http://journalstar.com/news/opinion/editorial/columnists/article_24b67b3f-e142-5de1-a33b-7aa53d92fdae.htmlPankaj Mishra: London rioters are Thatcher's grandchildren
By PANKAJ MISHRA / Bloomberg News | Posted: Saturday, August 13, 2011 11:50 pm
LONDON -- I am often asked, when in the United States or Europe, whether I feel frightened while traveling through such obviously dangerous places as Afghanistan and Kashmir. It's hard for me to explain, and so I never confess, that I feel more insecure on the streets of Tower Hamlets, a London borough just south of Tottenham and Hackney, the epicenters of London's riots. Tower Hamlets, where I often go to work in a friend's apartment, has among the highest rates of poverty, unemployment, overcrowding and crime in Britain. But it is not a ghetto. Segregation is more insidious, and inequality has shrewd disguises, in what is also one of London's most diverse boroughs. Among the rundown, gang-infested council estates, the bingo halls, betting shops and working-class pubs, there are wine bars, boutique shops, cafes and studio apartments costing more than a half-million dollars. Bankers as well as artists, designers and other well-paid members of the creative class have turned pockets of Tower Hamlets into London's answer to Manhattan's East Village.
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In their indifference to the common good and single-minded pursuit of brand names, the looters hold an unflattering mirror to many other depoliticized consumers in Britain. Their small regard for authority only could have dwindled sharply in recent months when one British institution after another was revealed as ethically deficient: the members of Parliament caught charging home improvements to the taxpayer, the journalists hacking phones, the senior politicians and police officers prostrate before Rupert Murdoch, and the bailed-out bankers with their unrepentantly high bonuses.
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But the mayhem this week speaks of a broader and irreversible Americanization of British society in the last three decades, as the imperatives of a global market economy overtook those of society. Britain, of course, is the original home of the free market. As the first country to industrialize, and to have an enormous comparative advantage, it inevitably adopted laissez-faire policies in the mid-19th century. The harsh effect this had on the working classes and the poor was softened gradually by such Victorian institutions as compulsory education, trade unions and social-service societies. The political and economic catastrophes of the first half of the 20th century buried the idea of the self-regulating market; and a new national consensus was built around the welfare state after World War II. This all changed starting in the 1980s as successive British governments, Labor as well as Conservative, struggled with high inflation, falling industrial productivity and conflict. The illusion that the nation could be saved only through immersion in a self-stabilizing market economy hardened into a revolutionary ideology, embraced by both major parties, that has shaped today's Britain.
In that sense, if Tony Blair and David Cameron are "sons of Thatcher," as the journalist Simon Jenkins puts it, the rioters of today are the grandchildren. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who famously proclaimed "there is no such thing as society," rapidly privatized state-held assets including railways, steel mills, airlines, coal mines and telecommunications providers. She decimated many public services that tended to the most disadvantaged and vulnerable people in Britain. More importantly, Thatcher abandoned the idea of full employment -- a precondition of the welfare state. She did not stop at defanging trade unions and reducing labor's bargaining power. With one eye on her friend and ideological ally President Ronald Reagan, she ushered in policies that reduced hiring costs for employers, giving workers the dubious gift of endless mobility and a downward race for wages.
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