London's burning

It was very surreal, last week, to be in Nigeria – a country where I have frequently feared, and now come to expect, unrest – and to be reading reports of riots, looting and general chaos on the streets of the UK. If a similar thing were to happen over here (and there have been various small incidents while we have been here, not to mention the widespread election violence while we were out of the country), I would panic, frankly. Information would be shared quickly with the organisations we are working with, security advice would be issued, people would be evacuated or advised to stay at home all day to avoid any potential trouble (although the Nigerians tend, largely, to go about their business as usual).

And yet, here I was reading about events in my own country, and reading Facebook updates describing how friends and family were having to go about their own lives amid the chaos, worrying about their commuter route taking them through planned riots, walking past looters in broad daylight on their high streets, trying to be safely tucked up at home by dinner time. I can’t imagine how I would have reacted to experiencing a breakdown of law and order in my own country – it’s something I think I had compartmentalised to my life in Nigeria.

This isn’t a political blog, but I can’t not comment on the situation in my own country as I see it from over here. And frankly, from what I have been able to read on the internet, I am deeply saddened by the reaction to the riots and looting.

I am appalled by the Prime Minister’s official response to the events of last week. To divide the country into ‘them and us’, to say that “Those thugs…do not represent us, nor do they represent our young people – and they will not drag us down” is to further alienate those people who already feel they have so little part to play in society that they feel no shame in taking what they can get with little thought for how it might affect others.

In one video of looting in Clapham, I watched teenage girls carrying boxes out of Currys. The Sky News journalist filming it on his phone asks “Why are you doing this?”; their answer: “We’re getting our taxes back.” Now, I don’t know if those girls pay taxes or not, and I think we can be pretty sure that their argument hasn’t been thought through in terms of what taxes are for, how they are spent and whether stealing a telly from a high street store will in any way reclaim the money that has been taken out of their pay packet. But if you de-code that statement, I think the message is clear: “Society has done f**ck all for us, so we’re taking what we can when we can get”.

As an individual, I want to be someone who, as a first instinct, looks kindly on other people and their behaviour and feels compassion. I want to be someone who has empathy with others, rather than condemning. I want to be someone who, when faced with a difficulty with another human being, looks first to myself and asks whether I am the cause of the problem and/or whether I can do anything to help the situation, regardless of blame. And that’s the kind of society I want to live in.

Even as a non-parent, I know that if a child misbehaves, you don’t immediately withdraw all of its privileges, because then the child has no incentive to cease the bad behaviour – they have nothing left to lose. And so it is with those members of our society who feel they have nothing and who have taken the chance to act out. If we respond to this behaviour by cutting their benefits, evicting their parents (has Cameron gone totally insane?!?) and further shutting them out of society, what motivation will they have to in any way uphold the social contract? It can only serve to further alienate these groups and to make matters worse. It’s the political equivalent of saying “Well, if you don’t know, I’m not going to tell you.” – “Well, if you’ve got so little stake in society that you’re actively destroying law and order, we’ll make you even less a part of society. So there.”

Now, I’m not saying that looters should be rewarded or put into highly funded school-holiday schemes to distract them from the trainers in Foot Locker, but what I am saying is this: to dismiss and hold in disdain these people as “evil” or “scum”, and to distance ourselves from them is only going to make matters worse. If we believe in society, then we’re all in it together – the good, the bad and the ugly. When people do wrong, we have a system of penalties and – to some extent – reform. We believe that people can change with the right support. We believe that people are not inherently good or bad, but that we all perform actions which fall into both categories. Society is about trying to create a context in which people can thrive, in which we support each other to do well, in which we accept that people are different from us and will behave differently; it’s not about judging people on individual actions and throwing them away when they do not perform to our own exacting standards. In fact, the only time when we really remove someone from our society is when we believe them to be so psychologically disturbed that they are a danger to themselves and/or others – mass murderers, and the like. (Don’t even get me started on the current movement to bring back the death penalty.)

Isn’t it a bit like a marriage? (Of which Mr Cameron is such a fan.) You don’t rush to the divorce lawyer as soon as your spouse does something you don’t like – you made a commitment, you signed a contract, and you’re in it for the long-haul. Together. You find ways to work things out, to live with each other, to accept each other’s differences; you forgive, you try to empathise, you try to see both sides rather than seeing things in black and white. In short, you take each other for better or worse, flaws and all, the whole package, and you accept that the other person isn’t always going to do things you like, but that those elements are part of what makes the whole person you married.

These “thugs” are part of our society whether we like it or not. As well as making sure our criminal justice system is in healthy, working order (not something we can be sure of right now) and able to deal with the penalties which need to be paid, we also need to accept these people, to try to empathise with them and to work out what has caused them to behave in this way. The Prime Minister himself ended his recent speech by saying “There is no them and us – there is us. We are all in this together”; unfortunately, he was talking about the government and the citizens – he still clearly believes that this new united ‘us’ is firmly pitched against the evil ‘them’ who haven’t behaved as we would have like them to.