Nepotocracy and the August Riots

What caused the August riots?

In the search for an answer, the first point to make is that we might question the appropriateness of the word “riot” in that it implies an agenda and a political consciousness that remained unarticulated by participants. Certainly, no leader emerged and no demands were made. To all appearances, the riots were what one commentator described as “shopping with violence”, an opportunistic orgy of shoplifting on a grand scale. It may be telling that no public buildings were attacked, no party headquarters were stormed and, if you were the proprietor of a bookshop, you had little to worry about. Instead, it was shops that stocked consumer durables and fashion items that bore the brunt, specifically, shops that stocked the types of consumer durables and fashion items that appeal primarily to teenagers.

Of course, it would be wrong to attribute all of the anarchy to one age group, just as it would be wrong to blame a particular ethnic community; numerous examples of people of all ages, not to mention socio-economic backgrounds, have appeared before the overworked magistrate courts during the last, vaguely surreal, week. That said, TV pictures, combined with court records, confirm that the riots were a phenomenon driven predominantly by the young – either teenagers (and, shockingly, some who are even younger) or those who, until relatively recently, have been teenagers. It is surprising that no-one seems to have noticed any significance to the timing: the riots took place in the middle of the long summer holiday when methods by which teenagers alleviate their boredom are at a premium.

In trying to account for the riots, a consensus is forming in the media around the notion that they are an inevitable consequence of a policy agenda that mollycoddles young people, that goes to often ludicrous extremes to protect them from everything – even, and, perhaps, especially, the consequences of their own actions. Teachers will recognize some truth in this, but it is surely not the whole story. Three youths interviewed on Sky News this week attributed their part in the riots to what they saw as inequalities in “the system”. They compared their relatively poor condition to those of wealthy bankers and other ill-defined groups favoured by “the government”. They spoke – sympathetically – of their failed attempts to get into the mainstream through employment and education. Their case was somewhat undermined by their acknowledgement that the looting in which they had been involved was no more than a method of acquiring the expensive goods that they could not otherwise afford, but they said enough to confirm that it is overly simplistic to see the riots as mere mindless thuggery.

What those youths and the many hundreds of others like them had done is to test the boundaries of the social contract that holds any Western country together. As history has shown again and again, people’s social compliance can only be forced by the application of massive resources and a willingness to use draconian measures of repression. In a “free” society, such as that of the UK, public order relies on people’s voluntary compliance, the police force being, for the majority, a largely symbolic presence. The limits of this dispensation were horribly exposed by the August riots: the rioters quite simply stopped agreeing and withdrew their compliance. In this sense, the riots were a profoundly political act, even if those responsible may not have been aware of it.

There is, however, a more immediate way in which they exposed a growing political and social problem in contemporary Britain. They can be seen as a response to the increasing extent to which power and influence in this country is concentrated in the hands of a narrow “nepotocracy”. This was precisely what Sky’s interviewees were saying in their rather clumsy and hostile way.

In order to explain this, it is worth making reference to the summer’s other big story – the hacking scandal. Although it went unremarked upon, the most telling moment of the House of Commons debate on the matter was arguably when Ed Milliband stated that his current spin doctor-in-chief once worked for Education Secretary Michael Gove. To me, this served to highlight the extent to which a relatively small number of inter-connected people in this country have their fingers in all the pies, particularly those that have a bearing on public debate. Politics, the media and the arts are now essentially run by a cabal of family members, old school pals and hangers-on who manipulate their address books in order to gain influence and promote their careers. Think about this. Three of the most powerful positions in this country – Prime Minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer and Mayor of London – are all occupied by men who were members together of an exclusive club, the Bullingdon, within their already exclusive university, Oxford. Lest we mistake this for a purely Conservative characteristic, though, we should remember that four of the positions on Labour’s last front bench were occupied by a husband and wife team and two brothers. The numerous young female playwrights who have been presenting their glorified soap operas on subsidized stages in recent years almost all have connections that made their passage from slush pile to production easier than for most. Then we have the ubiquitous Speaker's wife who is set to become an MP – one of the people who runs this country – on little other recommendation than that she has the right contacts.

And the examples could go on and on… In fact, it is hard to think of any other time in recent history that has seen this country so completely in the grip of a mutually-back-scratching elite which rarely issues invitations to potential new members. There is little cause for smugness if you happen to be an American, since you come from a country of over 300 million that, nevertheless, has picked two of its recent presidents from the same family and, from a different family, another recent president and the current Secretary of State. Much the same, to varying degrees, could be said of other Western countries.

Putting yourself in the position of the rioters, then, looking from the outside at a club you will never be asked to join and which will never pay any attention to your voice, the decision to rip up the social contract becomes more understandable. It also gets to the heart of the educational problem that, as was alluded to earlier, has been mooted as a key seedbed for the riots. Put simply, young people might well ask why they should bother with school if their future prospects will rely not on their educational achievements, but on who they know.

So what’s to be done? The first task should be to ensure that the frankly iniquitous system of unpaid internships be done away with; nothing restricts access to politics and the media quite so effectively as that particular closed shop. Next, choice of Parliamentary candidates should be truly local, central offices losing all power to influence such decisions; the Conservative “A List” at the last election was, in practice, just another mechanism by which the nepotocracy extended its range. Finally, there is a strong case for making all job applications anonymous prior to interview stage; this would allow applicants to be judged purely on their merits and achievements and not on their surname (or, in a happy side-effect, their probable ethnic origin).

Those who talk of “broken Britain” are usually referring to the lower end of the social spectrum. But, Britain is broken at every level, going right to the very top. If the social contract is to be renewed, it needs to be built around genuine opportunity for all. Education can play its part, but pupils have to see some purpose to it; if they perceive it as a cynical game that gives an illusion of opportunity while the nepotocracy goes about its business untouched, then we can look forward to chaos on the streets becoming a regular occurrence.