Perennial Problems in Shelving Books

G.K. Chesterton and T.H. White shared a birthday, so it seems somehow apt that the author of The Once and Future King had been an ardent admirer of the author of The Man Who Was Thursday. White was an English teacher in 1936, when Chesterton died, and the story goes that the day after Gilbert's death, White addressed his students. 'Boys,' he said, 'G.K. Chesterton died yesterday. P.G. Wodehouse is now the greatest living master of the English language.'

I'm not wholly convinced that Wodehouse was a greater wordsmith than James Joyce, who was still alive at the time White decreed Wodehouse to be Chesterton's successor, but I take his point. I hardly think it possible to overstate Wodehouse's brilliance, and I think Douglas Adams got it spot on in introducing Sunset at Blandings when he said:

'Master? Great genius? Oh yes. One of the most blissful joys of the English language is the fact that one of its greatest practitioners ever, one of the guys on the very top table of all, was a jokesmith. Though maybe it shouldn’t be that big a surprise. Who else would be up there? Austen, of course, Dickens and Chaucer. The only one who couldn’t make a joke to save his life would be Shakespeare.'

If anything, Adams understates Wodehouse's brilliance, perverse though that seems given the company with whom he ranks him:

'He doesn’t need to be serious. He’s better than that. He’s up in the stratosphere of what the human mind can do, above tragedy and strenuous thought, where you will find Bach, Mozart, Einstein, Feynman, and Louis Armstrong, in the realms of pure, creative playfulness.'

Adams focuses on Wodehouse's magical mastery of style, recognising him as a true musician, but -- and in this respect he is surely channelling his own strengths and weaknesses -- he pays no heed to Wodehouse's superlative command of structure. It's notoriously difficult to summarise a Wodehouse plot.

Anyway, this sprang to mind the other day, when I was browsing through the hillock of Spectators that adorns our bathroom floor, and came across an article about Kim Philby and his reading habits, as revealed in recently-discovered letters he'd written between 1984 and 1987 to Bowes & Bowes, a Cambridge bookshop. The article divides the books into nine categories, these being 'Modern Fiction', 'Memoirs', 'Travel', 'Literary Criticism', 'Popular Novels', 'Thrillers and Spy Fiction', 'History', 'Espionage', and 'Fitness'. In most categories each book is named, but 'Popular Novels' and 'Thrillers and Spy Fiction' are merely listed by author, with the number of book by each author in parentheses.

The result is that whereas the text elsewhere suggests that the one John le Carré book Philby bought was The Honourable Schoolboy, we're left guessing at which of Dashiell Hammett and P.G. Wodehouse's works he'd ordered.

I'm not sure whence this taxonomy derived. Why rank Wodehouse as a mere 'popular novelist'? Was it the journalist who wrote the piece who made that decision? After all, in any English bookshop nowadays, Wodehouse is securely fastened amidst amongst all the other canonical works of modern fiction, rather than being pigeonholed in 'Humour'; Hammett usually bilocates between 'Modern Fiction' and 'Crime'.


Truth be told, I hate the whole idea of genre fiction; or, rather, I hate the snobbish tendency to treat some books as though they're genre fiction and to treat others as though they're better than that, and are free of any genre constraints. Jane Austen wrote nineteenth-century chick-lit, Alexander Dumas wrote airport novels before there were airports, Kim is spy fiction, The Picture of Dorian Gray is a fantasy, The Name of the Rose is a detective novel, and who's to say that stories about frustrated academics or embittered milkmaids or youths on the threshold of manhood aren't genres in their own right?

Some months back I met some friends at home in Dublin, and a mutual acquaintance came up in conversation. 'Am I imagining things,' said one friend, 'or did you have a huge argument with him in my house once, with him trying to say that The Lord of the Rings wasn't a fantasy novel?' Indeed I did, I said. You're not imagining it. He seemed to think that because it was good, then it couldn't have been a fantasy.

There seems to be a mentality in play whereby works in commonly-recognised genres can be anointed as 'serious fiction' and treated as though they're distinct from their genres. Sometimes, and especially nowadays, this is simply down to marketing, of course, but more broadly, it seems to be something that we do. Rather than recognising the truth of Sturgeon's Law -- that 90 per cent of everything is crud -- we decide that such genres as horror and fantasy are intrinsically and completely worthless, such that any work done in those genres must be rescued from the pit as soon as they're recognised.

Most people will freely recognise that The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and A Journey to the Centre of the Earth are all science-fiction novels, but if anything they tend to see them as a kind of proto-science-fiction, foundational works that were later corrupted by the pulps. Much the same will be admitted, after some thought, about Frankenstein and The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde.

But what of such dystopian classics as 1984, Brave New World, and Fahrenheit 451? What of Cold Comfort Farm, Lord of the Flies, Slaughterhouse 5, A Clockwork Orange, The Handmaid's Tale, The Children of Men, Cryptonomicon, The Time-Traveller's Wife, Never Let Me Go, or The Road?

I really don't think this is a case of Science-Fiction people claiming classics as part of their field to give themselves credibility. In my experience, real science-fiction people are happy enough to brandish their acknowledged classics: Dune, Stranger in a Strange Land, Foundation, The Stars My Destination, The Left Hand of Darkness, Stand on Zanzibar, Rendezvous with Rama, The Drowned World, Lord of Light, A Canticle for Leibowitz, Flowers for Algernon, The Man in the High Castle, and so forth. If anything, I don't think science-fiction fans should be so shy. 

If bookshops are going to insist on treating science-fiction as literature's embarrassing cousin, then those who love the genre should do their damnedest to have some of the genre's pinnacles restored to their rightful place. And that's nothing compared to what the fantasy aficionados could do.

Me? I don't really care. When the day comes for me to be able to put all my books into one place, all fiction will be together, alphabetically shelved, with no quarter given to genre. It's hard enough classifying non-fiction.

Eolaí and his Painting Tour: Week Seven

Last Thursday, as you'll surely remember, the Brother brought his sixth week on the road to an end, clocking up a mighty ninety kilometres in the saddle as he pedalled his way into Galway, his thirteenth county.

Friday saw him waking in Ballinderreen, squinting at the screen with morning eyes in a house impressively garnished with his paintings, one of which is one of my favourites. The highlight of the day must surely have been a most peculiarly Celtic episode, with eight cattle running down in a street into a garden, only to be driven off by a small boy, wielding a hurl and accompanied by a dog. If that doesn't get you thinking about Cuchullain, well, your imagination's clearly not as prone as mine to flights of legendary whimsy. Appropriately enough, given the profoundly Irish nature of  Friday's highlight, as a guest-gift for his hosts he gave them a painting of the Poll na mBrón dolmen in County Clare.

He downed tools at half eight on Friday evening, and by ten he was in Galway City, there to stay with a man who advised him to bring lots of grey paint as it was hammering down. Galway had always been envisaged as the halfway point in the Brother's travels, where he'd take stock and make new plans; given time pressures and the need to get back to base in time for the Lucan Festival in a month or so's time, it's already starting to look as though Laois and Offaly may have to be forsaken; I guess we'll see, though.

Meanwhile on Twitter, others began to plot what they'd do on his return to Dublin, with a swift consensus being reached of a night in the Gravedigger's pub by Glasnevin Cemetery, though that conversation soon spiralled off into tales of Parnell being buried above a cholera pit, of Gravedigger's regulars gathering  on Brendan Behan's birthday to toast him with pints at his grave, and of Behan himself having come from a family of painters less artistic than the Brother.

Saturday was given over to painting the city from above, with Long Grass serving as his table, as ever.

Sunday in Galway City looked nice, thought the Brother: suspiciously so. Indeed, others soon warned him that Met Éireann had already been darkly hinting at ominous sounding 'weather from the west'. Still, he painted and pondered and cycled by the Corrib, and even gave some thought to going to bed early, having spent the previous four nights scorning sleep as best he could.

Monday saw Twitter reports of the Brother's doppelganger being spotted wielding a banjo and disembarking from a Chinese bus; or was it him? It was, he said: he'd a side gig where he engaged in sudden global travel to spook people by appearing and playing that music from Deliverance. Off he went to the Claddagh to try to paint in the rain, but to no avail; up with the paint but the rains came down and washed it away. And no, it wasn't anywhere near as delicate an operation as in the Flake advert -- down the rain hammered, washing the paint right off the canvas, through the hairs on the Brother's leg, and away. The end result, to be fair, wasn't without its unintentional charms, but still, the Brother took shelter, and spent the evening happily curled up on a dry couch.

Yes, I know I should be able to see beyond the Giraffe, but after that story, I just can't!

Tuesday was a day for walking, and for painting, and for making a second sally at the painting his previous day's inclement conditions had so thoroughly thwarted. I like this painting of the Long Walk as seen from the Claddagh, and though it's the sky that entrances me most, I can't help but smile at the giraffe down the end. 

Yesterday, then, saw him leaving Galway city, admiring the views as he went, and pedalling out past where TG4's based in Ballinahown, into Connemara. Long a lover of Connemara -- it was in Rosmuc that the Brother went to Irish college back in his summer holidays when I was but a whelp -- his plan was to make it past Pearse's cottage and then stop overnight in whatever random B&B he found. In the end, having cycled what our dad would call 70 kilometres -- that's 43 miles in old money -- he had to settle for the second B&B he tried, the first one having turned him away. Still, in the end there was tea to be drank and a shower to be indulged in, and all was well.

You should be following the links, btw. They take you to better pictures than this, and in colour too.

And today? Well, today must have been a great one, with him cycling out beyond Clifden on what he's saying is a candidate for his greatest day ever on a bicycle. Given the roads he's ridden and the sights he's seen, that's saying a lot, but I have no idea quite what's made this day so special, other than his views at breakfast, and his lakeside painting somewhere. It seems the route took him from Kylesalia to Loughaconeera and back, and then onward through Kilkernin, Carna, Glinsk, Cashel, and beyond Clifden on the Sky Road, heading out to Eyrephort. I've been doing image searches online to see what he might have seen, and have been bursting with envy, but that's just a stop-gap. I look forward to seeing what he saw, rendered in pixels and especially in pigments.

If you're new to this story, or even if you're not, it's well worth reading today's piece about the Brother on New Tech Post. He explains a lot about his relationship with Twitter, and how it has driven the tour, and about how wonderfully welcoming the Irish Twitterati have been:

'It’s great fun as a concept in a pub. There are times when my knees don’t think it’s that much fun. The overly-ambitious aim is thirty-two counties. That might not happen. If it doesn’t, fine. I’ll have met loads of people and painted lots of pictures and cycled around. 

The people of Twitter have been fantastic. From being taken for a drive to buy supplies, to giving me things, to packing me lunches, people have gone way, way above and beyond, it’s been fantastic.'

You should read the whole thing, and then follow the Painting Tour on the Brother's blog and especially on Twitter, where the hashtag's #paintingtour. His Facebook account's worth a shout too, but the real fun's on Twitter. As I've said a few times now, I wouldn't bother following him on Google Latitude, though, given its habit of placing him at seemingly random locations in the past. And perhaps most importantly, if you think there's any chance at all he might be passing within twenty miles or so of where you live, and if you have a bed to offer and fancy a painting, and especially if you're in one of the spots he currently doesn't have a host, you should let him know. 

Just send a message to Ireland's first digital nomad™. This is why it's called social networking.

A Proposed Activity, not a Proclaimed Institution

Right, so yesterday's post was longer and more rambling than ever. I was really just thinking aloud. Sorry about that. This'll be rather more to the point.

Having watched yesterday's Merkel-Sarkozy joint statement and press conference in a state of some confusion, I was bothered in its aftermath by the Guardian's tardiness in reporting on it, and then appalled to watch Tonight with Vincent Browne (without Vincent Browne) on TV3, it basically being a frenzy of Germanophobic hysteria, starting with this ridiculous opening:

'Good evening. I'm Declan Ganley, standing in for Vincent Browne. Behind closed doors in Europe today, leaders of France and Germany made a decision with immeasurable consequences for the people of Ireland. Tonight the Irish Government is scrambling to make sense of it. Does this spell the end of what's left of Irish sovereignty, and is there an alternative?'

And then, following an absurdly scaremongering questioning about the death of democracy in Europe, Lord Alton weighs in, saying:

'This is about creating a greater Germany. Let's not beat about the bush. This is what this about. There's been an agenda that's been running now for many years, where people want to create a sort of United States of Europe with Germany in the driving seat, and I think that's the agenda we're seeing being driven on, under the cover of the fiscal crisis that's been affecting the whole of Europe.'

And so it began, with the next panellist babbling about 'the first step in the destruction of the Common Market', misrepresenting the statement as a 'diktat' with 'conditions set in stone', and a third panellist saying 'this has been about the United States of Germany for a very long time'.

Suffice to say the show was more polemic than discussion, with only the most tentative attempt at balance, and all the while with the Twittersphere muttering darkly about spiked helmets and a 'Franco-German Empire'. Given his record with Libertas and its lies about the Lisbon Treaty, Ganley shouldn't have been allowed chair a discussion such as this.

We can all see that the Euro's in dire trouble. Even the British Conservatives think that its collapse would be disastrous for everybody, such that George Osborne's been advocating the raising of Eurobonds for the Eurozone countries based on a common -- or at least a co-ordinated -- fiscal policy, arguing that greater Eurozone integration is necessary if the single currency is to continue to work. Some degree of fiscal co-ordination had been foreseen when the common currency was first proposed forty years ago, but for whatever reason when the currency was being forged the countries that embarked on the project disregarded that economic reality. It's time now to face facts.

A More Sober Analysis...

Jason O'Mahony puts the Irish dilemma in starkly accurate terms on his blog:

'But now we have to confront the reality of a higher standard of living through cheaper Eurobonds and German supervision, or a lower standard of living, exclusion from the bond markets for the short to medium term, but keeping total control over our very modest resources. What will we do?

[...]

We need to be cool and calm about this. There is an argument that we would be better off staying out, keeping our fiscal sovereignty, and if we are willing to pay the price of having far less money to spend on public services, then it’s a strong one. But one thing is certain. Indignant guff ain’t gonna buy us any chips at this table.'

That's the option, and in considering it we need to think about why we joined the EEC in first place back in the day, signing up to a process of 'ever closer union'.

... In the Best Traditions of Realpolitik

Though I'm sure there's been some great work done since on the topic, it's well worth taking a look at what Joe Lee says about the Irish accession process in his Ireland 1912-1985: Politics and Society. Lee quotes with approval those hard-headed diplomats and civil servants in the Department of Foreign Affairs who took the view that those who banged on most loudly about our sovereignty being a pearl of incalculable price didn't have a clue what they were talking about.

True independence, in international affairs, is defined by freedom of movement, and the more options a country has, the more free it can be said to be. Arthur Griffith argued more than a hundred years ago that political sovereignty is meaningless without economic sovereignty, and the Department of Foreign Affairs at the time of accession to the EEC took that ball and ran with it. Lee says:

'Defining sovereignty as "the freedom to take autonomous decisions and actions in domestic and foreign affairs" the White Paper asserted that "as a very small country independent but with little or no capacity to influence events abroad that significantly affect us", Ireland enjoyed very little effective economic sovereignty.'

Our economy was in thrall to the British one, and dependent to a lesser degree on the decisions made by other European countries. Our only hope was to take our place at the European table and to have some say -- however small -- in the collective European decision-making process. What's more, by doing this we could diversify our trade, weaning ourself of our dependency on the UK, thereby increasing our range of options. By surrendering a small amount of nominal sovereignty, we would in practice hugely increase our sovereignty.

And so it proved, until Irish banks borrowed far too much money, and the Irish government guaranteed all money that had been loaned to those banks, not realising that by doing so -- and by not reneging on this arrangement once the reality of what it entailed became clear -- it was condemning Ireland to a condition not a million miles away from indentured servitude.

What Are They Talking About?

So, what have Sarkozy and Merkel said? Well, in truth, they haven't said a huge amount, and you'd never think, to hear the hyperbole and screeching from some of Ireland's more europhobic commentators, that Merkel had to be dragged to this position, as further European fiscal integration isn't exactly a vote-winner in Germany!

They've proposed that economic and fiscal policies in the Eurozone should be coordinated more than hitherto, that serious efforts should be made to facilitate this through twice-yearly meetings of the European heads of government, these meetings being chaired by the president of the European Council, that Eurozone countries should institute constituitional limitations on deficits into their constitutions, and that a pan-European tax should be introduced on financial transactions. They've resisted the idea of introducing Eurobonds just yet, though they remaining open to the idea in the long run, and they intend to work together to coordinate their own national tax policies.

That's all.

Firstly, I don't think anyone should be getting upset about two countries agreeing to work towards harmonising their own taxes. If we believe in our own sovereignty, it seems unfair to deny Germany and France the same thing; we can hardly object to countries deciding on their own tax policies. Will this make it harder for Ireland to resist pressure to join in this harmonised tax arrangement? Maybe, but what kind of an objection is that? Is it really tenable to say that Germany and France shouldn't be allowed to harmonise their taxes unless Ireland says they can do so? Can a government representing 4.5 million people really dictate the domestic policies of two other governments representing 145 million people?

Second, why all the screaming about a European Economic Government under a European President? Well, the clue here lies in the translation, which is why I got rather frustrated when the press conference was on; I wanted to read official transcipts not listen to immediate and perhaps innaccurate interpretations.

The word 'government' can mean either an institution or an activity; sometimes the word 'governance's is preferred in reference to the activity, as this is clearer. It's striking that while Google throws up about 35,500 results for the phrase '"true economic government"',  it throws up almost as many -- 31,000 -- for the far more precise phrase '"true economic governance"'. It's clear that what Sarkozy and Merkel were suggesting was not a new institution, but simply a meaningful activity, and one coordinated to some degree by elected heads of government rather than by unelected bankers. Indeed, this should be common sense: surely we can all see that while two meetings a year would hardly constitute an institutional government, it might at least suggest some effort to steer things. 

As for Van Rompuy's presiding over these meetings, well, doesn't this make sense? The President of the European Council is really only a chairman -- the French word Presidente in this context really just means that, in that he presides over meetings. It's been Europhobic propaganda that's established the position in the popular mind as an 'unelected President of Europe'. Having Van Rompuy chair the meeting would free the heads of government from that deliberately neutral role and allow them to focus on arguing their countries' cases.

And finally, don't forget too that these are just proposals. There's nothing to stop -- say -- Italy, Spain, and Portugal from getting together to put forward their own ideas for how things should be handled, or even Ireland announcing its own plans. There's nothing to stop countries working together in the Council to block proposals they don't like. There's nothing to stop countries from using their veto if need be. And, at least in the case of Ireland, there's nothing to stop us from refusing to amend our Constitution in accord with other people's wishes, unless they're our own too; we might, after all,  think it a good idea to live within our means.

This is a negotiating position, nothing more. No need to panic.

Trying to Make Sense of Madness

I found it baffling a few months back when, in a discussion about apologetics with some Evangelical friends, one of them insisted -- with specific reference to the Gospel according to Matthew -- that the Evangelists were the best historians of the ancient world, and on my blinking, challenged me to name some better ones. I'm afraid I fumbled my response, trying to explain that it's daft to treat all four Evangelists as though they're historians, and that in any case you can't simply put ancient historians into boxes labelled 'accurate' and 'inaccurate' with a special section for 'most accurate'. All else aside, some historians are more accurate on some things than they are on others; Appian, for instance, is probably pretty reliable on the Third Punic War but is an embarrassment on the Second Punic War. 

I should, of course, have said that of the Evangelists only Luke really seems to have been a historian by any definition, in that he talks of having collated and weighed up his sources; that's not to say that the others are of no historical value, which I certainly don't believe, just that they're not historians. And then I should have talked about what ancient historians actually did.

Writing Pragmatic History

Unlike Appian, the second-century BC Greek historian Polybius is widely regarded as an excellent historical source for the Second Punic War and most of the matters he covers, and though he certainly has failings, he's generally recognised as a first-rate historical thinker. He scorns romantic and anecdotal historical writing, and tries to grapple with the big questions of how and why did things happen. With particular reference to wars, Polybius explains their origins in terms of three things:

• An arkhē is a beginning, the first action of a war.
• A prophasis is a pretext, an alleged -- but largely or wholly spurious -- reason for going to war.
• An aitia is a cause, an underlying factor or reason that genuinely influences the decision to go to war.

I've been thinking about this a lot in the aftermath of last week's riots, thinking too about how the riots seem to have been a cascade of distinct -- if related -- events. Legions of causes have, of course, been advanced to explain the riots; Nelson Jones at Heresy Corner has compiled an amusingly comprehensive list.

Things can be Paradoxical without being Oxymoronic

I don't think we should jump to the conclusion that apparently contradictory arguments can't both be right here. There were a lot of riots and a lot of rioters; it's entirely plausible that what was a pretext for one riot was the cause of another.

As an example of apparently contradictory explanations, it's wholly possible, for instance, that both police brutality and police timidity were factors in causing the riots: the death of Mark Duggan, and the police's failure to deal properly with Duggan's family following his death could well have at the very least provided pretexts for the initial Tottenham riot, while frequent stopping and searching of black youths surely bred a deep-seated resentment that would have been causal in nature, both in the case of the first Tottenham riot and subsequent ones;  on the other hand, the impotence of the initial police response to the first Tottenham riot could well have itself had a causal effect, leading to more riots, which in turn were so feebly handled as to encourage other rioting.

Different Strokes for Different Folks

I also think we really should keep in mind that individual rioters may have had individual reasons for why they ran amok. Lots of us have by now heard the clip of giggling Croydon girls revelling in the previous evening's rampage, saying such things as:

'Like, it's the Government's fault... Conservatives!... It's not even a riot - it's showing the people we can do what we want... Yeah, that's what it's all about -- showing the police we can do what we want, and now we have... It's the rich people, the people that have got businesses and that's why all of this has happened, because of the rich people. So we're just showing the rich people we can do what we want.'

Let's be frank. These girls were speaking for themselves; we don't know if what they said reflected the views of the other rioters and looters in Croydon, let alone the rest of London or elsewhere in England. Nobody's conducted a survey of the rioters, asking them they're motives -- no more than anybody seems to have been compiling demographic data on those rioters who've been thus far convicted or at least charged in court. We're relying on anecdotes in the hope that they're representative. Still, it sounds very plausible that this was a common attitude. Civilization is, in no small part, a confidence trick, and once the frailty of our bulwarks against savagery is revealed -- as they were on the first night of rioting -- it's hardly surprising that the fences would be smashed down everywhere.

David Starkey, of course, has agreed that what happened wasn't rioting, embracing instead the description of it as 'shopping with violence', and there does seem a strong case that what went on was, in large part, a looting rampage led by gangs that recognised the impotence of the police and rallied their troops using modern communications, but with large numbers of auxiliary looters -- people who weren't gang members but who just joining in. This BBC report certainly ventures that tentative explanation, though features an interview with one Londoner who -- afraid to show his face -- poses a very blunt question:

'If the media are saying these are mindless thugs that are creating this situation, why are these mindless thugs? What is creating a young man, born and bred in this society, to grow up and become a mindless thug?'

This is a good question, and indeed is the most important question we need to answer if we want to prevent this from happening again. We need to diagnose the problem before we can cure it.


Clusters of Causes

It's striking that most explanations I've seen ventured to explain the riots tend to fall into, roughly, nine categories.

• The most banal and meaningless explanation, of course, is to say that the riots were caused by 'criminality'. This is ludicrous, and explains nothing. What is criminality? Criminality is the quality of being criminal; as such, the riots and looting weren't caused by criminality; they were examples of criminality. This 'explanation' tells us nothing. It's like saying that the Battle of the Somme was caused by war, or that the Omagh Bombing was caused by terrorism.

• More ridiculous, if less self-evidently so, are those attempts to blame the riots on social networking and mobile phones. Modern technology was used to summon the troops, like those beacons in the Lord of the Rings, but that's a far cry from saying it caused the riots. Twitter and Facebook and Blackberry Messenger no more caused the riots than horses did the American Revolution; as Malcolm Gladwell says in The Tipping Point, word of mouth is still the most important form of human communication. Likewise, it's absurd to blame riots on face-coverings or hoodies or knives; that's like saying that Battle of Britain was caused by aircraft.

• Racism -- or at least perceived racism -- and in particular the actions of the police prior to the first riot, has been  cited as causes of the first riot, and some subsequent ones. There's merit to this, certainly, though it doesn't work as an explanation of, say, what happened in Manchester. More broadly, though, stop-and-search is an approach directed not against black people so much as against youths in general; the police may well have good grounds for this, of course, but I think it'd be naive to expect people not to be annoyed by such hassle. We shouldn't be surprised by backlashes.

• More fundamentally, in terms of immediate causes of the riots, I don't think we can shirk all those simple human explanations, especially with reference to people who seem to have got caught up in them: herd behaviour, crowd psychology, peer-group pressure, brain chemistry and mirror neurons, the exhiliaration of crowds, and the sheer madness of the moment. I've had it wittily and rightly put to me recently that 'the IQ of a mob is the IQ of the stupidest person present divided by the total number of people.'

• Sheer opportunism clearly lay behind much of what happened. The walls of civilization aren't very strong and aren't always as well-garrisoned as we'd like. Once it became apparent that it was possible to riot, it's hardly surprising that people rioted. They did it because they could. That sounds too obvious an explanation, but I've no doubt that there's a hell of a lot of truth in this.

• There are, I think, deeper causes that we can all accept as well, related to a culture of acquisition and conspicuous consumption, the influence of such aggression-glorifying media as gangsta rap music, the growth of gang culture, and hereditary joblessness. The question, of course, is why these phenomena have developed, and in trying to answer that, Left and Right tend to draw from very different wells.

• Those on the Left tend to see the deepest root causes of the riots as being rooted in class divisions, the devasting effects on Britain's social structure of free-market economic policies, the failure to replace sold social housing, the corralling of the poorest and most vulnerable into ghetto estates devoid of positive role models, the stigmatising of the poor, and the poor's sense of hopelessness and abandonment. I've already talked about this, and basically think this analysis is correct, if incomplete. I have, however, little time for other aspects of analyses I've seen coming from the left: I don't think people have rioted because of cuts or any other current government policies. On the contrary, I think they're only vaguely aware of what current policies really involve.

• On the right, however, there have been a whole battalion of radically different explanations, many of which come down to a crude attempt to claim that a criminal underclass of morally illiterate children grew up under fourteen years of Labour government. Some of these relate to the education system, blaming comprehensive schools and the lack of corporal punishment, while others blame teenage pregnancy, absent fathers, single mothers, and a supposed lack of ability or will on the part of parents to discipline their children. It's common for these explanations to scorn political correctness, feminism, multiculturalism, liberalism, socialism, and a belief in rights without a complementary belief in duties; a general theme is a collective breakdown in respect, and typical of these arguments is the line that Britain's poor are lazy, having been drugged senseless by an all-providing welfare state.

• There are those on both left and right who say this is, ultimately, a question of morality, or perhaps beyond morality, of Sin. I've heard it argued that the rioters haven't been brought up to know the difference between right from wrong, or that they know it but don't care, or that they know it but see it as meaningless in a world they regard as being stacked against them and in favour of corrupt bankers and politicians. It's as though most recognise that the riots were -- let's be frank -- sinful, but some identify the main sin driving them as having been greed whereas others see it as envy.

So that's nine causes or clusters of causes, of which I think seven are credible, one absurd, and one meaningless. I'll come back to the arguments of those on the Right in a day or so. They need serious consideration. I don't think myopic analyses are really going to help us here, with the Left refusing to engage with points made by those on the Right, or vice versa.

Would 'Right to Buy' have passed Cameron's 'Family Test'?

 As you'll see from the comments on yesterday's post, my contention that the Right to Buy scheme has contributed in no small way to the transformation of social housing into ghettoes of despair has not gone unchallenged:

'I thought the facilitation was to allow residents to buy the council house they lived in rather than continuing to rent them; the idea being that those who owned their own home would be more involved with, and attuned to, their neighbourhood and community. I don’t see then why this led to a regression from “stable families” in “stable neighbourhoods” to “ghettoes of intergenerational deprivation and despair, with no visible way out for those left behind.”

[...]

If people who bought their council houses were no longer regarded as being part of those in "social housing", then clearly the remainder that then constituted the social housing group would consist of a statistically higher proportion of the unemployed and one-parent families. But this in itself is a mere statistical realignment, not a change in the reality of who lived where and in what community or neighbourhood.'

These are understandable criticisms, so I'm going to stay my planned topic for today in order to try to answer them.


Before Thatcher
It would, I think, be absurd to argue that all was perfect in the world of social housing in 1979, when Mrs Thatcher came to power. About a third of all British housing was then owned by local councils, much of this housing having been hastily built during 1960s slum-clearing campaigns. Many of these estates were built in line with the architectural fads of the time, with flats in high-rise buildings joined by raised walkways and with underground car parks. In hindsight it's easy to see why such arrangements were a recipe for disaster, with crime and vandalism swiftly becoming rife, and people refusing to move there unless they had no choice whatsoever.


The Right to Buy Scheme
When the Right to Buy scheme was introduced, Michael Heseltine declared that it would lay 'the foundations for one of the most important social revolutions of this century'. He was right, but not quite in the way he meant.

The Right-to-Buy scheme was in many respects a very good thing, enabling lots of people to own their own homes, something which I think we probably all recognise as desirable, even if -- as Labour argued at the time the scheme was introduced and for several years afterwards -- it was economically profligate. However, while acknowledging the good the scheme did, we shouldn't gloss over the scheme's dire though wholly unintended consequences.

The first thing to grasp is that while the scheme allowed tenants of council houses to buy their homes, it did not allow for a significant or systematic construction programme, and councils were prevented from reinvesting in social housing. The nation social housing stock fell from more than 6.5 million in 1980 to below 5 million in the mid-nineties. Labour, though divided on the issue, subsequently relaxed the rules barring reinvestment in new social housing and eventually encouraged the building of new properties, but the damage had been done.

Crucially, this reduction in stock has not been spread evenly across the country, such that -- say -- a third of all properties in every single housing estate or block of flats was bought by the families living there. On the contrary, stock reduction has varied nationally, regionally, and even locally. The remaining social stock is disproportionately concentrated in areas with lower property prices and employment opportunities than elsewhere, and is notable for being of a generally lower quality than those properties which have been bought.

While the earliest tenants to avail of the Right to Buy scheme tended to be relatively affluent families from the skilled working class, centred on middle-aged, married couples, it was more common during the nineties for buyers to be younger tenants with stable incomes, buying their homes with a view to selling them quickly and moving out, such that their neighbourhoods became increasingly transitional and unstable.

The Right to Buy was hardly ever exercised on estates that were already rife with problems or were in areas of high unemploment, with no more than one property in twenty in such estates being bought, such that 'problem estates' remained in the hands of local authorities. The social composition of these estates became far more homogenous than before the introduction of the Right to Buy scheme. The reduced social housing capacity forced authorities to allocate housing on a basis of strict need, such that the poorest, most vulnerable, and often least-educated of people -- many of them having recently been homeless -- were concentrated together in unpopular and unstable run-down housing estates. Rather than housing a mix of people, including families headed by skilled manual workers or public servants such as policemen and nurses, they became dilapidated ghettoes of the poor and desperate, overwhelmingly inhabited by the young and the elderly, typically on low incomes and dependent on benefits.

A large quantity of social housing stock owned by local authorities was transferred into the hands of housing associations, these being less shackled than the authorities in how proceeds from sales could be reinvested, and being able to build new estates, such that the amount of social housing owned by housing associations now approaches the amount still held by local authorities. Unlike local authorities which are run by elected counsellors, however, housing associations are largely unaccountable, such that their increasingly marginalised and stigmatised tenants have next to no say in how the estates where they live are run.


A Living Tapestry of Men and Women
In her famous 1987 'there is no such thing as society' interview, Mrs Thatcher said some important stuff, worthy of real consideration. Thatcher's acolytes have a self-deluding tendency to gloss over what she said, while her opponents tend to misrepresent it, scorning a caricature of her argument. What she said is worth engaging with, and I just want -- briefly -- to look at two passages in the interview in connection with the social revolution brought about by the Right to Buy scheme. Early in the piece she said:

'... when people come and say: "But what is the point of working? I can get as much on the dole!" You say: "Look. It is not from the dole. It is your neighbour who is supplying it and if you can earn your own living then really you have a duty to do it and you will feel very much better!"'

I think she's correct, of course, but I also think that such arguments have next to no moral or rhetorical force in homogenous ghettoes where everyone is on benefits, and where there's nobody to point to as examples of those people who are supporting other people. Sure, if you're familiar with the idea of the Good Samaritan, you'll know that your neighbours aren't just the people on your street, but even then arguments like this need a human face. It's no good saying that 'other people are supporting you', if you and those 'other people' don't go to the same schools, don't worship in the same churches, travel on the same buses, drink in the same pubs, or even talk to each other occasionally. It's not good saying that 'other people are supporting you' if you believe those same people look down on you as failures -- even as scum.

Later in the interview Mrs Thatcher said,

'... when we have got reasonable housing when you compare us with other countries, when you have got a reasonable standard of living and you have got no-one who is hungry or need be hungry, when you have got an education system that teaches everyone -- not as good as we would wish -- you are left with what? You are left with the problems of human nature, and a child who has not had what we and many of your readers would regard as their birthright -- a good home -- it is those that we have to get out and help, and you know, it is not only a question of money as everyone will tell you; not your background in society. It is a question of human nature and for those children it is difficult to say: "You are responsible for your behaviour!" because they just have not had a chance and so I think that is one of the biggest problems and I think it is the greatest sin.'

If it takes a village to raise a child, then we really need to give some thought to the kind of villages our society has created. By removing the leaven of hope and aspiration -- stable families, married middle-age couples, and skilled workers and public servants -- from our social housing, Right to Buy has effectively resulted in Britain's social housing being reserved for those with the worst problems, such that social housing estates are ghettoes blighted by intergenerational illiteracy, ignorance, broken relationships, drug abuse, alcoholism, child abuse, violence, vandalism, gangs, and a desperate lack of facilities, opportunities, or hope.

Roughly a sixth of Britain's population lives in social housing, in neighbourhoods that, as Will Hutton puts it, 'are caught in a self-reinforcing loop of decline'. Given this, I think Mr Cameron might have done well today to think of what his predecessor had said about children not having had a chance when he so swiftly dismissed the attitude he characterised by saying:

'People aren’t the architects of their own problems, they are victims of circumstance.'

Sometimes -- to a large extent -- they are. That doesn't excuse anything, of course, but it does help explain things. We need to diagnose illnesses properly before we launch at patients with dictats, drugs, and scalpels.

Thatcher's Grandchildren

Despite the ravings of Tim Montgomerie and Peter Hitchens, the Welfare State is not at the root of what led to the English riots of the last week; they're not far wrong about the collapse of popular morality, but they're completely off-base when it comes to the Welfare State. If anything, the British Welfare State as it now stands, and the 'underclass' it sustains, is a symptom of a far more serious problem, and one effectively created by the British Right.

Blair's Children?

You don't believe me? Do you think that the Spectator's Harriet Sargeant is right to say of the rioters of the last week:

'These young men came of age during the thirteen years of Labour. They are Blair’s children and the Left’s creation. It is not deprivation that has stunted their lives, but the policies of the previous government in three key areas – school, work and home.'

Rot. Blair's government failed to deal with the massive problem that it had been left, but it certainly didn't create the mess. It inherited it. It's worth taking a look at Will Hutton's 1994 book, The State We're In, simply to get a picture of Britain's underclass after fourteen years of Conservative rule. Just plucking a couple of passages from the first chapter, these being supported in detail later in the book:

'For two decades unemployment has been a grim fact of British life, bearing particularly hard on men. As well as those included in the official count who want work and can't find it, there are millions more who are marginalised -- prematurely retired or living off inadequate savings or sickness benefit. One in four of the country's males of working age is now either officially unemployed or idle, with incalculable consequences for our well-being and social cohesion. The numbers living in poverty have grown to awesome proportions, and the signs of social stress -- from family breakdown to the growth of crime -- mount almost daily.

[...]

One in three of the nation's children grows up in poverty. In 1991 one twenty-year-old in five was innumerate; one in seven was illiterate. The prison population is the highest in Europe. The British are failing.

Above all, we live in a new world of us and them. The sense of belonging to a successful national project has all but disappeared. Average living standards may have risen but have not generated a sense of well-being; if anything there is more discontent because the gains have been spread so unevenly and are felt to be so evanescent. The country is increasingly divided against itself, with an arrogant officer class apparently indifferent to the other ranks it commands. The privileged class is favoured with education, jobs, housing and pensions. At the other end of the scale more and more people discover they are the new working poor, or live off the state in semi-poverty. Their paths out of this situation are closing down as the world in which they are trapped becomes meaner, harder and more corrupting. In between there are growing numbers of people who are insecure, fearful for their jobs in an age of permanent 'down-sizing', 'cost-cutting' and 'casualisation' and ever more worried about their ability to maintain a decent standard of living.

The rot starts at the top...'

Sounds eerily familiar, eh? Blair inherited this problem, and it was monstrous even when he took the helm. 

With the Imprimatur of a Conservative Leader

What's more, lest you think this is just 'typical left wing rubbish', you might be interested in what Iain Duncan Smith's Centre for Social Justice had to say in their massive and probably definitive study, Dying to Belong: An In-depth Review of Street Gangs in Britain. Just quoting from the executive summary:

'The past few decades have seen an increasing socio-economic divide between the haves and the have-nots which, coupled with an environment of intense and overt consumerism, is often explicit in the global city where poverty and wealth sit side-by-side. The decline of industry and the rise of the knowledge economy have been instrumental in this: significant parts of the working class have become the workless class and their income has plummeted accordingly.

Particularly hard hit were young people, and in particular young men. Between 1984 and 1997 employment amongst 16-24 year olds decreased by almost 40 per cent and by winter 2006/07 youth unemployment had increased by a further 18,000 on its 1997 level. Work not only provides regular income, but also provides a sense of purpose, identity and belonging. It is no coincidence the highest prevalence of gangs is found in areas with the highest levels of general worklessness and youth unemployment: the gang as an alternative to mainstream employment, offering the same advantages.

In addition to a changing labour market came a shift in the function of social housing: no longer were council estates home to working, stable families and long-term residents. The introduction in the 1980s of right-to-buy coupled with a major reduction in new building and a shift in allocations policy has meant that social housing is now home to some of our most disadvantaged and vulnerable individuals and families. The majority of social housing households are now headed by young, workless lone parents and single men and women, often with incomes below the poverty line.

Gangs are, unsurprisingly, most commonly found in these highly deprived areas. These factors together have created, in certain communities, a generation of disenfranchised young people. Alienated from mainstream society these young people have created their own, alternative, society – the gang – and they live by the gang’s rules: the "code of the street".'

Look at that. The decline of British industry basically created this mess by turning significant parts of Britain's working class into a workless class, and Thatcher's housing policies made the situation worse. Section 4.1 of the report explores this issues more thoroughly. It notes how modern gang culture is a specific creation of an era when Britain's poorest people became even poorer, when conspicuous consumption became the hallmark of success, when deindustrialisation gave rise to high unemployment and a new type of labour market which reduced opportunities for young people of few qualifications, when the stigmatisation of the urban poor reduced their hopes for betterment...

You Can't Make An Omelette Without Breaking Some Eggs

I don't think any sane person would hold any view other that British industry in the late seventies was deeply inefficient and in dire need of reform; reform, however, should not be confused with deracination, which is what happened under Thatcher. In her determination to reduce inflation, she was willing to pay pretty much any price -- or, more precisely, to have Britain's working classes pay any price. There's a reason why she never had the support of anything close to a majority of British voters. Just quoting from Andrew Marr's A History of Modern Britain, because that happens to be on the shelf near me:

'In politics, if your tactics work and you are lucky -- then you will be remembered for your principles. Margaret Thatcher's tactics did work; she was shrewd, manipulative and bold, verging on reckless. She was also extremely lucky. Had Labour not been busy disembowelling itself and had a corrupt, desperate dictatorship in South America not taken a nationalistic gamble with some island sheep-farmers, her government would probably have been destroyed after a single term. Had the majority in her cabinet who disagreed with her about the economy been prepared to say boo to a goose, she might have been forced out even before that. In either case her principles, 'Thatcherism', would be a half forgotten doctrine, mumbled about by historians instead of being the single most potent medicine ever spooned down the gagging post-war British.

[...]

The great confrontation would have come in 1981. Howe believed that despite unemployment at 2.7 million and heading towards 3 million, despite the economy continuing to shrivel, with new bankruptcies being reported by the day and the biggest collapse in industrial production in a single year since 1921, and despite the lack of any clear control over the money supply, he must go further still. Swingeing cuts and rises in taxes, this time by freezing tax thresholds, would take a further £4 bn out of the economy. Thatcher told her new economic adviser Alan Walters that 'they may get me for this' but that it would be worth it for doing the right thing. Outside her circle, it seemed anything but right. Famously, 354 economists wrote to the papers denouncing the policies. The Conservatives crashed in third place in the opinion polls behind the SDP and the left-wing Labour Party of Michael Foot. On the streets rioting seemed to be confirming all the worst fears of those who had predicted that monetarism would tear the country apart...'

Thatcher's policies worked, of course, for a certain value of 'worked'. By the time she finished, Britain was a post-industrial nation. The country that had been the Workshop of the World had boarded up its factories and closed down its mines, and the transformation of the United Kingdom into a service economy was well underway. Given the role of finance in this, the Pound became a symbol of all that was booming in Britain's economy, while Mrs Thatcher, previously an advocate of European integration, suddenly became an outspoken opponent of the plan for monetary union that Britain knew had been on the cards since before the UK signed the Treaty of Rome and of the pan-European plans for common policies on work and society that she had championed in Parliament on 8 April 1975.


Putting All Your Unbroken Eggs In One Basket
What this meant, of course, was that Britain no longer sold things; and so the people who previously made things to be sold became surplus to requirements. They had nothing to contribute any more. Sure, the more able ones could be retrained -- though both Thatcher's and Major's governments maintained that training was something best provided by the private sector than by the State and  that training was not in itself a public good that could lower social security costs -- but Conservative Britain had laughable facilities for retraining, and in any case, not everybody is bright enough for ordinary jobs in the 'knowledge economy'. The effect was that for many Britons in the era of Thatcher, their old jobs disappeared and most new jobs that appeared were beyond their abilities, such that the best they could hope for were jobs that paid little, gave little security, and offered no future.

As those working class people who could bought their own homes, their doing so being facilitated by the Conservative governments of the 1980s, so council estates ceased to be stable neighbourhoods of stable families and long-term residents, instead becoming ghettoes of intergenerational deprivation and despair, with no visible way out for those left behind. The result was a demoralised underclass of unemployed and unemployable Morlocks.

It didn't have to be this way; there's a popular myth, hammered out for decades by neoliberal thinkers and politicians, that says that Britain had no choice, that there was no alternative. This is nonsense. Other countries still make things. Other countries still provide real and meaningful work for their poorest citizens. Look at last year's trade figures across the EU.  Germany had a trade surplus of  more than €140 b. Ireland's surplus was more than €40 bn. The Netherlands was more than €38 bn. And the UK? The UK has the worst trade deficit in the entire EU, at more than €105 bn. It makes nothing.

This is one respect in which I think David Quinn was deeply wrong in his Irish Independent piece on Friday. Social liberalism hasn't laid the foundations for widescale riots in Ireland -- sure, our shared morality has been eroded and has begun to fragment, but the fact of the matter is that we still make stuff. We have farms and we have factories and we sell physical things all over the world; even now, with the economy suffering in the aftermath of the property-construction bubble, we're still selling things, and still providing work for ordinary people. Not as much as we were, and not as much as we'd like to, but we're doing it.

British industry didn't need to be destroyed; it needed to be reformed, and Thatcher's line of attack has had devastating consequences. To quote Will Hutton again, from chapter seven of The State We're In:

'The collapse of social cohesion that comes when the market is allowed to rip through society has produced a fall in the growth rate; marginalisation, deprivation and exclusion have proved economically irrational.

The social consequences are profound. The virtual stagnation of incomes for people in the bottom third of the population has affected the very marrow of society. Holding families together has become more difficult as the wages and conditions of unskilled adult males has deteriorated.'

And it's into that poisonous soil that the seeds of social liberalism and moral relativism flourished in the most suffocating, paralysing, brutalising, alienating, stigmatising, and destructive ways possible. Whenever Cameron or his acolytes speak of Broken Britain they should give some thought to who broke it.

No such thing as society? Not when she was finished with it.

Captive Jamaica Took Her Civilized Captor Captive...

When my younger brother was small, he used to watch a cartoon called Sharky and George, and once, years later, when it came up in conversation, I misheard the show's name, and thought someone had uttered the rather odd phrase 'Starkey and George'. That conjured up a very peculiar picture...

The Crimebusters of the BB-Sea?

... and before you wonder whether I'm implying something by associating David Starkey with an effeminate pink fluffy hippo, I can assure you that when I first misheard the phrase and enjoyed myself by mucking about with Photoshop for just my second time ever, I didn't know Starkey was gay. No, I'd not planned any insinuations. It just looked like it afterwards.

Anyway, I think it's a funny picture. Certainly, it's far more amusing than what Starkey said on Newsnight yesterday. He started pretty well, repeating somebody else's claim that the riots hadn't been real riots so much as mere 'shopping with violence'; a contentious claim, and not one that goes without saying, but certainly a point worth considering. But then, we had this:

'... I think there has been a profound cultural change. I've just been rereading Enoch Powell. The 'Rivers of Blood' speech. His prophecy was absolutely right in one sense. The Tiber didn't foam with blood, but flames lambent wrapped round Tottenham and wrapped round Clapham.

But it wasn't intercommunal violence; this was where he was completely wrong. What's happened is that the substantial section of the chavs that you [Owen Jones] wrote about have become black. The whites have become black. A particular sort of violent, destructive, nihilistic gangster culture has become the fashion. And black and white, boy and girl operate in this language together, this language, which is wholly false, which is this Jamaican patois that's been intruded in England. And this is why so many of us have this sense of literally a foreign country.'

Emily Maitlis pressed him to clarify his position a bit, saying, 'In that speech Enoch Powell talked about in twenty years' time the black man having the whip hand over the white man--', and Starkey interrupted, saying, 

'That's not true. What's happened is black culture -- this is the enormously important thing -- it's not skin colour. It's cultural. Listen to David Lammy, an archetypical successful black man. If you turn the screen off, so you were listening to him on radio, you would think he was white.'

Now, at least, unlike the odious Kevin Myers, he's not putting forward an explanation that could as easily be summed up in the phrase 'black bastards', but just because his argument's not without sophistication doesn't mean that it's not wholly wrong-headed. 

Starkey's thesis, in essence, is that Britain has suffered from a detrimental version of how Horace said the conquest of Greece had affected Rome, when 'Captive Greece took her rude captor captive, and brought the arts to rustic Latium,' such that as far as Professor Starkey is concerned, 'Captive Jamaica took her civilized captor captive, and brought savagery to urban England.' And no, I'm not being pretentious by pulling out a Classical quote here; Powell was a Classicist, and his speech explicitly drew from the writings of Horace's contemporary Virgil.

Aside from being deeply offensive in its crude equation of whiteness with civilization and blackness with savagery, it's obvious that Starkey is simply wrong on this. As with the BBC having originally called the English riots 'UK Riots', this is a case not of political incorrectness but of factual incorrectness.

Insofar as Jamaican rude boy culture has affected British culture, it seems to have done so in two waves, the first being back in the seventies, giving rise to the Skinhead and Ska movements, and the second being in the mid-eighties, when 'Yardies' arrived in London, giving rise to a new form of British gang culture, where violence was often a first resort rather than a last one, and where wealth and firepower were ostentatiously displayed by gang leaders, these leaders becoming aspirational figures in the most broken of London's estates. That London's gangs, in particular, modelled themselves -- at least in part -- on these Jamaican gangsters seems indisputable, with them being further influenced by American gang culture, especially as codified in Gangsta Rap music. 

Part I, Chapter 4 of the Centre for Social Justice report, Dying to Belong: An In-depth Review of Street Gangs in Britain is very useful on this point. The whole report, to be fair, is excellent. I think we'd be well-advised to turn to the CSJ and ResPublica for a lot of help in coming months.

However, to single out the Jamaican influence in the way Starkey does is both perverse and lazy; he extrapolates later in the discussion from the fact that the first riot was connected to the killing of a black man, without pausing to consider whether the Tottenham riot may have had discrete roots to those in the rest of London, and without giving a moment's thought to the possibility that the riots outside London might have been radically different in character to those in London. Nobody has done anything even resembling a survey of the demographic profile of the rioters but it seems clear from footage and court reports that English people of all shades rioted side-by-side in a national frenzy of equal opportunity vandalism.  

What's more, it's deeply disingenuous to talk about thuggery on this scale without reference to the fact that during the seventies and eighties the English were proverbial throughout Europe for their penchant for mass violence, such that football hooliganism was known as 'the English disease'. Wild rampages through cities have been a hallmark of white English males, without any Jamaican influence whatsoever. And this didn't stop in the eighties either, despite the Heysel ban and Mrs Thatcher's pressuring the FA to pull out of European football. I still remember the shock in 1995 when English fans rioted at Lansdowne Road, such that I wasn't surprised about violence in London in 1996, in Marseilles in 1998, and during Euro 2000 such that England was threatened with being expelled from the competition. 

And in recent years, lest people were tempted to forget this stuff, there have even been TV documentaries that effectively glorified such havoc.

It is, frankly, claptrap to make out that mass English thuggery is due to a foreign intrusion. What happened this week wasn't remotely unEnglish.

This, it appears, is not a time for the Left

Emily Maitlis, posting on Twitter earlier, utterly nailed the problem with so much of the current fumbling efforts to explain this week's English riots:

'Riots have become political chameleon: whatever you felt was problem before, you just repeat LOUDER and reference riots.'

It's deeply disheartening to watch some blaming the riots on cuts they've long opposed, on others blaming them on what they've long regarded as a sloth-engendering welfare state, other sneering at the police and claiming that elected police chiefs or even -- for the madder pundits -- privatised police forces would never have allowed the riots to happen, others taking this as an opportunity to call for a British right to bear arms.  

At this point my instincts are such that I'm really only inclined to take seriously commentary that accepts some share of blame for what's happened; a Guardian piece, for instance, that admits that social liberalism has made it harder for parents to raise their children, or Telegraph ones that recognises the criminality in Britain's streets cannot be disassociated from the moral corruption of the British establishment, or that point out that rioters are often just like us, and certainly aren't just 'other people'.

One really annoying aspect of so much commentary at the moment is the tendency towards finger-pointing, something which has been more pronounced from the right than the left. That's not to say that people on the left haven't drawn connections between the riots and cuts, but I think most realise that argument isn't very convincing. In the main people on the left have restricted themselves to -- aside from condemning the rioters themselves -- pointing out that we shouldn't be throwing our legal principles out the window, and saying that whatever the solution is it probably won't involve bringing back the death penalty, reintroducing national service, or evicting families because of the behaviour of one child. Liberal handwringing has been the understandable order of the day from most of those on the left.

A very good friend of mine wrote to me the other day, expressing this paralysis:

'Earlier this week I was admonished by a co-worker for daring to suggest that not all rioters had the same motivation - that many will have been lulled into the idea of causing as much damage as possible to see how far they could go, but others may have felt genuinely angry at what they see as being ignored by Society; that unless we seek out explanations for the actions of a vast number of disparate individuals, we can never hope to address the root causes.

Explanations like "they're all twats" don't cut it for me, but right now it seems I am in a tiny minority against a howling and aggrieved majority who would probably elect Sir Fred Goodwin to high office if he promised to bash the convicteds' heads in with bricks.

I am not an apologist.  I am not particularly defending the rights of rioters, other than that they should be treated according to the criminal law.  I am utterly ashamed of what my people have done to our country.  Their behaviour has been wholly thoughtless, naive and repugnant.

But we must breathe.  We must keep our perspective, punish those that should be punished, continue to help those that need helping, and above all get to the bottom of the root causes of this trouble so that we can actually make progress and ensure this never happens again.

I'll give you a hint - the solution won't involve cutting benefits back to the point where the jobless must find work or starve.

But this, it appears, is not a time for the Left.'

Part of the problem, as my friend pointed out, is that people are looking for simple explanations, ones which smoothe out the texture of the problem, that gloss over the facts that different rioters will have had different motivations, and that individual rioters may have had mixed motivations. Occam's Razor's an important principle, but sometimes it can be used too eagerly; it requires us to refrain from multiplying matters beyond necessity when considering problems, but it does not by any means say we should stop short of multiplying them to the necessary point. Indeed, it would be wrong to do so. Some issues are very complex.  

Making matters more difficult is the fact that people are so horrified and frightened by what's happened that attempts to understand what fuelled these riots are too easily perceived as attempts to excuse the rioters. Although 'hate the sin, love the sinner' is always a good principle, I don't even think that's what's going on here. Common sense dictates that riots have both immediate and underlying causes, and unless the underlying causes are identified, they can't be tackled properly. Identifying these causes, of course, requires asking the right questions and asking them of the right people. Fraser Nelson, on the Spectator blog, at least recognises the importance of doing this, and though I think he misses  important questions he at least raises some questions we should be considering. One that I'm really intrigued about concerns why all the riots were confined to England.*

As I've said, there are those on the left who are trying -- not very convincingly -- to link the riots with government cuts. But what of the right? Well, I'm come to that tomorrow. There's something especially disingenuous going on there.

* And what on earth was the Daily Mail playing at accusing the BBC of political correctness for pointing this out? If the BBC was guilty of anything in this regard, it was guilty only of factual correctness, or 'accuracy' as we used to call it.

Eolaí and his Painting Tour: Week Six

You'll remember how we left the Brother last Thursday as he coasted into Limerick to deposit himself at the home of Bock the Robber, he who once promised to mock me when I was on the radio, and then stayed eerily silent. Swiftly and happily filled with Bock's Chilli Surprise, he was happier still  in the pub a little later, filled with a fiery chilli and hunched over a perfect pint.

Friday was a day of wandering, with the Brother gazing up into the skies, presumably wondering whether what he'd seen had been a bird, a plane, or Jerry Seinfeld's mate, and admiring the Walls of Limerick. Saturday saw him wandering still, though with a bit of a limp, his foot starting to play up, which is hardly surprising given how he's cycled and painted a winding road halfway round the country. Still, limping though he may have been, he was reportedly looking pretty fresh as he ambled through the Milk Market. 

Culinary experimentation was the order of the day for him as he marshalled with pride a 'Celtic Egg', wrapping a hard-boiled egg in black pudding and musing whether there might be a market for 'Gaelic Eggs', with white pudding serving as the meaty armour. I'm not surprised he's going down this road; I'll not forget his delight at Sister the Eldest's back in the day when he experienced white pudding inside black pudding!

Gastonomic adventures complete, it was off to the pub again, there to watch Dublin beat Tyrone 0-22 to 0-15, in a match that the Brother had to admit wasn't really a game that any neutrals could have enjoyed. Seemingly the rain didn't skip Limerick that day, but settled in the pub as he was, he hardly noticed.

Sunday saw him cycling through east Limerick, admiring beautifully ramshackle houses, and stopping for a mineral -- that's a soft drink to people not from Ireland -- at Doon, before making his way through Cappawhite into Tipperary, his twelfth county. I must quiz him at some point about whether it's packed with orchards, as the Magners ads would have us believe. I've only set foot there twice, once to go to jax in Toomevara when I was eleven, and once to visit a graveyard in Carrick-on-Suir when I was fourteen or so, so I'm afraid I'm no expert on the county. Eventually, having cycled through a beautiful day of rain and sun, he reached the Rock of Cashel, and pulled up his Xtracycle to settle in for the night at Peggy O'Neill's B&B, there to chat at length with Bernie Goldbach, who described the Brother's 'subtle use of Twitter, Picplz, Latitude, Google Plus, Audioboo, Latitude and Street View [as] a case study in getting results from social media.'

Seemingly Bernie was ashamed of having kept my cycleworn brother talking beyond midnight, not being able to finish a chat with him in less than two hours, but given that I don't think I've ever really finished a chat with him in less than two decades, I don't think there's any shame in that. 

Up on Monday morning, the Brother had a gorgeous view from his window of Hore Abbey, a ruined thirteenth-century Cistercian monastery. Monday was a busy day, with no shortage of acrylic applied to canvas, and tea drank by the bucketload, not to mention a reviving bath being gloried in, with the internet largely being shunned, such that the Brother was shocked when he turned it on in the early hours of Tuesday, to learn what was happening in England. 

Bernie set the Brother up with a microphone to aid him in his audioblogging, and after they checked the lapel mike, the Brother turned around and cycled off into the distance, heading back westwards, leaving Bernie to muse on the trip thus far, describing the Brother as being, not merely 'a gold-plated member of the Irish Twitterati', but 'Ireland's first truly digital nomad'.

High praise, methinks.

It was clearly a remarkable day's cycle, the highlight of which was his seeing a group of swallows join forces in the air to drive off a hawk. Having said farewell to Cashel, he crossed the Suir by the Camus Bridge, and eventually left Tipperary and returned to Limerick, cycling through Abington, to new hosts in Castleconnell, as pretty as it was wet, there to revel in hospitality again, and to paint and plot into the night. Wednesday saw the Brother sitting painting in the company of a small child, and dining out on some fine Italian food, with him staying in Castleconnell again that evening, painting and poring over maps through the night, wondering about the practicalities of the rest of the trip.

Off we went again today, getting thoroughly damp as he cycled through the clouds, and past fields upon fields of stones upon stones, craving tea as he continued his constant sensory overload of being mesmerised by the scenery he was becoming part of.

And finally, then, after a long and glorious day of ninety kilometre's cycling, with him spotting a true avian highlight in a charm of goldfinches and taking advantage of a rare cessation of rain to photograph a beautiful wall, he entered Galway. Six weeks down, and thirteen counties visited.

There's more to come, of course, so rather than just tracking my summaries, you should follow the Painting Tour on his blog and especially on Twitter, where the hashtag's #paintingtour. I wouldn't bother following him on Google Latitude, though, given its habit of placing him somewhere he visited once upon a time. That was one of the great incidental revelations of Tuesday, when someone pointed out that it's not common for wireless mifi to have accurate gps support, such that most of them can easily revert to cached locations: this goes some way to explaining why several times in this trip Latitude's placed the Brother in Drogheda, Lucan, Cork, or anywhere really as long as it's eighty miles or so behind him!

Today's been a wet day, but when the right moment appeared the Brother hit the ground to capture this.

And again -- and especially importantly --  if you think there's any chance at all he might be passing within twenty miles or so of where you live and you have a bed to offer and fancy a painting, and especially if you're in one of the spots he currently doesn't have a host, you should let him know. Just send him a message to Ireland's first digital nomad™. It's not called social networking for nothing, you know...