Rioting 1911/2011: Similarities And Differences

As regular readers know I have done a lot of research into the Great Unrest of 1911: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2008/11/great-unrest-1910-11-part-1.html  I have been in contact with people involved in commemorating this period of strikes and rioting, notably in Liverpool which experienced effectively a general strike.  It is ironic that precisely 100 years on we are seeing much the same kind of riotous activity.  As I have noted that, in contrast to the early 2000s when people on history discussion boards discussed any reference to the Great Unrest as a fantasy or a counter-factual, elements of it are even appearing in prime time television, such as reference to the shootings during a riot in Llanelli in 1911 on 'The One Show' on BBC1.

What then are the similarities and the differences between what we are seeing now and what was witnessed in 1911?  The basis is very different.  The unrest in 1910/11 had its roots in strikes by coal miners, railway workers and merchant sailors.  In 2011 there are no such strikes going on.  The coal industry has been all but destroyed in the UK and our coal, where needed still, is imported.  A lot of freight that arrives in the UK is carried by foreign vessels, whereas in 1911, the UK was the dominant country for sea freight.  The railways were as fragmented as they were in 1911 since the privatisation of the 1990s.  However, at present railway workers seem not to have any reason to strike.  Consequently, unlike in 1911, there is not an established pattern of unrest on which the riots can be based.  A lot of this stems from the hammering of the trade unions during the 1980s under Thatcher and the loss of any collective identity among workers.  Thatcher's greatest success in weakening the unions was not the legislation restricting their behaviour, much of which Labour tried to introduce in the past anyway, it was her success in getting us simply to think of 'me first'.

Another factor that is different to 1911 is the lack of radical rhetoric.  In 1911 Labour MPs notably Keir Hardie went around not only supporting the riots as an expression of legitimate working class unrest which they generally were not, but publicly calling on soldiers to mutiny if their commanders ordered them to fire on rioting working class people.  In contrast this time we have supposedly left-wing Diane Abbott, MP for Hackney one of the most deprived areas of London calling for a London-wide curfew, something that was not even imposed (outside Liverpool) even in 1911 and would appear as if we were under foreign occupation.  No-one in the Labour Party will even try to squeeze out some reference to this unrest being a representation of the anger of the public over a mixture of issues, notably continued police mistreatment of ordinary people, especially from ethnic minorities and youth unemployment at a level higher even than the worst days of the 1980s.  Without channelling there is a danger that the unrest will turn to racial violence as it did in South Wales in 1911 and could easily do in many parts of London.  This may not be black/white violence but as happened in Cardiff a century ago, targeted at people seen as taking jobs, so aimed at Poles and other EU citizens who have settled in London and who we know the CBI favours as employees over UK young people.  This seems to be an unforeseen danger that needs to be addressed now.

Another difference to 1911 is the fact that the weather is not as hot.  The summer of 1911 was exceptionally hot and this always provides a context for rioting.  However, neither is it raining heavily, so the weather may not provoke rioting but it is not discouraging it either at the moment. 

Rioting in 1911 was generally carried out by people unconnected to the strikes going on at the time and it focused on much the same things as this time: attacking the police (especially those brought in from outside the area) and looting.  Looting is especially popular at times of economic hardship and conspicuous consumption that we are experiencing at the moment.  The largest similarity between 1911 and 2011 is the economic context. It is noted that in 1911 a lot of anger stemmed from the fact that real wages were falling but consumption by the wealthy especially of very visible luxuries was increasing.  We are in a very similar position now.  Real pay has been declining for forty years now and even those people in graduate professions cannot afford a fraction of what their parents in such jobs could have done. 

Everyone is suffering from the inexorable rise in petrol costs, utility prices and housing both in terms of buying houses and, in particular, rent, which seems to have had a new burst of climb since the recession started.  The disruption to household incomes by redundancy and unemployment further impinges on disposable income as well as income used to pay for the essentials.  I have been unlucky, but my circumstances are probably not atypical, with over half my monthly income paying for somewhere to live, to light and heat it, to fuel my car and to eat.  I do not go on holiday, my car is 15 years old, I do not eat in restaurants and do not go to the cinema.  You can put up with a dull life and battling for every penny, but after a while it impacts on you.  I am lucky, there are millions of people in the UK far worse off than me, but if I am disgruntled can imagine how many of them/you feel?  Whilst most ordinary people struggle we still keep seeing the obscene salaries and consumption of the privileged.  Bankers pay continues to be high and yet we are still suffering the consequences of their failed greedy gambles and will be for decades to come especially in terms of lost social care and local facilities such as libraries being closed down.  As in 1911 the obvious greed of the wealthy is painful and pricks us, made easier by the constant flow of information to us through every medium available.  Whilst the trains may be slower and less frequent than they were in 1911, information travels far faster these days to people in all walks of life and all ages.

There are a number of other similarities to 1911 not just the conspicuous consumption in a time of hardship.  The drafting in of police to cities is just like in 1911.  There are promised to be 16,000 police on the streets of London tonight; 10,000 of these brought from outside the capital; nine constabularies are sending officers to London.  In some ways this is a reverse of 1911 when the Metropolitan Police provided officers to other parts of the country, but that was only because London remained quiet and the unrest was located in other cities.  However, it seems likely that cities will draw on constabularies in neighbouring more rural counties.  The UK has far fewer constabularies than in 1911, but we still have a very decentralised system.  I wonder if cities in the North East will bid to buy in police from the Cleveland Constabulary given that their former Chief Constable and Deputy Chief Constable, arrested this week for corruption, seem happy to sell their officers to the highest bidder. 

The call from the local authorities for troops to be on the streets of Croydon is just like the hysteria of 1911.  Fortunately local magistrates are no longer in a position simply to summon a local unit as they were 100 years ago.  Given how many people whine about Winston Churchill as Home Secretary centralising the despatch of troops in 1911 to tackle unrest, that is more the system we have now. The issue, ironically, is unlike in 1911, Britain is currently fighting in two wars.  Whilst we no longer have imperial possessions to defend and the commitment in Ireland is far from what it was in 1911, the British Army would be pretty stretched if it was mobilised to police the streets.  In 1911 the Territorial Army was not trusted to oppose rioters, but in 2011 given class fragmentation and the dependence the UK has on its part-time soldiers, they may, in fact be called up to combat unrest.  However, I would imagine even now they would be sent to areas outside those in which they were recruited to avoid any questions about opening fire on family members for individual soldiers.  Of course, these days the odd tank or armoured car can achieve what a squadron of hussars would have been needed to do in 1911, so they could be spread thinner.  They are also no longer dependent on the railway system to reach the scenes of unrest.  However, experiences with civil unrest in Northern Ireland in the 1970s show the hazards of such action. 

I am more familiar with the King's Regulations of 1908 than I am with the current Queen's Regulations, and I would be interested to hear what the procedure is for the military called on to deal with unrest.  I cannot believe it is to simply fire into the front row of rioters but with the power of modern rifles and sidearms, even firing over their heads would cause a hazard.  Of course, the British police, since the 1980s have possessed anti-riot equipment pretty much undreamt of in 1911.  There would be no need for police to fall back on furled raincoats, instead they have baton rounds, tear gas, shields of different types and in some locales, water cannon.  Cameron ought to be alert to coming down too hard on the rioters if he wants to secure his political legacy.  Misremembered accusations that Churchill had striking miners shot were to haunt him politically even forty years after the event.

Whilst it is clear that 2011 is not a re-run of 1911, there are similarities which furthermore makes me ask why no-one in power was ready for the unrest which broke out this month.  As I have noted before, I believe that they probably did foresee and are happy for it to run its course.  Cameron is clearly enjoying sounding off as the authoritarian leader in the media and no doubt taking steps to further reduce liberty in the UK.  Perhaps, I am simply giving him credit for foresight that is undeserved and he is simply even more incompetent than I believed.

The Morality of Bankruptcy

Bankruptcy, as I have noted before, has become a fact of life for many people in Britain over the past few years. Once it was just the realm of businesses, but now thousands of people each year are going personally bankrupt. This is not surprising in a country where food, fuel and accommodation are already among the most expensive in Europe and where salaries rise very slowly and 80% of the population earns below the average salary. The UK is a country where the companies which control the basics of living such as water, sewage, gas and electricity are making millions of pounds of profit whilst people are shoved into fuel and water poverty. Repossessions of houses have risen 48% in the past year and are set to increase meaning that more people are thrown on to the very diminished public housing sector and into private rented accommodation where landlords/ladies can abuse them and increasingly where rented properties are also being repossessed by banks leaving tenants homeless without even notification of the process going on until they are evicted, even if they have been paying their rent religiously throughout.

For our young people, we have got to a situation where you cannot get a job or at least a decent job at all without a degree. However, studying at a university is will put you into at least £20,000 (€32,000; US$40,000) in debt. It is clear why this is wanted, it effectually makes graduates indentured and dissuades them from doing anything risky or radical and certainly not protesting against the state. However, it does saddle them with debt from the start of their working lives (assuming they can get a job with unemployment rising sharply) and is effectively meaning that 5-15 years from now even fewer people will be able to afford to buy a house than at present and yet no-one is making provision to increase either the social housing or the private rental market. It can be seen as a big boost to those rentiers currently snapping up houses and flats put on the market by people who had a 'buy-to-let' property which they cannot keep up. It will put many more people into the hands of the unscrupulous (and you show me a decent landlord/lady, I have yet to meet one, they are greedy and mean and have no consideration at all for the tenants who provide their income treating them all as if they are criminals and seeking to screw every last penny from them) landlords/ladies. They will have increased demand in the next decade that they can exploit to keep rents (that have no control on them in the UK) high and the quality of what they provide very low.

You have to earn over £15,000 in order to start paying back a student loan and most graduates (and I spoke to a man who researches this) earn only £17,000 per year (about £7000 less than the national average salary). Of course the debt does not go away until either they reach 65 or are so disabled that they can no longer work. Even if they go abroad it hangs over them. I can see the rise of UK student loan exiles in France, Spain and the USA rising. Of course taking a degree should be seen as an investment in your future, but of course it is not, because now everyone has them. It is like having to pay £20,000 to buy a school-leaving certificate. Rather for UK people it is a beginning of the process of British society draining as much money from them as possible with giving minimum back. We are the donors to keep the wealthy very rich. There is no sense that you can ever be without debt in the UK. You are hooked up to the blood-draining device at the age of 16 and are never let free because if you were then some rich people might actually have to work for their income rather than suck it from you. I can see where the writers of 'The Matrix' got their idea for humanity being a resource drained by parasitic controllers!

Currently there is one escape from all these pressures on people: bankruptcy. Though student loans are exempt from bankruptcy. Now, I have noted a trend to try and plug this gap. Of course bankruptcy is not the easy solution. It means that for six years you will find it very difficult to get credit for a mortgage, a car or anything and in the UK that effectively bars you from purchasing so many things. Bankruptcy also bars you from entering professions such as the law or accountancy, as if most of us had a chance of getting into either of those, though they are popular with graduates, so for them this is an issue. Also many of your possessions will be taken, that new computer and that ipod and the DVD player will no longer be yours. You can have old furniture and an old car (well I am in a fine position, my car is now 11 years old and rusting and my furniture was second hand when I got it 6 years ago and is coming apart, I can afford nothing newer). Make sure no-one dies and leaves you an inheritance while you are bankrupt because that too will be taken. Avoid winning the lottery too, unless it is such a big win that it can wipe out your debts. So bankruptcy is a way out but it is not an easy way or a decision that is taken lightly.

Now, to stop people using bankruptcy to escape the indenturement that society wants to shackle them with, I have noticed that people have started talking about how 'immoral' bankruptcy is. I heard this first from the Inland Revenue's sickly-named Time-To-Pay Helpline. If you ever want to be told how foolish you are and how you are trying to cheat the state and are a despicable you are and do not happen to have an irascible elderly relative handy then call these people up. They portray you as a tax cheat if you dare even mention bankruptcy. I noticed even the Money section of 'The Guardian' talks of the questionable 'morality' of bankruptcy. Putting this moral censure on people is utterly perverse. Who questions the morality of utility company and petrol company bosses awarding themselves million pound bonuses as they squeeze ordinary people into poverty? Who questions the morality of landlords/ladies who charge high rents and then provide no service to their tenants and then come after them for fictitious charges?

In the UK it is clear that the perspective on morality has become totally twisted. What is clearly moral now in the view of the civil service and the media is to exploit ordinary people to the fullest extent that you can. It is no longer a question of 'I'm Alright Jack', what we are being told to adopt is 'I'm Alright Jack, but I must get more money from you and you are going to suffer as a consequence'. Any attempt to escape from such rapacious behaviour is being condemned. In the UK society insists that you make yourself amenable to being exploited and to not having a stable let alone comfortable life. If you dare challenge your exploitation then you are the ones portrayed as immoral. This is sick. This is a sick society, stay away from it if you have any sense.