During the extensive period in which I attempted to cut an intellectual figure by reading books none of my friends had, I spent the best part of two years labouring away at the literary marathon that is Proust's A La Recherche. For those who've never bothered, there are occasional flashes of brilliance, but many, many tedious pages describing what this or that member of an imaginary Parisian aristocracy might have meant when they glanced across the Duchess de Guermantes' drawing room. Yadda yadda yadda.
For those seeking the long roman a fleuve, Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time sequence is shorter, funnier and equips those temperamentally suited to its stoic outlook with a mental armoury for dealing with the more unpleasant characteristics exhibited by people in pursuit of power. It's also British.
However Proust is so exhaustive in his examination of, well, just about everything, that for a long time afterwards all other writers seemed pretty superficial. And the enforced abstinence from reading anything else had the effect of cutting me off from new novels, an intermission from which I have never really caught up.
I mention this because the post-Proust out-of-touch feeling is tenuously analogous to the one experienced when you go on holiday and come back to find that in your absence the world has changed. In August quite a lot of people came out onto the streets and rioted; or rather rioted, looted and burned. Viewed on TV from the remote north of Scotland it looked rather weird and threatening ("Look", we cried, baffled, "there's the Arndale Centre. And it's on fire!"). The political and social environment doesn't seem quite the same as it did when we went away at the end of July, and it's irrationally annoying that its changed without our consent. Irrationally because if we'd been here it would have happened anyway.
What to make of the rioters' behaviour? Obviously looters are primarily a law and order problem rather than a political one, but it doesn't seem a complete waste of time to try and work out why they looted, if only to formulate ways of minimising the possibility of it happening again and to see what it might say about British society.
Are these people bad? Perhaps some of them; if they all are, we certainly have a lot of bad people in this country. But when I was a criminal lawyer I only came across one or two truly wicked people; the rest were stupid, feckless, greedy, desperate for drugs or drunk; or indeed any combination of the preceding. Given that even those of us that don't riot probably answer some of those descriptions some of the time, having those qualities clearly isn't enough to make you smash a window and nick trainers from JD Sports.
Much has been made of the revelation that four fifths of those arrested were known to the police in one way or other, and that most of them came from poor areas. I don't think this signifies. We shouldn't be surprised that most people committing criminal offences exhibit a habit of criminal behaviour; nor does the fact that most of them don't seem to have had much money mean that they stole and burned because they were poor. The riots were apparently organised by people who owned Blackberrys, which are expensive, and perhaps that's a clue. Perhaps they should have spent their Blackberry money on more useful things. But when you haven't got much money, spending a lot of it on something high-status but unnecessary might be a classic sign that you are going to do plenty of other stupid things as well. It's possible that the rioters who were out of work ended up out of work for the same reasons they ended up in trouble with the police, namely that they were stupid, feckless or drunk, as per the previous paragraph; in other words, their low socio-economic status and their criminality might both be effects of another cause.
If it's hard working out what makes people behave like this, what could we do that might minimise the risk of them doing it again?
I heard several rioters, or people sympathetic to them, complaining that "the Poles had taken all the jobs". Some of the complainants would evidently have had difficulty holding down a job till lunchtime on day one, since by then they would either have nicked something or told the boss to Eff Off. But they surely have a point. Surely some of the rioters would have stayed at home if they'd had jobs to go to, or prospects of a job. Unfortunately in 2004, when eight new countries joined the EU, the then Labour government allowed free entry of their citizens into the UK. By 2006 a BBC news report I found in a ten-second search said that the best part of 600,000 Eastern Europeans had come to Britain.
At that time the intellectually fearless Labour MP Frank Field, reported as saying that the number of migrants was "unmanageable and made it increasingly difficult for local people to get jobs", was a lone voice of dissent. Happily there is now much wider agreement that this open door policy kept wages down at the bottom end and made it much harder for British people (whether white, black, brown or any variant on the same) to get off the sofa and into work. In an economic boom, the last government missed a golden opportunity to shift a whole section of society into jobs, importing instead a labour force from overseas. As I weary of telling people, the Government's own figures tell us that over 50% of new jobs created in the period 1997 to 2008 went to people born abroad.
Saying that we shouldn't have started from here doesn't help solve our present problems, but you would hope that next time we get some economic growth (assuming we ever do), the Government of the day might try a little harder to make sure jobs go to the British.
All this assumes that jobs and the economic growth which creates them are a good thing; but surely another reason for looting is that our society is predicated on the seductiveness of shopping; people who can't shop, or can't shop much, feel entitled to loot. Blessed with more money than most people (although less desire to buy things than most), I am ill-placed to lecture others about the fatuity of this fetish. But buying things, and having things, is essentially shallow. It's doing things which is interesting. In this, if nothing else, I have some sympathy with the looters. Shorn of the ability to do something which society tells them is both their entitlement and the ultimate good, they have nothing to fall back on.
Of course, shopping and eternal growth are not just shallow. They're unsustainable. They can only be created by increased use of resources. And we are using far too much already. The world needs fewer people, and so does Britain. Ultimately we are going to have to work out how to set up a just society with fewer people and less growth.
We could start doing this by stopping paying people to have large families. As recent economic events have demonstrated with ruthless starkness, we cannot afford our current public spending. My favourite measure to reverse this trend is to restrict future child benefit payments to the first two children. Lots of people who don't work and have never worked, who aren't in a stable relationship and haven't ever seriously tried to maintain one, are being paid by the state to have children. Their children are disproportionately unlikely to work, disproportionately unlikely to form stable relationships, and, yes, disproportionately likely to take part in riots. Why subsidise them?
The liberal answer to this is to say, "Because they will have more than two children anyway, and those children will be brought up in even greater poverty". To which I would say, "Some of them will have more than two children, but not all, and perhaps quite a lot fewer. Moreover the parents who do have large families without being able to afford them might start to take greater responsibility for their decisions." Incidentally, no-one with enough to eat, a roof over their heads and access to free health care and education can truly be described as living in"poverty", and anyone who suggests otherwise is jumping up and down on language with heavy boots, as well as insulting the huge numbers of people around the world who will never own a Blackberry.
Thus the liberal's dilemma in a nutshell. You make a provision to help people who get into trouble; but as decades pass getting into trouble becomes more acceptable and more people do it. The liberal then asks for more and more provision to help them. The conservative says, No, you must allow people to take more responsibility for their actions, because then they will behave better. The liberal cries, But the children will suffer. So be it, says the conservative. It's an unattractive position, but not necessarily wrong.
Which brings me finally to absent fathers. It doesn't do young men any good to be brought up in families without a father. This isn't to say that it isn't possible. Just that young boys are surrounded by role models - footballers, pop stars, video games - which give them no clues whatsoever in how an ordinary adult man might live with dignity and self-worth. My Dad was a paragon - didn't get drunk, didn't womanise, didn't hit my Mum, held down a job he didn't like much - but even with his example I still find those things hard to do. Men who disappear as soon as there's a nappy to be changed aren't subject to any effective social censure. We wring our hands and say what a shame it is.
The solution to this problem is beyond one blog, beyond one person, and possibly beyond the reach of us all.
A postscript. This morning I read in the paper that, amongst others I have never heard of, a novel by one Patrick de Witt has made the Booker shortlist. Amazingly, I have read it already. My wife bought it for me when we were going on holiday. It's an engaging dead-pan Western called The Sisters Brothers. It has taken me twenty years, but once more I am, if not ahead of the race, at least running on the same lap as the leaders.
Or rather my wife is.
