of living, increases the possibility of our violently dying. Fear of the science which takes away with one hand even more than what it so profusely gives with the other. Fear of the demonstrably fatal institutions for which in our suicidal loyalty we are ready to kill and die. Fear of the great men whom we have raised, by popular acclaim, to a power which they use inevitably to murder and enslave us. Fear of the war we don’t want and yet do everything we can to bring about.” Here are some of the contradictions of our society and we can agree too that ". . . fear casts out love. And not only love. Fear also casts out intelligence, casts out goodness, casts out all thought of beauty and truth . . . in the end fear casts out even a man's humanity.”

Where in all this can children find that security so necessary to their balanced development? With their parents they jeer at authority in all its forms. Living in overcrowded rooms the human frailties of the parents themselves are painfully apparent and an early model for the wrangling, spitefulness and apathy which school teachers so loudly deplore. The schools themselves are a reflection of this unbalanced society in which technical progress has so far outstripped all conception of the art of living.

Unfortunately the protest against all this has little direction. People may want a change, but they merely want the same system with themselves the possessors of power, wealth and privilege. The juvenile depredations of the delinquent child grow into the adult depredations of the spiv, the swindler and evader of the law. But always this struggle against the moral bastions of society is not to overthrow them but to get inside them. Once inside, the old lag turns copper with a vengeance and fiercely upholds what he previously flouted.

The Labour Government, by trying to plan the unplannable and to run Capitalism in the working-class interest, has made confusion worse confounded. Small wonder that most people turn aside to snatch what pleasure they can from the cinema and speedway or ballet, opera and the arts. The children educated to take their place in this ostrich society and to become mere parts in a machine, can hardly be blamed for irresponsible behaviour. But neither can we regard them hopefully since this is not the material to shape itself easily into Socialism, that most responsible of all societies.

Socialists must show that this is yet another problem which must be tackled at the root. We must conspire with events to show that a majority of people with clear understanding of what they want can be the arbiters of their fate. Then the children will respond to that adult self-discipline and restraint which springs from a sense of purpose and confidence in the dignity and ability of man.

P. T.

Blogger's Note:

Huxley's "Ape and Essence" was reviewed in the December 1949 issue of the Socialist Standard.

Letter: Sadists in Socialism? (1986)

Letter to the Editors from the August 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Friends.

In an otherwise excellent article in the June Socialist Standard titled "Criminal Convictions" it stated "If there was no property, no competition, no oppression, exploitation or deprivation, but instead freedom for all to pursue peaceful, uncorrupted and useful existences, then there would be no violence".

Do you not believe that there are certain individuals whose violence is not due to the symptoms of capitalism but because they actually enjoy inflicting pain on others?

If so. what will become of the anti-social element in a socialist society?

Fraternally.

G Ellis 

Halesworth

Reply:

There is very often a great deal more to be said about the motives of those who are described as enjoying inflicting pain on others; they are not simply sadists. In many cases they have themselves been subjected to rejection and violence. Sometimes they are unable to contain, as most workers are. their responses to the frustrations and repressions which capitalism imposes on us. day after day. Or perhaps a lifetime of alienation has taught them to fear and mistrust any kind of human relationship, or to be unable to admit to any dependence on others.

These examples of social neuroses — and there are many others — spring directly from the way property society operates. Another important example is the way in which capitalism positively encourages workers to enjoy inflicting pain, by rewarding those who are the most efficient and ruthless killers of the ""enemy"' in wartime (Remember the famous "Gotcha" headline in the Sun?)

The advent of socialism will remove the cause of all these problems and so abolish all but a few examples of violence. And those few will be the acts of individuals who are mentally sick, for although socialism will obviously eradicate most mental illness there will probably be isolated cases where it has physical and not social roots. If such people express their sickness in violence they will need to be restrained in the interests of society. But they will be treated as patients, not as criminals and while they are restrained they will also be helped to recover.

Editors.

Greasy Pole: Be kind to a hoodie (2006)

The Greasy Pole column from the August 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Although David Cameron, in his speech on youth offending, did not actually advise us to get out and hug as many hoodies as we could find, he should have suspected that his speech about the need to “…understand what’s gone wrong in these children’s lives” would be quickly summarised by the media in those sensationalist terms.

 Perhaps he thought he was being original (he wasn’t) or courageous (gambling would be more accurate) or progressive (in fact it’s all be thought of and said before). By the time of his speech hoods and hoodies had become, in New Labour speak and other such trendy verbiage, an issue.

For example last May the Bluewater shopping centre in Kent banned anyone wearing a hood, along with those who swore or behaved in similarly challenging ways. But there were apparent problems in this as there has yet to be a satisfactory definition of a hoody – does the term include the enthusiasts who gather on railway platforms to make a note of train numbers? When does an anorak become a hood, with all that implies in terms of a threat to mug old ladies who have just collected their pension from the post office? If a hood is made of the finest cashmere wool and sold in a trendy Notting Hill boutique is it still an aid to an offender trying to hide their identity? And what would the genuine hoodie think about having a fleshy Old Etonian approach him in the street, when he was out looking for an opportunity to do a bit of swift robbery, and start to hug him? Wouldn’t that be enough to put anyone off a life of crime forever?

Bluewater said they were delighted at the effect of their measure, which they claimed was responsible for a marked increase in their customers – although how many of  these were reporters and assorted media hacks is not known. Hood manufacturers made no comment; the company Bon prix continued to advertise its wares with pictures of pretty girls and muscular, handsome young men and slogans like “Ladies, your favourite hoodies at great prices . . .” Tony Blair was delighted – with his eye on the readership of the Daily Mail he recruited Bluewater’s experience as justification for his government’s introduction of Anti Social Behaviour Orders. Amid the panic a few voices were raised in question – like Harold Williamson, a policy researcher at Cardiff University, who thought “We need more politicians who are courageous, who stand up and say ‘Look, this is a complex issue and we need to think about it seriously’”. And there was David Cameron, adopting the role of the courageous politician who had something to gain by taking a markedly different, possibly unpopular, line :

 “The hoodie is a response to a problem, not a problem in itself…But hoodies are more defensive than offensive. They’re a way to stay invisible in the street. In a dangerous environment the best thing to do is keep your head down, blend in, don’t stand out.”

And then, crucially:

“… it’s about family breakdown. It’s about drugs, it’s about alcohol abuse, often it’s young people who are brought up in care when they should be in loving homes."           

Children Acts

This did not go down well with Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells (and, as we shall see, of Bromley and Chislehurst), who would have preferred the traditionally tougher attitude Cameron had expressed only weeks before, when he assured the Centre for Policy Studies that "We support tougher sentences" and ". . . improving the effectiveness of the courts, and the CPS, and making sure that our prisons really work". Furious Tory bloggers declared that they would never vote for the party while he was leader. Labour spin doctors, grateful for this opportunity to label the Tories as soft on crime, trotted out slogans about Hoody hugging. Nobody seemed to notice that Cameron was a bit out of date, in that he was advocating something which once almost had the status of accepted wisdom and was an article of faith among Labour Party members. The Children and Young Persons Act of 1969 was something of a zenith in the post war reformist legislation about crime. It was intended to deal with youngsters who had committed offences through local authority "care" rather than the courts. Decisions about whether a young offender stayed at home or went into residential care would be taken by Social Workers instead of magistrates (which did not please many a magistrate). The Act was driven by a mass of enquiry such as the Longford Committee which was set up in 1964 by the Labour government and which concluded that many of the offences by youngsters could be accounted for by their social conditions and that, therefore, the remedy lay in an examination of those conditions. In 1968 the Home Office stated that

"It has become increasingly clear that social control of harmful behaviour by the young, and social measures to help and protect the young, are not distinct and separate processes. The aims of protecting society from juvenile delinquency, and of helping children in trouble to grow up into mature and law-abiding persons, are complementary and not contradictory."

Futility

That was a long time ago, before the political parties concluded that there were more votes to be won through a repressive, rather than permissive, policy about crime and punishment. Michael Howard was among the more adept at this, rousing Tory conferences with flaming speeches on the theme that prison worked, advising criminals that "if you can't do the time then don't do the crime". Then there was John Major whingeing that what was needed was to "condemn a little more and understand a little less". And now there is Tony Blair and "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime" which, as time passes and the criminal statistics do not support Blair's optimism, has come to mean simply being tough on crime. It will be interesting to see how long Cameron is able to persist with the policy of "understanding" and "loving"; he could not have been encouraged by the result of the by-election in Bromley and Chislehurst which, the first test of his popularity since he won the Tory leadership, saw the 13,342 majority of the staunchly right wing Eric Forth slashed to just 633.

Cameron is being accused now by his own membership of changing the Tory party so that it is almost indistinguishable from the Labour Party. Indeed, in the matter of the hoodies he has said more than Blair at his most ambitious would have dared to. Perhaps, like Blair and his drive to erect New Labour, Cameron calculates that his best chance of winning power is to make the two parties so similar that it is not just impossible but also pointless to search for enough difference between them to be worth a vote either way. But reality is clear. The politics of capitalism is the process of choosing between two or more parties which to all intents and purposes are identical. To make that choice is crass futility, while capitalism's problems, like violent crime, remain impervious to all efforts to legislate them out of existence. Instead, why not go out and hug a hoodie?

Ivan

In Rude Health? (1998)

TV Review from the November 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

Britain is a place of warm beer and sandwiches, lazy days on the village green watching cricket, a place of order and conformity. At least that s what John Major reckoned. But in doing so he reckoned without the stars of Rude Britannia (Channel 4,10pm, Thurs 15 October).These were some of Britain's rudest people who were counterposed to those who deplore the behaviour and openly hanker after a return to the rose-tinted past.

That Britain was ever the kind of place John Major thought it was is open to dispute — what is clearer is that whatever level standards of behaviour were in the past, there has been a serious decline since. When Major said he aimed to build a society “at ease with itself” he was stating a political intention he was never remotely going to be able to fulfil. And so it has turned out — if this programme is anything to go by Britain is a more competitive, selfish and inconsiderate society than it ever has been.

This was illustrated time after time via the filmed behaviour of those who just couldn't give a monkey’s about anybody but themselves. One or two of them were not only prepared to admit this when questioned, they were actually proud of it. One who showed no lack of remorse was the man who parked in the disabled parking spot at a supermarket when there were scores of other places free. When challenged about it by a disabled woman it turned out the gentleman in question was none other than an officer of Her Majesty's constabulary. His response was not to admit his culpability and mutter something about “being in a rush” as most probably would, but to insist that he had not violated any road traffic laws!

Happy days are here again

Then there was the guy in Accrington who went about his business with total disregard for everyone else, whether he was driving his car or just walking around the shopping precinct. His most revealing response to questions about his attitude was to comment that “I am too fast for Accrington”. In truth, here was a poor sap, convinced that he was among the movers and shakers of society, a child of Thatcher and son of Satan, who thought that the most effective way to exercise his muscle was to barge past old ladies in the high street and knock them over. Needless to say, the reality behind the image was revealing — a man in a poorly paid job with little self esteem who wanted to make himself appear bigger than he was. When asked by the interviewer “if you are too fast for Accrington, then why don’t you just leave?” he had no cocksure reply to utter, in fact no answer of any kind at all. To give an answer would have been to reveal that he did not live life to the Max. This was a man who, in reality, lived life in the bus lane.

While it would be wrong to assume that the kind of anti-social behaviour exhibited by individuals in this programme is already widespread as such, it is undoubtedly in the process of becoming so. That this should be the case is not surprising. John Major was doomed to failure in his attempt to halt the slide because he failed to recognise that, first and foremost, it is the market system itself which promotes such types of behaviour and engenders such anti-social attitudes. There is no compelling evidence to suggest that humans are born to be rude, aggressive and anti-social. On the contrary, it is human sociability which is the primary reason why our species has been the most successful on the planet—humans, unlike other animals, are generally able to plan and organise our affairs in a conscious manner, ensuring long-term stability. But the economic, social and political structures created by humans in various circumstances influence human behaviour in turn, and if social systems develop in a manner which promote competition and individualism (as say, a result of natural or artificial scarcity in relation to wants) then humans will adapt their behaviour and attitudes accordingly.

Any society — like the market system — which is based on division, competition and rampant individualism, and then sustained by the creation of generation gaps and the spread of atomised, isolated thinking and behaviour, is going to produce the sort of anti-social attitudes illustrated in Rude Britannia. So it is the ultimate irony for all the Colonel Blimps of this world that the system they admire so much — capitalism — is what has done so much to undermine many of the values they hold dear, values which arose in a different sort society to that which now exists.

But why should a rational thinker want to turn the clock back? The future could be far brighter than any rose-tinted view of the past could allow if the working class grasped the importance of collective action and the necessity of solidarity and class organisation. For the only way to overturn the “every man for himself” culture eating away at the heart of society is in the forging of a united struggle — a united struggle against the system which is currently pitting worker against worker in one of the shabbiest episodes it has yet conjured up in its extremely shabby history.

Dave Perrin

Who are the real litter louts? (2009)

From the July 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

Official statistics from the Home Office’s Office of National Statistics show that there is a high level of concern about the problem of litter. Indeed, of all crime and anti-social behaviour litter has the second highest source of concern (33 percent of those surveyed felt “a high level of worry”). Vandalism comes top of the list (34 percent), both much higher than racial harassment (8 percent) and fear of burglary (14 percent). Hardly a week goes by without a letter sent to local papers on the subject. Now common or garden street litter is hardly one of the world’s major problems, but most people are primarily concerned with things that affect them – it is simply a human response to something right before the eyes. People clearly want and indeed should expect a decent local environment. What can be done about this problem? We examine a few solutions . . .

Solution no. 1: More bins. It might be suggested that more rubbish bins would solve the problem. Certainly this could have some effect. However my local area has plenty of bins (empty ones) and plenty of litter. Putting the rubbish in the bins is clearly something different from putting the bins up in the first place.

Solution no. 2: The strong arm of the law. A crackdown on ‘litter louts’– fines or imprisonment – can be a short term solution particularly in areas with a traditional respect of authority. Such a policy has been carried out very successfully, for example in Singapore. However, whether large and disparate societies have the resources to deal with what is basically a minor infraction of the law in such a heavy-handed manner is doubtful.

Solution no. 3: Education. A rather cheaper method than a policeman on every corner would be a concerted campaign in the schools: “Naughty children: don’t throw things on the street.” However education (or what passes for it in these sad times) seems to be part of the problem. It is almost certainly the case that the majority of street litter is thrown by children or adolescents.

Solution no. 4: ‘Alternative’ education. If it really is the case that littering is a product of alienation in the schools it might be advisable to change the system of schooling to one more child-friendly. At the risk of us being deluged with letters from irate ‘alt-ed’ enthusiasts, the idea of ‘nice’ schooling is ridiculous in a world that is most definitely not nice. The modern system of education generally fits the bill required – that of producing (and reproducing) the ideal modern worker. Also again we hit the problem of resources – who will pay for this intensive, alternative approach?

Solution no. 5: A ‘green’ idea. Very popular in Germany, the Green ‘Law of Return’ means that councils are entitled to ship product wrappings back to the factory of origin. A ton of crisp packets dumped on the doorstep is a powerful argument for making biodegradable or recyclable packaging. This comes close to the problem and all credit here for identifying the real litter louts. But recycling uses resources – surely better, as far as is possible, not to produce potential litter in the first place; however, this cannot be expected from those whose business is to produce.

Solution no. 6: Socialism. Litter, like most other problems of the world, is a product of the current phase of capitalism. Consumption to the nth power (including snack foods, the main cause of street litter), within a background of built-in obsolescence determined chiefly by the great corporations, is the order of the day, all driven by the relentless quest for profit.  Compounding the issue within capitalism is the sense of alienation, especially among young people, the result of the class ownership of society and the commodifying of everyday life – all of which helps produce the carelessness of littering. Powerless and voiceless – why should the ‘litter lout’ care? The streets really are not our own, nor can they be under capitalism.

Kaz.

Order on the terraces (1989)

From the May 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

It may seem amazing that a government that speaks so much of freedom as the present Thatcher administration does should in practice be so authoritarian and restrictive. Amazing that is to anyone not acquainted with traditional government doublespeak. The 1987 Conservative Party General Election Manifesto declared that the election mattered more for our freedom than “any election since the Second World War".

Most people would like to have more freedom whether it be money in our pockets or just fewer signs around saying "keep off the grass", and of course, this is where the politicians' rhetoric comes in. But on a practical level keeping the wage slaves in line when there is so much to complain about requires control and discipline. As a result a vast state machine has developed with the aim of maintaining "law and order" and ensuring social stability. The armed forces, police. Special Branch. MI5 and others exist to back up the legal system which protects property from 'anti-social' behaviour such as theft or criminal damage.

The ID Card Scheme

Sometimes though threats to order and stability arise which cannot be readily dealt with and require special attention. The present Government has decided that football is currently in need of some of this attention — hence the ID Card Scheme. The Football Spectators Bill, if unamended, proposes that entrance to all Football League matches and Cup matches will be restricted to holders of identity cards. The ID cards will carry a photograph and the name of the team supported by the holder and they will only be able to be obtained in person with proof of identity. Any holder of a card who is convicted of a "football related offence" will immediately have the card withdrawn for a period of two to five years. The supervisory body for the scheme, the Football Membership Authority. will also have the power to impose a ban on membership even if no football related offence has been committed.

The ID card scheme is therefore designed to keep known “troublemakers" away from matches, hopefully leading to a massive drop in violence. However, it ignores a number of important things. Foremost among these is the fact that most of the violence does not occur in the grounds anyway — it takes place outside the grounds and in the town and city centres. Rigid segregation of fans and the use of closed-circuit television has reduced violence in the grounds to low levels while organised gangs of young thugs battle it out outside. As an increasing number of hooligans don't even bother entering the grounds in any case there is absolutely no way that the proposed Membership Scheme could do what the government wants it to do — stamp out football related violence.

What is more, banning fans from grounds has not stopped them from traveling to matches in the past. The present writer has been witness to a number of instances where away supporters have been banned from a ground but have been admitted in large numbers on the advice of the police for fear of the trouble they may cause outside if they are not let in. Who is to say that those who have their membership cards taken off them will not continue to travel to matches to provoke trouble?

Daft Reform

Indeed, it is likely that the ID card scheme may end up causing more trouble than it prevents. At the moment it has been estimated that it takes three seconds for a paying supporter to pass through the turnstile. However, when the ID card scheme is introduced it is likely that the checking of the card will mean that it will take eight seconds to pass through the turnstile. If a thousand people pass through it will take them five thousand seconds longer than at present — in other words nearly one and a half hours (When Saturday Comes, No. 23)! If this is not likely to lead to crushes and crowd violence it is difficult to imagine what will. Indeed, this difficulty was partially noted in the Minister of Sport's Working Party's Report on Football — Membership Schemes, where although it was argued that photographs on the ID cards were essential, "there would be unacceptable delays if turnstile operators were asked to check photographs as well''

The Football Spectators Bill is arguably the daftest reform to be proposed by any of the Thatcher governments, and there have been many contenders for that particular title. It is so ill thought-out that it has been opposed by clubs, supporters and police alike. Outside of the Cabinet and the dewy-eyed Tory backbenchers eager for promotion at the word of Mrs T.. it has been almost universally condemned.

The reason for this condemnation has ranged from the restrictions that fans feel are being placed on them, the unworkability of the scheme which has concerned the police and the financial aspect which has worried the clubs. It will not only be costly to instal computers and the electronic card readers but as the entire scheme is likely to prevent casual supporters from attending matches it will adversely affect attendances. This will in turn affect income, and the majority of clubs who already run at a financial loss may have their very existence called into question. On a commercial level individual football clubs don't so much compete amongst themselves but compete as a whole against other sports and entertainments which have in recent years become increasingly popular at football’s expense. Discouragement of the casual supporter is the last thing that the football clubs want.

The Other Hooligans

A large part of the problem is that the government sees hooliganism that has attached itself to football as a mere aberration within society as a whole, and therefore as something which can be reformed out of existence. However, in the extremely unlikely event that the ID card scheme eradicated football violence hooliganism would only move more noticeably than it already has done to other sports such as cricket and rugby league. For although football matches provide a particular outlet for hooligan behaviour, they are not the cause of it. Capitalist society both breeds violence and sanctions its use. "Legitimate" violence such as the Falklands War or the police beating people up during the Miners' Strike is seen as entirely necessary and acceptable whereas soccer violence is something totally different which cannot be tolerated. It even used to be argued that a reintroduction of National Service would provide discipline for the hooligans and channel their aggression. The absurdity of this was shown during the 1988 European Championships in West Germany when a large proportion of the English fans arrested were in fact members of the armed forces stationed there.

Hooliganism is a product of a society which values aggression, competition and violence above peace and co-operation. It is only when this aggression gets out of hand and threatens stability that it becomes a real concern. What better example is there of the sort of ruthless competition extolled by Thatcher and Colin Moynihan. the Minister for Sport, than the frightening activities of the football mobs vying for the position of "top dogs” every Saturday?

The ID card scheme is as pathetic as it is hypocritical. The Government is not interested in the freedom of working class people and is prepared to restrict the limited freedoms and liberties that we have in a sad attempt to solve a problem which the system that it upholds so clearly threw up in the first place.

Perhaps in the light of increasing drunkenness and late-night violence we can expect the self-proclaimed lovers of freedom in Westminster to issue us with ID cards to enter pubs in future (complete of course with a photograph and the name of your local). The queues to get past the electronic card reader on New Year's Eve don't bear thinking about.

Dave Perrin