A Depressing Experience

A Depressing Experience
I'm just back from a week in England and have to admit that, apart from the pleasure of seeing my mother and kids, it was a depressing experience. The weather was part of it. I had hoped to get my mother to sit in her garden or to take her out to see a public garden in the vicinity but the weather was simply not suitable; as a final resort, I brought some friends of hers over to see her. I thought that if the weather was like this in mid-August (constant overcast skies, if not too much rain), had I still been living in England, what would I be looking forward to in November through to April? Maybe I'm just becoming a weather freak. The psychological effect, anyway, is considerable.

Then there were the riots. I arrived as they were fizzling out and thus got a week's worth of the aftermath in TV and newspaper coverage. Being somewhat locked up with my mother, I watched a lot of television: Newsnight, Question Time, Horizon, you name it. And the quality of debate I found appalling, even allowing for the inevitable inane point-scoring by the politicians involved. (Why, I ask myself, must we regard this as inevitable? But it seems to be.) Numerous very pertinent points were made almost incidentally in these programmes but none really homed in on and nailed down by the programme presenters.

There was the colleague of the New York cop invited to advise the government on zero-tolerance strategies who stated that crucial to the success of this exercise in New York had been recruitment of an extra 5000 policemen. But the UK government is proposing the exact opposite. Why wasn't this point nailed down and explored? Instead, we had a focus on sterner sentences, most of which will inevitably be reduced on appeal.

The morality aspect was explored with the help of a couple of bishops and, similarly inevitably led nowhere. Morality is much too personal to help in this case, although it did provoke a mention of the role of the banks in creating the economic situation which contributed to the riots.

Another point I thought very pertinent was that of the social infrastructure around many of the kids and areas involved; there is none, apart from the local gangs. So how does that get changed? Nobody, it seemed, really wanted to discuss this; the agenda was sterner policing.

And what about the role of schools? At a time when half of teachers supposedly want out of the profession, wasn't this relevant? Even when the most common reason they want out is a lack of discipline and the means to impose it in schools? Not explored; the focus had to be on sterner policing.

Another interesting point was the role that modern telecommunications played in the organisation of the riots. So what's the most simplistic solution? Shut them down, was the cry. Fortunately a policeman pointed out that these social networking tools were equally important to the police.

There seemed to be almost a conscious collusion between the programmes and politicians that any avenue for a possible way forward that entailed extra resources being provided (even police) was to be mentioned only in passing and then set aside.

There is no denying the government's predicament in providing extra resources, given the economic situation, but this problem is simply not going to go away without them. So, time for some creative thinking, outside the box? Dream on.

I hoped that possibilities such as the use of a volunteer workforce or possible extra pennies for job seekers with suitable skills might be explored. Again, dream on. What we got was tired, old and failed remedies from politicians concerned more with point-scoring and programme presenters with blunt teeth. The overwhelming impression was that the powers that be really did not want to get to grips with this problem, had no idea how to tackle it or simply preferred fatuous populist slogans. And, oh boy, was that depressing. I came away with the impression that England was bankrupt not just in terms of money but also ideas. Brain death is now the criterion for the truly dead.

Dark Thoughts

Dark Thoughts
It's been a lovely day today but one that, to me, has turned out to have curious echoes of the circumstances surrounding the song that almost says the same thing: it's a lovely day tomorrow.

There was a heavy storm over Saturday night and rain fell for most of Sunday; so no watering to be done today. I spent the morning pottering and on the computer, did some shopping, played boules and went to the Bar du Pont for the usual pizza this evening. Friends Steve and Jo have their daughter and family staying with them and I asked how they had spent the day. Similarly peacefully and happily it seemed, grandchildren playing in their pool, adults reading books, etc.

All this contrasted bleakly with the news emanating from England, to where I shall return for a week on Thursday. The episodic, dispersed and mindless violence that appears to be going on there seems to have little rhyme or reason behind it and that is worrying. Riots for a reason are understandable, however outlandish or mistaken the reason might be. Riots for apparently no reason bespeak an underlying malaise, in the society; in Shakespeare's words, something rotten. That is not so surprising in view of the economic conditions, particularly for young people, in the country and the same applies, indeed, for most of Europe; but is worrying nonetheless.

Then, at the end of the pizza evening, I was left talking to Alex, a part-time resident of the village who has spent most of his life working in finance in London. He's never exactly a barrel load of laughs but our discussion on the general economic outlook was even more depressing than usual, against a backdrop of stock markets falling all over the western world. I had to agree with him that it is difficult to see how Greece can stay in the euro zone but equally difficult to see how it can opt out of it. So Europe is in the frying pan alongside the UK.

What worries me most in all this is that all these portents point to a repetition of the political conditions that prevailed in the nineteen thirties and led to a huge swing to the political far right and a swathe of fascist movements. True, the riots in England can doubtless be contained and may prove transient. True also, the US and Europe may print large quantities of money or find some other way of achieving a temporary equilibrium. But, and it is a big but, the underlying widespread economic weakness will certainly not go away easily and the thus neither will the potential for fascist movements.

Racial tension is an ever-present potential tinderbox in most of Europe. If, as seems likely later in the year, Germany is called on again to bail out Greece (France is not in a position to do any more without joining the list of failing European economies) what will the political reaction be there? And what will the popular political reaction be to the austerity measures that will almost inevitably affect the rest of Europe over the next few years? It hardly needs saying that riots, whether in the UK or elsewhere, usually lead to general demands for sterner policing and government. The only way out of this that we could find in the nineteen thirties was to have a world war.

Of course, we are nowhere near that now. And the EU has been created in the meantime with a specific goal of avoiding wars in Europe (but not fascist or neo-fascist governments; Hitler's goal, after all, was to unite Europe). Maybe I am just having a bad evening. But it has made me wonder whether my little corner of paradise in Mollans is something of a fool's paradise. It is certainly sheltered from much that is going on in the rest of the world.