So, in the words of journalist and broadcaster Jonathan Freedland, "the summer when the news forgot to stop", is finally over. A truly extraordinary couple of months, which saw Rupert Murdoch biffed in a Parliamentary committee, parts of London and some other UK cities witnessing a complete breakdown of law and order for hours on end (with the capital's largest-ever police 'service' leaving families trapped in their apartments to their fate), the world's biggest economy losing its Triple A credit rating and teetering on political sclerosis, and one of the world's most vicious regimes (admittedly in a crowded field) toppled with a combination of the sheer guts of its citizens, backed by air support from NATO. In fact, 2011 as a whole is shaping up to rival other Years to Remember such as 1968, 1989-90 and 2001.
The British political class has rivalled the police (who have reacted like hypersensitive teenagers to any criticism, however justified - in my opinion they've been let off lightly) in demonstrating hypocrisy, corruption and uselessness. So, we have the spectre of our Prime Minister – the most privileged leader of the most privileged Cabinet since the early '60s - belatedly returning home from his Tuscan villa complaining about an unjustified sense of entitlement, and who is, along with the Mayor of London, a former member of the notorious Bullingdon Club - which regularly trashed restaurants and terrified innocent people and was lucky not, like Boris, to have his collar felt - insisting that 'wrongdoers must be punished, there can be no excuses'. But, of course, if you're wealthy you can have your youthful mischief and get away with it, because you can always afford to pay off the aggrieved restaurateur, etc., and have a smart, family lawyer to get you out of clink if it goes wrong. Most of all, you can have your youthful indiscretions in private places, whereas your social housing estate kid has nowhere to go but public spaces. Then there's a Deputy Prime Minister (who also did a spot of vandalism in his youth) who doesn't seem to realise that the word 'Deputy' means, erm, that you deputise for the boss when he's away.
It was all so different in the olden days of course, when the police were paragons of virtue, never accepted a bribe, when young people showed respect of their elders and burnt off their youthful energy with tea dances, and never, ever had sex until they were at least engaged. Apart from the scandals in the Met's Vice Squad in the 1960s and '70s, Teddy Boys in the '50s, the Mods and Rockers in the '60s, the skinheads in the '70s, the violence on the streets from rival football supporters…
The reaction of the authorities in the '60s was spookily similar. The quotes about the Mods and Rockers for example could have been written today (or the other way round!). 'Bring back national service' (given the apparent easy availability of guns in our cities, is it really a good idea to ensure our young men are proficient with firearms?), 'bring back the birch' - the Isle of Man had that in the '70s and extended its application up to 21 years of age in the first 'moral panic' of the mid-1960s. Well, true enough that did work, in that a well-publicised case of some young Glaswegian men does seem to have prevented disturbances from reaching that island paradise. One of the great joys of being an academic is the access you get to newspaper archives and as it 'appens, part of my research covers the 'Mirror' from this period. Here's a sample from the edition of 25 July, 1965, accompanies by a picture of the miscreants in their swimming trunks, showing as much of the weals resulting from the punishment as is possible in a family newspaper:
They admitted causing bodily harm to a holidaymaker by setting upon him, hitting him with a bottle, and stamping on him after he asked them to stop swearing. The four were also fined a total of £80. Only two hours after sentence the birch -- three 3ft. twigs bound into a 14in. long handle at one end and weighing a maximum of 9oz. -- was produced. Brown-haired James McKell said: "I was led away to an upstairs room. Nine people were waiting.
Cried
"I was bent face downwards over the back of a chair. I cried with fear. My trousers were pulled down and my shirt pulled up. Two policemen held my arms and a third held my head down. A fourth, a sergeant, used the birch.
"The pain was terrible. I kept screaming for my parents. I was in pain for hours."
Stocky, pug-nosed William Connelly said: "I thought they were hitting me with red-hot wire.
"I just shouted until they had finished."
William Keenan said: "It was over quickly. But I'll never do anything that could get me the birch again."
Magistrate Radcliffe told me: "This island is a happy place. We want to keep it so that people are safe to walk the streets."
Mr Edward Bancroft, president of the Hotel Association, added: "We would rather have fewer holidaymakers than be flooded with Mods and Rockers like Clacton and Margate."
So, we COULD do that – well, actually we couldn't; the European Court of Human Rights wouldn't allow it. But plenty of countries do – Singapore, for example, held up by R Murdoch as a model country! My paternal grandfather - the son of a miner who chose the police service (then known as the Police FORCE) largely because the remuneration for senior officers included a house, and who rose to be a Chief Superintendent - had a choice solution for the containment of riots: "Shoot the first one". Or, as Phaedrus (15BC-50AD) put it: Aggression unchallenged is aggression unleashed.
And there can be no doubt as to the public appetite for harsh punishments, and many a bleeding heart liberal has had his/her world view challenged:
As the old saying goes, a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged, and the riots could prove a turning-point for liberalism. During the last major disturbances few members of the opinion-forming classes lived in Hackney, Brixton or central Manchester. They do now, and they will remember their fear on Monday and Tuesday nights. (Andrew Gilligan, UK riots: a festival of broken glass, Telegraph, 14 August, 2011.)
Being a Grammar School from solid, middle class home, loved and cherished, etc., did not prevent me and contemporaries from going a bit wild. A school trip to Alton Towers left the theme park reeling! I was culpable because I had supplied other kids with beer from home - which we got free due to my dad's job - and I don't think many of them had had alcohol before! Lecture from deputy head next day, swishing cane: never had complaints before, completely unacceptable, you've let down the school, but most of all (etc.). Made it clear that if he had his way all the boys would have been given 'six of the best' (I'd been 'slippered' before, but not caned, which was reserved for really bad behaviour, rather than cheekiness and mostly low-level classroom disruption which was my forte – see RudinBlogs passim for fuller account of the joys of being a schoolboy in the late '60s and early '70s) but he'd been over-ruled because some of the girls had behaved just as badly and they couldn't be caned! So it was detention for us all for a week. Then I could talk about me and my mates chasing other kids, running in and out of hotels and bars , causing aggro, being out into the early ours with my parents not knowing where I was or what I was up to; this is all in the period 14-16 years. It's all a matter of degree, circumstances and location.
God knows what I'd have been like if I hadn't had a stable family background. So I think a LITTLE humility and understanding and distinguishing between really bad, violent behaviour and the rest is required. What I do recognise is that young men crave for three things (and probably in this order): sex, status and excitement. And you tend to get more sex if you have a higher status, so if you cannot achieve that through conventional means – mostly through work – then you will find it elsewhere. Most of all, you need love and respect. I was struck by the comments – made quite unselfconsciously during a previous panic about gangs - from those in a notorious Liverpool outfit, a member of which was implicated in the tragic, accidental shooting of Rhys Jones, at a location I drive through most working days: "He has no dad, he has no family, we're his family and we love him."
Now, you might be thinking 'well, Richard, this is all very well, but if you'd been at the other end of the riots and looting, were in fear of your life, seen the business you'd worked hard day and night for a decade trashed in a matter of minutes, you wouldn't have such benign feelings about all this. In fact, it's just this sort of woolly, middle-class, moral relativisim, hand-wringing, guilt-ridden, self-loathing nonsense that's led to all this mayhem! I say get these little s*!%s off the street, and bang them up. It's time to put the fear back!'
And, up to a point, I do think adolescents and young men do need (and are happiest and most secure with) rules, boundaries, threats of punishment that are followed through when necessary and, above all, good, tough male role models. This used to be fathers and teachers, but the first are often absent now and the second are powerless to exert any meaningful punishment. But I fail to see how, say, a young man with no 'previous', who is full of contrition, is half way through a course almost certain to lead to a good job but who, in that state of euphoria after a night of passion at his girl-friend's flat (oh, blessed memory!) and somewhat hazy through drink, sees the tail-end of a bit of looting and decides – 'what a laugh this will be when I tell girl-friend and my mates tomorrow!' – to put his hand through a broken window and take a pack of water worth £3.50, is caught and imprisoned for six months and will almost certainly lose his place on the course, with ALL the implications of that, serves society or the individual.
There is another way – it's called Restorative Justice. And it's most certainly NOT a 'soft option'. And best of all, it empowers the VICTIM – because it can't happen unless the victim agrees. Time and time, victims of crime complain that they are cut off from the whole judicial process – sometimes never even told what has happened to the offender.
Offenders find the process demanding and tough. We require offenders to take an active role in repairing harm, acknowledging the impact of what they've done and facing up to the consequences. (Lord McNally, Restorative Justice Helps Prevent Harm, Restorative Solutions, 27 July 2011).
The classic mistaken assumption of conventional justice is to punish criminals as if they will never come back from prison to live among us. But with rare exceptions, they all come back. When they do, we depend on them not to cause more harm in the community. We are all interdependent in a shrinking world: criminals, victims, and the wider society. (Lawrence W Sherman and Heather Strang, 2007) Restorative Justice: the evidence, Smith Institute 2007)
And if you're thinking that I would think differently if it happened to me, well 'it' did. I won't go into the details – there's no reason legally why I shouldn't but it's not necessary to make the point. Briefly: a young man, who let's say I knew a little - attacked me, in the middle of the day, with witnesses and caught on CCTV. It was completely unexpected, had no 'lead up' that I was aware of and I had no reason to think he had a grudge against me. But he had got into his head that I had, some time previously punched him in the head and began a campaign (unknownst to me) to my superiors to have me sacked, calling me 'scum', etc. Landing the first blow from behind me and pushing me into a chair he launched a frenzied attack on my head, before being pulled off me. He departed with a threat to return to 'f*!"£$g finish this/me/you (it wasn't clear) off'. As he wasn't immediately apprehended I was offered the choice of proceeding with a charge of assault (possibly with occasioning GBH – one of the reasons I have been a far less frequent blogger of late is that the whiplash from my head being punched from side to side has exacerbated am existing neck/shoulder problem, making writing painful to do - rather than just to read – HA!), in which case he would have a criminal record and almost certainly lose his job. As I remarked "I didn't go into this (higher education) business to reduce young people's life chances".
And when the day came for us to meet, he being seated next to a police officer, and for him to apologise and I heard his tale – not to put too fine a point on it his life was a crock of s£!t and he looked so lost and troubled, his 'hoodie' pulled down over the fists that had punched me - I was SO glad I had done it. We all need someone in our corner and the sad thing is, I could have been that person. But of course, I can't be now.
Naturally, I received any amount of support from colleagues, friends, relatives. Old school chums offered to come up as a posse to sort him out and half-heartedly chiding me "Don't say you didn't get a crack back at him!" Best of all, was an e-mail I had from a colleague who works in another part of the university, which simply read: "You are a good man". Which is, above all, what I want to be. In fact, I would use that as a test to distinguish between the really violent, psychotic elements, who certainly have to be incarcerated, and those who are just lost, troubled and lacking in any self-worth or respect: "Would you rather be known as a hard man, or a good man?" If the latter, there is hope. We all have moments of madness. We can all go off the rails. And, after all, David Cameron, in justifying giving the job as his Head of Communications to the already tainted Andrew Coulson, did say that he believed in giving people a second chance.
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