The UK's Spouse Visa Regulations: the Conservatives at their worst

The government's rules on granting visas to non-EU spouses of British citizens seem to sum up pretty well all the negative aspects of the Conservative government.

An article in "The Guardian" returns to this sore issue, reminding us of what low depths that the Tories are capable of sinking of when dealing with their own people. The rules are so stringent, they make The UK's rules comparable with the immigration rules of some of the worst authoritarian regimes. Worse, they effectively make British people who wish to marry anyone from outside the EU (which obviously includes The USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) exiles from their own country, simply for implementing a basic human right, unless they are wealthy.

Why were these new laws introduced in the first place? The official reason is to reduce "benefit fraud" and foreigners "living off the state", as part of Cameron's impossible-to-achieve "pledge" to reduce annual immigration to the "tens of thousands" (more on Cameron's broken promises here). But the rules now applied are more stringent (and nonsensical) than those in The USA or even Australia. The general consensus is that the rules that prohibit Briton's earning less than approx. £18,000 from bringing their spouses to The UK are really designed to reduce the disproportionate number of Brits of Pakistani and Indian descent from bringing over their cousins in arranged marriages from the subcontinent. That, and to discourage the perceived problem of Brits marrying "brides-to-order" (for want of a less un-PC phrase) from places like the Far East and the former Soviet Union.

Whatever the motivation for these changes, this rule is really about appeasing the Conservatives' party base, as well as the instincts of "The Daily Mail", when it comes to immigration. The facts of the matter are irrelevant; it's the perception of "a problem" that counts.

A system designed to destroy the family

Apart from the financial limits to the rules, there are other rules, also far stricter than other comparable countries, that compound the injustice.

There is also the rule about children, so that the salary base escalates with every child in the Briton's family.

There is also the rule that means that the salary measured must be earned by the "sponsor" (the Brit), rather than the spouse; there is no flexibility if, for example, the foreign spouse earns a higher salary to offset if the Brits' salary is lower than the threshold.
Furthermore, there can be no "co-sponsor" (like in The USA and elsewhere), such as wealthier parents, that can act as a form of financial "insurance" for the couple.

The British "sponsor" must also have paid employment in The UK when the couple live there (i.e. for some time before the foreign spouse arrives).

The British "sponsor" can only get around these rules if they have savings in their account equivalent to more than double (or nearly triple) the average annual salary in The UK.

Lastly, if the "sponsor's" situation changes during the two years the couple are in The UK (such as losing a job), this would effectively condemn any chance of their spouse staying in The UK after their initial two-year "probationary period".

Then there are the many rules designed to catch out the foreign spouses, but there isn't time to go into them all here. It's enough to say that from the initial application of a spouse visa, the Briton and their non-EU spouse are assumed guilty of deception until they can prove they are an honest (and well-financed) married couple.

Such an ordeal would test the strongest of relationships; it is not surprising that some would break down under the stresses of such a system. Children are deprived of their parents for months on end under such a system. Under the guise of defending Britain against "sham marriages", they implement rules that break the one of the most fundamental human rights in the world: the right to choose who you want to live your life with, and the right to live in your own country with the person you wish.

A Kafkaesque nightmare 

These rules display the Conservatives are their most heartless as well as their most nonsensical.

Some might say "a person can't expect the state the fund your relationship choices". Well, The USA and The EU don't have a problem with that idea, within reasonable limits. As mentioned earlier, The USA see that it is reasonable to maintain the coherence of the family unit, and allow a "co-sponsor" of a married American an a foreign spouse living the The USA.
The EU's attitudes are even more humane: according to EU law (which The UK government flouts to implement these nonsensical rules) any EU citizen cannot be denied the right to live in the EU without his spouse, regardless of where they are from. This is again to preserve the sanctity of the family; even more important if they are children involved.

It's because of these EU rules that there is a way around the UK government's rules. As any Briton is also an EU citizen, they can simply move to any other EU country (such and the Republic Of Ireland) and live there with their non-EU spouse. These are the Kafkaesque lengths that the Conservatives are pushing their own people to in order to be happily married.
This is just one of a catalogue of Conservative disasters committed while in government. And while Brits who marry anyone from outside the EU are subjected to these inhumane restrictions (creating a whole subset of British "marriage exiles"), any other EU family is free to move into The UK without any legal restriction.

Such a situation invites comparisons (if perhaps over-indulgently) to political and economic refugees. Certainly, no other Western developed country has such an inhumane and cynical attitude towards foreign marriage. While those in the developing world have been banished from their own countries for their political beliefs, thousands of Brits are being forced to live outside their home country for their relationship choices.

The UK government is effectively saying: "You Can Only Marry Who We Say You Can". If you don't, then prepare to suffer the consequences.

The government introduces these rules to avoid "marriages of convenience": and yet the government encourages Britons to marry only people who they consider "convenient" for themselves. When the government talks about "marriages of convenience", it simply means it objects to marriages inconvenient to its interests.

If there was one way for the government to encourage British people become more cynical in their relations towards each other, foreigners and the institution of marriage, this certainly would be one way to achieve it.

And this, from the supposed party of "family values".

Adoption, Narcissism and psychopathy

I wrote at the start of the month here about the relationship between family breakdown, the individualist structure of modern society, and narcissism. I said there that there seemed to be conclusive anecdotal and scientific evidence that suggested a link between narcissism formed in early childhood, and the dysfunction of the parental unit.
 In other words, the perceived rise of individualism and the "me" culture in modern society I saw as stemming from the rise of the "baby boom" after the Second World War, and the erosion of the stable family unit/parenting skills. Thus when the parents themselves become narcissistic, the children they raise are bound be be at a higher than average risk of developing the same (or even worse) psychological disorders.

We know now that many psychological disorders, such as narcissism, ASPD and psychopathy, have their origins in early childhood. Narcissism (and psychopathy), apart from any biological factors, stem from an unstable and dysfunctional parental relationship in a child's first years. The issue is even more complicated when the child is an adoptee or foster child.

For decades, adoptions have been seen by many governments as the answer to the problem of unwanted children; either as the result of family poverty, rape, or any number of other social factors. It seems clear that as the level of social instability increases and destroys the family unit (as I mentioned in the previously-related article), the rate unwanted children is bound to increase by a correlating amount.
Adoption was seen by governments and psychologists as providing a stable family environment (provided the parents-to-be were properly screened) that allowed the adoptee the right environment to develop healthily. However, more recent research has revealed a previously-unexplored reality. That although many adopted children do develop normally, an alarmingly-disproportionate number of them develop psychological disorders - such as narcissism, and in extreme cases, psychopathy.

A closer look at the prison population, and the biographies of notorious serial killers, tells us a different story to the one told by government. Many of the most notorious serial killers were adopted children; and the proportion of adoptees in the prison population (and violent offenders) is significantly higher (as much as five times higher) than their proportion of the general population. The fact that adoptees feature so disproportionately in crime statistics is highly revealing, as well as an indictment of the how badly this issue is downplayed.

There are two contributing factors to this trend.
Because adopted children are severed from their biological mother, the damage this does to the baby had been previously-downplayed (partly because of the obvious difficulty of analyzing the psychology of newly-born babies). Lacking a mother's warmth is a huge blow to the infant's needs, and makes it more likely that the baby will become either self-absorbed or worse if not remedied quickly. So from the start, adoptees are psychologically fragile, even before we factor into it the prospective parents.
Next is the psychology of the adopting parents themselves. What is the real motive for them wanting the child? This factor cannot be emphasized strongly enough, and can make the difference between a well-adjusted adoptee, and mal-adjusted one. Adopting parents who want a child for the sake of their own vanity (such as to fill a void in their life, or as a source of love) are running the risk of making the adoptee's psychology even more dysfunctional, and making the likelihood of the child developing narcissistic/psychopathic traits all the more certain. Narcissistic parents and parenting makes the child feel like they are looking after two adult children. Such parents do not really "love" their adopted children, they need them, as a form of Narcissistic Supply. A parent-to-be who already has Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) is the last person who should be responsible for the upbringing of an adoptee. As a result, the adoptee's psychology becomes even more self-centred and narcissistic: the worse possible result. If the child is then not given a proper moral grounding either, the child can even develop into a psychopath.
Then there is also the factor of the social conditions of the parents themselves: adopted children raised with parents from a socially-deprived background, regardless of good intentions, may well do more harm than good. As mentioned in the previous post on this issue, social deprivation and economic instability can cause great psychological harm to the already-insecure mental health of an adoptee.

Set with the wrong-minded parents in the wrong social conditions, an adopted child can be akin to a psychological time-bomb. 

This is why emphasis should be put on doing extensive research into the motives and social background of the prospective parents as well as the child, in order to avoid such a situation. Unfortunately, the damage for many has already been done, as any trawl through adoption forums can tell you.

I explained in my article "Individualism, Narcissism and Psychopathy" how modern society has helped to gestate these psychological disorders. Social breakdown creates broken families; broken families create unwanted children; unwanted children can become wanted by insecure and narcissistic "parents"; and the adopted children's psychology becomes even more dysfunctional.

This is a vicious circle, and one that even the UK government is exacerbating. The Education Minister, Micheal Gove (an adopted child, with a personality possibly indicative of some form of narcissism/psychopathy) is eager to make it easier for parents to adopt children. The horrible irony is not lost here: that a man who was an adopted child, and possible psychopath, wishes to make it easier for other adopted children to become potential psychopaths.

Perhaps there is a method to the madness after all.

A more general description of the main attributes of Psychopathy, see here.

Individualism, Narcissism, and psychopathy in modern society

The rise of the culture of individualism has been blamed for the breakdown of the family unit in the Western world over the last forty years. This is nothing new, and there have been many studies done over the years on the subject. I don't want to go over the same ground; instead, I am more interested in the psychological grounding of this trend, and the psychological implications it has had on society, that we can see all around us, under the surface.

I said that individualism has caused the breakdown of the family, but Western society's change began in the "baby boom" generation after the Second World War. That came about at the same time as unprecedented levels of rising prosperity in Western society, allowing children in the West to experience previously-unknown levels of parental attention. By the sixties, this prosperity created a greater emphasis on "self-improvement" and "individual achievement" in children, resulting in a greater degree of people's self-awareness generally. This culture of self-expression and exploration, and a greater tolerance of diversity of thought therefore created an unprecedented level of narcissism in children growing up in this social environment.
As long as this occurred at the same time as a healthy economy, this was not overtly harmful to society. The social culture of the West was radically different by the end of the sixties than what existed ten years previously, and was a direct result of both rising prosperity and rising self-awareness in Western society.
But by the seventies, the economy had become unstable, and one half of the equation (improving social conditions and rising self-awareness) had been destroyed. The effect on society was almost immediate: a culture of rising self-awareness had now grown to one of increasing narcissism, but in an unstable socio-economic climate. The collective psychology of Western society now became more dysfunctional, as an increasingly narcissistic society was unable to properly deal with a change in economic circumstances. The result was more family breakdown, and more crime. Thus children born of narcissistic parents (such as those in the social conditions of the "baby boom" generation) are even more likely to be narcissistic, if not outright psychopathic, when you combine narcissistic parenting with an unstable social environment.

When I talk about "narcissism", we mean Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD), which, with Anti-Social Personality Disorder (ASPD), is one half of the psychological conditions required to create Psychopathy. I wrote here about what the medical definition of psychopathy is, as an (until recently) under-examined and virulent psychological plague on society, and how it can be seen as the cause of much of the problems in human society.
Narcissism (NPD) is largely a result of environmental factors: a combination of parental dominance/indifference/excessive adoration and/or abuse in the child's formative years. Instability in the family unit, such as separation and parental conflict also contribute to the problem. Narcissism results from the child's inability to see healthy and suitable psychological support from the parents and elders, as mentioned: the child then begins to see itself as the only reliable place to receive support, becomes self-absorbed and misanthropic. A narcissistic personality sees itself as grandiose, entitled to superior treatment, and abusive towards others it sees as inferior to itself (i.e. everyone), who it sees more as objects to be used rather than real people. A narcissist cannot take criticism easily, and refuses to take responsibility for his own actions; he finds it difficult to focus on one task (be it a job or a relationship) for a long time, as his grandiose nature makes it difficult to "waste" time on what he sees as fruitless pursuits. Cynical towards humankind in general, he finds it hard to trust people, and thus have many real friendships; superficial, his emotions are shallow and not to be taken at face value. In personal relationships, the narcissist uses partners as objects of his own amusement, causing emotional distress and potentially long-last psychological damage.
The above characteristics, when combined with ASPD (Anti-Social Personality Disorder) create the dysfunctional and amoral personality of a psychopath.

The increase in economic instability in the seventies therefore created the knock-on effect of familial instability, exacerbating the conditions suitable for incubating NPD in children. This effect is then multiplied over the generations; parents born of the "baby boom" generation, potentially narcissistic and dysfunctional in their own right, made the likelihood of causing NPD in their children all the more possible. Furthermore, there is plenty of evidence to link the rise in consumerism as part of the modern Capitalist economy over the last forty years with the concurrent reported steep rise in narcissism in society.

The unstable economic climate of the seventies also destroyed the "Post-war Consensus" in the West; Western economies, such at the USA and UK in particular, saw the former Keynesian economic model as discredited. Monetarism, which emphasized the downsizing of government and social bonds, and the emphasis on individualist pursuit, became the new model to follow. While the economy improved over the next twenty-five years in both the USA and UK, the levels of inequality increased to unprecedented levels - the gap between the salary of the average CEO and his workers had increased tenfold in thirty years, while the salary of the average worker had only slightly improved, if at all, in real terms. For those at the bottom ten per cent, their earnings have fallen.

Monetarism, and the moral philosophy of Ayn Rand that inspired it, may even be compared with the economics and ideology of psychopathy put into practice. Psychopaths, because they are amoral, cunning, ambitious and promiscuous, act like a psychological plague on human society; literally spreading their psychopathic seed, and the unstable family conditions required for it to gestate in their offspring, they create more psychopaths in their unloved and misanthropic children.
Psychopaths cause chaos, and want to cause chaos because they gain pleasure and power from it, in equal measure. The Monetarist economic model, and its contemporary successors in the USA and the UK (The Tea Party, formed by the billionaire Koch brothers; and the Conservative government, intent on transforming and shrinking the public sector), is an ideological justification for the destruction of the social unit, and for destroying belief in government overall. 
Like Ayn Rand's ideology, Monetarism justifies itself by saying it advances individual aspiration, innovation  and achievement, like the Capitalist economies of medieval states like the Venetian Republic did, for example. This is a misnomer, and a smokescreen. For a start, the Venetian Republic was much more state-controlled than contemporary capitalists like to admit, as well as creating some progressive social measures to improve society (such as a rudimentary form of "NHS"). Secondly, by focusing on individualism as the primary method of improving the economy and society, it becomes an inherently misanthropic ideology; as all motives are seen through pure self-interest, cynicism in human nature becomes the norm. If people exist to simply get what they can more themselves, the motivation for co-operation decreases.
Ayn Rand argued that co-operation in society only exists through mutual self-interest: companies caring for the wider environment, for example, because they see the long-term benefits. But there is little evidence for this in reality. Companies are far more likely to do the bare minimum to benefit society, and will only behave in an altruistic way when compelled by government instruction; the same is true for individuals when there is no altruist motive. Rand's book, "The Virtue Of Selfishness" makes such counter-intuitive logic (that self-interest benefits society, while altruism destroys it), and turns the moral compass of society on its head. Thus people are poor simply through their own actions, people are made rich through purely their own actions, and charity becomes a counter-productive indulgence (as Ayn Rand thought herself).
Thus caring selflessly for others is akin to stupidity (if not outright evil), and human motive is reduced to pure self-interest: "he's helping me because he wants something, not because he cares about me", for example.

This is why Conservatives always emphasize self-improvement as the best method out of poverty, while conveniently ignoring the natural advantage of the wealth which they were born into. It is no coincidence that Conservatives are more likely to be rich; those that were not already born into comfort and wealth, most likely made their wealth through moral flexibility, if not outright ruthlessness and inhumanity. In other words, they are likely to be Narcissists, if not outright Psychopaths.

An economy based on these principles is most likely to create social inequality and sporadic bouts of  economic chaos, which inevitably benefits those already at the top. The West, especially the USA and UK (where Monetarist policies are at their most virulent), has therefore created an individualist (and more psychopathic) society that is predisposed to perpetuate itself; greater individualism in society, greater family dysfunction, and greater economic instability are all conditions that will create a greater frequency of NPD and Psychopathy in society as a whole, which will create further chaos, and so on.

There is also much that links the psychopathic factors in Capitalism with that of the earlier human hunter-gatherer instinct; and in this sense, Capitalism is simply an adaptation of the hunter-gatherer mentality applied to a higher stage of evolution.

In other words, using this projection, narcissism and psychopathy will continue to grow like a virus throughout Capitalist society as long as the social and economic conditions allow it to.

How To Raise A Generation Of Psychopaths

In my last post, I talked about why it was wrong to blame "Liberalism" for the August riots, saying that both the left and right who had part of the correct answer.

The left blame social deprivation and government under-investment; the right blame a culture of liberal indulgence. Both are correct, but I want to explain exactly why, and how this creates a psychopathic psychology in some of our youngsters.

Listening to young people who are also from deprived backgrounds, asked why they chose not to get involved in the riots, they shrugged and said "Cos I had good parents, I guess". If you want to hear why it's happening, ask those who choose NOT to do it, then the answer will become clearer.

Listening to parents who choose not to discipline their children, one of them said "Because the government doesn't give me the right to be a proper parent". What this parent means, is that because of a culture that defends the right of the child, the parents feels (and in a legal sense, this could be true) that they are subordinate to the rights of their children.

The extention of the rights of the child is one of the major things (as well as women's rights and the rights of gays and ethnic minorities) that seperates modern times from decades such as the 1950s and earlier, when children were beaten behind closed doors. Some on the right wish for a return to those values; it that would be simplistic and lazy thinking, as it ignores the truth that while for some children raised in that environment it enforced a strong discipline and fear of punishment, it gave a green light to any parent of a violent temper to indulge their weaknesses onto their offspring. So let's not return to that era.

The historic result of that was the "baby boomer" generation, who wanted everything to be better for their children; a harmless enough wish, but not when implemented at a goverment-sanctioned level.

The "rights" pendulum swung to the other extreme, where any teacher was obliged to tell social services of any incident of parental violence reported by children. Furthermore, teachers themselves could be reported for any perceived "violence" in the classroom. Added to that, children are legally immune from effective punishment, and those punishments that exist are more influenced by preventative "behavioral science".

In this environment, with children being told that they are worth more than the earth, and at the same time being protected by law from their own parents, a certain psychology develops in the mind of the child. But more on that later.

I should also mention the fact that since the 1950s, and especially in the last thirty years, the gap between the top ten percent and the bottom ten percent has grown to an unbridgeable gulf. It is therefore not surprising if some of the parents at the bottom therefore think that since the government has taken away their rights as parents and transferred them to their children, they have a common excuse to hand the parenting of their children onto the government themselves, and society in general. So a culture of government dependency is born. And also a culture of lack of responsibility. The children raised in the "sink estates have few real chances at the advancement that has been fed into and encouraged by their parents' generation; the frustration grows, with a psychology of interal all-empowerment and external impotence.

So some parents feel disempowered by the law; some parents use that same sense of disempowerment as an excuse to abrogate on their responsibilities; and many parents feel the need to indulge their children (either because they instinctively feel the need to give a better upbringing than they got themselves, or simply through lazy discipline). Either way, it's the children who are psychologically changed from that.

Add something else to this psychological cocktail: as well as the growing gap between rich and poor (by many estimates, one of the largest in the developed world), there is the change in the moral guide that keeps our culture together; I'm talking about amoral materialist capitalism.

This may seem like an easy target, but it's also a pertinent question. Why did so many teenagers go on a mass looting spree (in the French riots, they burned cars rather than looted, although that may also be because their deprived neighbourhoods had so few shops ready to loot) rather than indulge in other violent activities?

They did so because, as many of them put it, it was their way to stick it to the rich and get their own back. For the past thirty years in particular, British culture has been fed a morality of getting rich by any means; the only key to happiness is to get rich, and get lots of stuff. Some on the left blame Thatcher's long legacy for these riots. Again, that's too simplistic, as I've mentioned in the points above; there are a number of components that all need to be in place, rather like a necessary compound to make a dangerous substance.

They all need to be in place in order for this to happen. But now, in August 2011, it DID happen.

So, to summarise: we created a generation of youngsters, many of whom have no sense of right or wrong; who have a sense all-powerful impunity; who feel conversely angry and disconnected from the success enjoyed by those celebrated in the media, and the false sense of opportunity encouraged by their parents.

In other words, these are the bones of the psychology of a psychopath. They are fearless; boundless; and angry.

This is contemporary Britain's bastard creation: a "lost" generation, disconnected from their parents; disconnected from morality; disconnected from material reality. Their only connection is to their peers, the "gang", and whatever they can grab for themselves. Without role models, the only "role model" is the one they create from fake "media reality".

A Clockwork Orange, come to life.

The English Riots and the "Death Of Liberalism"

So now that the smoke has disappated, the police are in force, and calm has been restored to the streets, the inquest has begun. Or the blame game. Depends on your point of view.

The riots of the past four days have been the worst in the UK (and possibly in Europe) for decades. Certainly, I doubt there has been such widespread breakdown of law and order in Britain for a hundred years or more. During the Depression, I didn't read of any such looting and destruction ever happening on such a scale as England has witnessed in the last week.

Why did it happen, and what can we do to prevent it from being repeated? This is what people from opposite ends of the political spectrum have been debating endlessly.

The Conservatives, not surprisingly, and those at the extreme right, say that a culture of Liberalism is to blame. When there is a culture of criminals being able to claim benefits from the state, and when there is a culture of lack of responsibility in general, this feeds into this wicked cycle of a breakdown of values.

On the "liberal" left, people like Ken Livingstone have been talking of a culture of cuts creating anger and resentment from the poor, added to the decades of underinvestment and a culture of ignorance that institutions such as the police and the government have shown to the poor.

Clearly, both of these views can't be completely right. Blaming "liberalism" completely does not provide the full picture; there are plenty of other "liberal" countries in the world that have not had riots - Scandinavia being the obvious one; Germany also provides a fairly positive example (considering that nearly ten percent of the German population is ethnic Turkish, there are relatively few racial issues; though the fact that Germany is culturally pacifist since the Second World War also helps).

At the same time, emphasizing social issues as a root cause (as the left does) also fails to deal with the full issue; again, there is plenty of poverty in the developed world as a whole, yet there has been no similar breakdown in law and order elsewhere on this scale.

The closest comparison is the French riots in the middle of the 2000s (when Sarkozy was the interior minister); that went on for weeks, and the spark was also a controversial death blamed on the police.

As most of our leading politiicans have pointed out (rightly, as I mentioned in my previous post), it is about a gang culture, that has grown out of a lack of moral leadership from parents and other authority figures.

This issue cannot be blamed on the left or right, because being taught social and moral responsibility is not a political issue; it is a family issue. If parents choose to abrogate their responsibilities as parents, that is not only their problem, it becomes a social problem. It is how children turn into potential criminals; it is how children turn into potential sociopaths.

So it would be wrong to blame a "culture of liberalism" for these riots; nowhere does liberalism as an ideology tell parents that they have the right to not be parents. This is not about liberalism or conservatism, this is about basic parental responsibilty and children being given positive moral examples from their family.

There are plenty of families struggling in poverty because of social deprivation that bring up perfectly good, law-abiding children. Interestingly, many of those children are the families of immigrants; judging from some of the teenagers seen looting and rioting, many of them were not the children of immigrants - they were the children of "chavs".

It depends on the moral code that the parents teach their children; if they tell their children that it is OK to commit crime because they are poor, then these parents are passing on their own responsibilities to society; if they choose not to care what their children are doing once they walk out the door of their home, they are no longer acting as parents.

Any decent person, regardless of political persuasion, I think would find it difficult to argue with that. The scenes in Peckham, where people were going out of their way NOT to blame multiculturalism for the riots, shows us that some people at least, do not want to find quick scapegoats for the unrest. On the other hand, the scenes in the London suburb of Eltham, where vigilanteism was hijacked by the thugs of the anti-immigrant English Defence League, was another reminder that some people ARE susceptible to the easy answers of reactionary politics.

So, Liberalism is far from dead; but Liberalism was never about excusing common criminality and parental ignorance. Only an anarchist or nihilist would support the actions of the past few days in England.

Liberalism is about giving people the freedom to do want they want within the commonly accepted boundaries of lawful behavior; it is about accepting that the market does not provide all the answers for society, and that people sometimes need goverment to provide services that the private sector cannot fairly provide; it is about goverment providing a helping hand where needed to those who follow the law and respect others, while providing an effective punishment to those who do not.

Riots, Damned Riots, and Revolutions

Tottenham, London, can now be added to the list of cities in the Western world (i.e Europe and America) that have seen riots in recent years.

In the last week, even Tel Aviv, Israel (of all places) has joined the ranks of the more famous anarchy-prone metropoli such as Athens an Madrid, to name two.

That's not to mention the riots and civil strife happening on a daily basis in Syria, sporadically in Yemen, Egypt; civil war in Libya etc. etc.

Of course, the riots of the last few years each have there own roots, and are not directly related to each other, and I don't want to go into each set of events in too much detail, for the sake of space. But some things are worth talking about.

Starting most recent first, the riots in Tottenham and around.

It was the shooting of an armed criminal with gang links a few days before that was meant to be the spark. A protest walk in the Tottenham high street became hijacked by what appear to have been gang elements (many of them immigrant origin), and the end result was nearly twelve hours of mayhem in three seperate locations in the Haringey district of North London, resulting in looted and burned out shops, supermakets and retail outlets, as well as burned out police cars and a bus.

It may be tempting to ink these riots to those happening around the same time in places like Tel Aviv, Athens and Madrid. Tempting, but not entirely fair or accurate. The riots/ demonstrations in these other places are people (either young or old, or both) venting their frustration at their respective government's response to the economic and social effects of the financial crisis - unemployment, rising prices, cost of living etc.

In the case of the Tottenham riots, there are direct criminal elements involved. In that respect in bears a closer resemblance to the riots that took place in France several years ago (long before the financial crisis, as I remember); a teenager of North African origin was killed by a policeman; riots broke out across some deprived suburbs of Paris, quickly multiplying to other cities around France (Sarkozy called the rioters "scum" at the time); it got to the extent that by the tail end of weeks of the national riots there were "only" 1,000 cars that had been burned out in one day.

Those riots were also likely instigated by gangs seeing an opprtunity to wreak their own sense of "revenge" on the police and the establishment.

The essential question is: why do gangs exist in these circumstances? The answer doesn't take a PhD in Sociology to get to. Gangs exist as social networks to occupy a wider social vacuum (i.e. through dysfuctional family networks, community networks, lack of other connection to the social ladder etc.).

Am I making excuses for criminality? Of course not. I'm simply looking at the issue through a cause-and-effect rationality, in coming to understand why it happens. The police do the same thing: that's why when there is proper engagement with a community; when there are real opportunities for community improvement; when a community works together; when families work together, the levels of gang activity usually go down. That has been proven to be the case in Glasgow (the police did a successful programme there a couple of years ago).

So, back to Tottenham. As was reported, over the last few years, the suburb has seen rising levels of unemployment and falling levels of police interaction. You go figure what happens. Create the vacuum, and see who takes up the space.

So in an indirect way, yes, there is a link to all these riots over the "post-crisis years" (I just invented that phrase). The seperate make-up and triggers are different, but the underlying causes remain somewhat similar.

It is fair to say that without the financial crisis, the Arab Spring may well not have happened (as it took everyone, even the "experts" by surprise); the demos and riots across Europe are all direct consequences of the crisis. While the Gangs Of Tottenham can never dare to claim to hold the same legitimacy for their openly criminal behaviour, the gangs exist indirectly because of the social vacuum in the community in Tottenham itself, which has been exacurbated by the effects and government policy since the financial crisis.

Of course, the same community vacuum exists in other parts of London; exists in other inner cities around the UK; and exists in other inner cities around the Western world as a whole. Let me say again: there can never be a justification for the criminal behavior that we have seen in Tottenham.

The problem is that if these "community vacuums" are allowed to fester while the government continues to cut back on sevices like law and order and investing in social cohesion, the only growth economy we can expect in these places is further gang warfare and anarchy.