Tim Williams

I haven’t said this in recent years and possibly ever:two cheers for Tony Blair.Come to think of it, possibly one and a half.His comments on the recent riots made some sense to me but were also typically self serving. Essentially, he thinks that blaming the riots on a general moral malaise is wrong and indeed leads to bad policy. Rather he blames a minority of disaffected youth who live lives ‘outside the social mainstream’. The best policy therefore is to target that minority with policy interventions – running from better policing through to welfare penalties on the harder side and parenting lessons on the softer side.

The self serving essence to this is obvious to seasoned Blair watchers. One:it’s not his fault as the rioters were not , as has been said by many on the Right, Blair’s children. They were ‘not mainstream’ as presumably the mainstream is OK and thus are ‘his ‘ children. Secondly, his ‘respect agenda’ from 6 years ago was on the right lines but Gordon (‘evil Gordon’, the dark brooding cloud which prevented Blair’s sun from shining more consistently down on us) got in the way. Gordon betrayed the true path when PM. So, Blair was right ,everyone else was wrong .

It’s only ‘two cheers for Tony or maybe 1.5’ however . This is because whilst I buy his cool response to the moral panic being set off about the rioting and I endorse the identification of a particularly anti-social milieu which provided some of the personnel for the rioters, he clearly wants to let both himself off the hook and his friends in the banking world for any part in the ‘de-moralisation’ of the UK which I see as part of the provocation for the riots.

To be clear:the riots were ignited by short term factors and exacerbated by stupid and seemingly cowardly police tactics. Some of the rioters were clearly the kind of people described by Blair. But fires only start when the tinder has been nurtured by dry weather and the general climate in England was sullen and discontented before any police shots were fired at an apparently unarmed bad man in Tottenham. Idle hands make work for the devil after all and with youth unemployment in London at 25% there is plenty of idleness.

I repeat my proposition of last week. The immoral but unpunished UK elite in the City and in Parliament have left the UK morally, as well as economically, depressed and confused .This has an effect on the behaviour of the rest of society. The riots were a by-product of that ‘de-moralisation’ and it’s wrong-headed to ignore it. We need to do a lot more to repair this moral order than imprison people for looting 85p bottles of mineral water.We also need to do more than ‘kettle’ and harass the group of really dysfunctional families in each neighbourhood which Blair wanted to focus on at the time of the Respect agenda.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m no bleeding heart liberal on the anti social underclass. They have long been the enemy of progress and indeed of the real working class that’s still left. It’s just that much of the problem is actually an economic one and has to do with the collapse in work opportunities for unskilled male labour .And with the collapse of work came the ending of one key avenue to socialisation for otherwise feral youth. Yes ,single parenthood doesn’t help and yes bad schooling makes things worse and god knows welfare can stop people accessing jobs.But,there just aren’t enough accessible well paid jobs for the unskilled in the UK. And that is a major source of our ‘moral’ problem.

My stress on ‘England’ was deliberate. Scottish and Welsh voices have been raised saying that they don’t have the same problems there and that’s why the riots never happened.This is also self-serving and wrong. I agree rather with my colleague and friend Professor Dave Adamson in Wales who got into a bit of bother for saying Wales was lucky not to have a riot as we have many of the same problems and indeed lots of young people who are unemployable now.

The Welsh children’s commissioner had a go at him for ‘writing off a generation’ but Dave was right. Dave was actually saying that we only escaped the riots in Wales because although we have urban problems we don’t have an urban scale so that towns are just too small to create the conditions of anonymity in which rioters thrive.

London’s town centres are big and no-one really knows you that well.It’s not as visible a terrain as a Valleys town and the familiarity of the latter inhibited anomic behaviour. But do not think we don’t have the same problems as the English inner city. We do – and have even less prospect of jobs. Dave also stressed that in a place like Merthyr where teenagers know there are no jobs for them at 18, performance at school goes off the rails widely at 13 and 14. We then blames those kids for ‘their failure’ when the failure is that of the national economy and its political leaders. His call was actually for Wales to lift its game to provide jobs for those kids who are not going to riot but are as lost as any stone throwing oik on the streets of Hackney.I agree.I just don’t see any evidence that Wales is going to lift its game and make that happen.

The task in the Valleys of Wales is enormous. A recent study showed that just to bring worklessness levels up to the UK average there would take 70,000 new jobs – in an area which has been losing net jobs for decades.

The result ? Poverty,poor and worsening social and health outcomes – and no prospect of ‘regeneration’. Come to think of it ,the place needs a revolution not a riot.Neither sound Welsh to me, sadly.

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