Think Drunk Tanks

So the Conservative Government claim they to go to war on binge drinking. Partly as a measure of economics, to save the NHS the costs of sewing up people injured while insensible, the Police for dealing with the drunken violence and vandalism and generally to reclaim the centres of cities and towns up and down the land for 'decent' citizens. Binge drinking they say, is a symptom of the country's moral decay, another indicator of "Broken Britain". As analyses go, it's probably not too wide of the mark. But where do they think it stems from? This moral decay and Broken Britain. One doesn't have to go too far back into recent history to trace its genesis. And oh yes, it almost certainly arose during the last time the Conservatives held power, though ensuing Labour Governments did nothing to halt its inexorable tide.

After the post-war austerity of the 50s, there rose a new economic class with purchasing power, that of the young. Music and fashion, though overseen by Svengalis, was largely generated from the grass roots, as this new class flexed its creative and purchasing muscle.

In the 1980s, again a new class was empowered through their earning capacity, as Conservative economic policy targeted bringing the upper strata of the working class into a home and share- owning Shangri La. This was not grass roots generated in terms of what the money was spent on. Harry Enfield's "Loadsamoney" character, a get-rich plasterer satirised the times with laser precision: all spending power and no idea what to buy. Apocryphal tales of banners being unfurled at the opera bearing the legend "Bring On The Fat Bird", city floor traders necking champagne in bars as if it was lager, with spritzers for the ladies and the rise of the brand and the label as some sort of proof of material Election.

The 80s heralded the consumptive age. When aspirations were met through material purchases and pleasure was measured in terms of quantitive units. Yet for one not insignificant part of the country the 80s were as blighted as their communities, with job losses and a benefits dependency culture. Yet the aggressive acquisition culture was still being broadcast to them as worth striving for (and perhaps reached its apotheosis with the riots of last Summer). Between both the culture of excess and the culture of deprivation, the British ceded the arts of pleasure. That is we could no longer rely on our own creative energies to summon up a good night out. Not one that wasn't soused in drink anyway. Alcohol somehow was supposed to provide all the entertainment one could wish for. It was the genie that granted wishes, or at least unlocked the inhibitions to such wish fulfillment.

The Labour government that followed did nothing to reverse the trend, continuing to neglect those in need and doing nothing to tamp down the excesses of those with money. If anything they made it worse through loosening the legislation on alcohol, by permitting alcopop drinks to be sold to under 18s and allowing 24 hour licensing of premises. Teenagers who had experienced cheap, accessible foreign holidays, brought back their copious drinking habits to Britain with them and helped turn our city centres into no-go areas at the weekends. Girls as well as boys now embraced the abuse of alcohol too.

I wrote about all these trends in my debut novel "A,B&E". Part of the novel is narrated by a nurse in Casualty, stitching up all the pugilists to return to their drink-fuelled fights. The other is narrated by a woman abroad, watching the staggering amounts drunk by British youth on holiday, with the inevitable consequences. I started that novel over 12 years ago. There is nothing new that Prime Minister Cameron is talking about, though as usual the politicians look at the conspicuous symptoms and a quick, superficial sticking plaster, rather than the deep underlying causes. I would and did go so far to say that we are an unhappy and unfulfilled nation. We don't know what makes us happy, or possibly even more worrying, we don't know what happiness is. And with the current economic stringencies, we have just got a whole lot more unhappy as we feel the pinch so we can't even buy the white goods in such prodigious quantities as we used to.

Cameron, or someone in his cabinet, ought to read my book. Of course they won't. But his lightbulb moment of 'we have a problem here with binge culture' is something that artists, writers and cultural commentators have been expounding upon for many years, only to fall on deaf ears.

"Alcohol, the paint stripper of civilisation’s veneer. Bottled up rage, uncorked and decanted"

"The trouble with A&E is that it’s full of insensible people. Those off their trolleys and straight on to ours. Out of their minds with alcohol or drugs. Or a Carefree in the Community policy. Simultaneously anaesthetised and adrenalised, oblivious to the pain signals radiating from within their bodies"

The Riots In London

"Mindless thugs" has been the loudest outcry at the rioters.

They are not mindless, they are mindset thugs and such simplistic labelling as ever allows people to not go any deeper than the surface in response.

What is this mindset?

It has developed over the last 30 years since the last set of riots. It is the same areas in flames as before. Any Londoner could have probably predicted the most likely boroughs to experience problems. That tells me nothing significant has been done to help those communities bring themselves up to a happier state. They were communities largely thrown on the scrapheap in the 80's. Sink estates with mass unemployment and educated in sink schools that were no better than holding centres for the hours of school. Now we are seeing the children and grandchildren of those original rioters and their peers from the same estates out on the street and causing mayhem. It's hardly genetic, but when the envirinment is unchanged from that of 30 years ago, it produces the same outcomes.

What has changed over the years, is the development of American style territorial gangs, largely with knife in place of gun. it's a really depressing development and has been allowed to go unchecked over twenty years. Gangs provide the 'family' membership that their own flesh and blood have abdicated from. God knows how many fatal youth on youth stabbings and shootings there have been up and down the country but particularly in London. Carrying a knife makes the individual feel indomitable. The same indomitability they feel when through force of numbers (as the gangs join forces) they come to be in control of the streets and able to do as they please.

Suddenly instead of mooching around outside the shops and malls of a weekend, all of a sudden now they can help themselves to its stock, or destroy it for whatever perceived grudge. They are already used to petty criminality, through harassing passers by, mugging and demanding with menace. They are not being organised by any 'master criminals', nor by anarchists. If anything, they are leading and these other opportunists with their own agendas are coming to the party.

Do you recall the mass gang fight on the concourse of Victoria Station when a youth was fatally stabbed? Two gangs from outside the area, one from Fulham (South-West London) and one from South London arranged to meet and fight and came fully armed. they arrived on their bikes. So these gangs are highly mobile and as we know, communicate fluidly and rapidly. They can target and organise themselves to move about the capital & keep the authorities completely off balance. They are at present taking revenge on their haunts of the High Street, places they have spent so much of their lives at just killing time. Well now they're killing these places.

Feral is an adjective bandied about. It's clumsy but not without some pertinency. Three generations of economic neglect and parental neglect has bred swathes of completely unrestrained youth. They share nothing of your values or moral codes. Judging them accordingly wouldn't even register. they are not going to own any property in their life, so have no compunction about torching that of others. They are totally lost generations. They do not care, they feel impervious to every accusation you may care to throw at them. It simply would not compute.

This is the outcome of neither an economic deprivation nor a political protest. Banks (and by extension bankers) are not being targeted, so it's hardly the outcry borne of sophisticated political analysis. Yes shops have been ransacked, but of a certain type. Electrical goods, phone shops, jewellers, bike shops, sportswear shops - these are all lifestyle items for youth that we as society have been peddlling for decades as worth owning. They already own Blackberry's, are currently wearing Hollister or Nike; what they are helping themselves to is the latest model, the latest edition, exactly how capitalism and consumerism encourages us all to keep upgrading. Chemists and supermarkets provide the fuel of drink & pills to sustain their rampage through the night hours. Those shops that aren't relevant, such as carpet shops, get torched. There is an element of 'if I can't have it, I'll make sure you can't either', in tandem with the destruction's adrenalin pumping. And the power of being able to operate over the law and to be in control of the streets.

We reap what we sow. Generations left to drift with minimal adult guidance, with little education, without any aspiration other than gross material ones, without any sense of endangerment, without any imbued moral value or sense, without any stake in society. All they needed was an opportunity to realise their own unbridled power. After the student demos suggest the path, after the cutbacks in police numbers and the detriment to moral, here was the opportunity.

Some of us have been telling the politicians for 30 years about "Broken Britain". It got reduced to a soundbite. After the 80s riots and her re-election, Mrs Thatcher's acceptance speech pledged to do something about "those inner cities". Scarce anything has been done and here we are again, geographically if not for quite the same motivations. As the Scarman Report which came out of an inquiry into the Brixton riots of that time, still has too many of its recommendations ignored; as politicians of any political stripe refuse to face up to our society's deep-rooted problems; as we hide behind outrage and lumping complex factors into buzzwords; as we continue to face up to the fundamental arrangements of our society on ownership and ruinous consumption, then we have no hope in hell of mending anything.

These generations are lost I'm afraid. What we have to do is try and mend things to prevent the next generations going the same way.