Crime Waves

A few years back, I met a couple of pals in a Scottish city (not Glasgow) for lunch. We'd all come from working class backgrounds ourselves in the 50s and 60s, attended 'scheme' schools and worked in similar schools as teachers. We had all noticed the link between having a job and a decent income, support for communities from police and other public services and the steady fall in crime in Scotland over a generation, but we also agreed on the state of devastation Thatcherism had caused in communities all over Scotland in the 80s and 90s, from which many communities have never recovered, so that crime was a constant fear. And we decided that in the mid-2000s, after the collapse of UK and US capitalism, it was all about to happen again.

I'll be honest: poor people who assault, rob and steal from other poor people are the lowest of the low.

I don't care how badly off you are, you don't attack your own folk. But our 'communities' - what's left of them after Thatcherism and almost a decade of 'austerity' following the bank bail-out, cuts in public services and in social security support - well, not many feel any kind of solidarity, as far as I can see. That's what Thatcherism set out to do: the UK was to become a community of individuals where the motto was 'man, mind thyself' - take care of yourself - because nobody else will do it.

Tonight on the Channel 4 news, people were complaining about crime waves in London: knife- and gun-carrying and -assaults are rife, moped robberies are the latest thing and now people are facing acid attacks in the street. The indignant people protesting against the rise in crime didn't seem to see a connection with government policy. It goes like this:

* cut the level of community policing - in some cases by 20% - by reducing public sector budgets where workers have had next to no pay rises for 9 years and then complain about lack of support from emergency services
* cut social security payments to make it harder for people to get state support, especially young people
* make it near enough impossible to find affordable housing if you're young, and make homelessness a major issue, with young homeless people not only victims of crime but more likely to commit crime to survive
* introduce a bedroom tax (oh yes, it's still there) so that poor people are penalised for living in houses they can't move out of because there are no other houses available, councils having been banned from building the houses we need
* knock the arse out of wages, especially the wages of the unskilled so that you create an 'underclass' of poor people and then blame them when they react badly to being excluded from the world of the 'haves.'
 * sanction anyone who can't work their way through the jungle of social security rules
* find people to blame. How about immigrants?

Sure as fate, on the same news programme tonight, there was a Frenchwoman (married to a UK citizen, lived and worked here for 20 years, paid her taxes, etc) complaining about not feeling secure here any more. A total stranger in the cafe she and the news reporter were meeting in interrupted to suggest British workers were 'insecure' in their jobs because of people like the Frenchwoman, a complete misreading of the situation, widely peddled by people like UKIP and Boris (PM in waiting) Johnson.

There's no point blaming the police for a spike in lawlessness. And no point in the police blaming communities. No point blaming local authorities for not supporting elderly people in need of home care or children and teenagers in need of mental health care. No point lamenting the lack of decent housing when the government refuses to sanction house-building. No point letting the Tories carry on with the myth that Britain is a world power and ignoring 2 trillion quids' worth of debt so they can buy the new Trident and invest in a railway that goes nowhere and that nobody really needs.

Meanwhile on Sky News Review, there was a UKIP guy who runs a website and has no children, describing the Scottish Government's decision to ban smacking as 'preposterous.' You know the argument: I got the occasional slap...never did me any harm...To be honest, I'm not sure if this is a real problem in Scotland but I support the ban because although I grew up in a non-violent household I am myself pretty scared of violence. I'm delighted to say the other presenter agreed with me: setting a tone where violence is the answer can never be right. Where children are concerned I have strong views about defending their rights.

And on every news channel every night, there's another programme about Brexit. I promise you, 10 years from now, we'll be asking: What happened? How did we let these people lead us out of the biggest trading union in the world, negotiate a disastrous settlement (though there's no negotiation as far as I can say, just years of economic failure to come) because the UK elected a Tory government which is too scared to tell the truth: this is a disaster - and they are too incompetent to do anything to repair the damage.