Though Cowards Flinch

We’ve been hearing a lot about social breakdown recently, and at the risk of sounding like the worst sort of ostentatiously worldly Guardianista, it reminded me of the African novel, “Things Fall Apart.” The title is taken from one of W.B. Yeats’ poems, “The Second Coming” and this too has relevance to any discussion of the social problems facing our world today – and we should make no mistake, social breakdown is not an exclusively British phenomenon.

Jonathan Freedland is roundly denouncing David Cameron for announcing the political equivalent of “Physician, heal thyself” as prospective policy. David Craigg is bemoaning how British surveillance culture is actually a symptom of government inability to deal with mugging and knifing. Every week a new story about knife crime, anti-social behaviour orders or drugs hits the wires and commentators fall over themselves to talk about it.

The story “Things Fall Apart” has relevance to all this at several levels. On one reading, it’s a story about the belief of the hero, Okonkwo, that a man must master his own destiny, but the failure of that hero and his eventual disgrace and suicide. This makes a powerful answer to David Cameron’s mendacious claim that “social problems are often the consequence of the choices that people make.” Marx had an answer to that one too.

Alternatively, at the end of “Things Fall Apart” a white colonial governor in the story sees the actions of the hero, Okonkwo, and we learn that in the white man’s head, the titanic struggles of Okonkwo are reduced to a simple morality tale only worthy of inclusion in a compendium of undignified behaviours that the governor had experienced while in Africa. I think that perfectly describes the rhetorical intervention of Cameron on crime – the whole scope of social factors are reduced by Cameron to a morality tale.

So much for Freedland on Cameron; Craigg’s article is even worse. Any article carrying the sentence, “many people in Britain today are virtually prisoners in their own homes, only venturing out during daylight hours,” is just teeing itself up for a solid whack. Sure, living in certain parts of Brixton and going out at night you need to be in a cab, a large group or be pretty fast on a bicycle – but violence on a Saturday night has been common for a long time. Sure, people are careful with who they look too closely at, for fear of a fight.

This simply ignores that most of the country is crime free most of the time. I’ve lived in the south east of England for coming on two years now and its small towns are like small towns anywhere. When pubs let out, there are fights among those who turn up for a fight. Its cities have big working class estates where it can be dangerous after dark if you heedlessly walk past gangs of youths – but by and large, it’s a safe, calm place to live. So this middle England crime-inspired hysteria is based on a myth.

Since the Times headline which declared “Help yourselves, Cameron tells the fat and the poor,” Cameron has since tried to walk back his claim that there is no top-down solution to all this hysteria, whether based on erroneous data or not. The point that he was making is much more insidious; his is the desire to appoint this middle England hysteria moral arbiter for his possible future government. It just goes to show that David Cameron is a normal Tory, prepared to sermonize but not to get his hands dirty helping matters.

Underneath all that, however, maybe there is a broader point to be made and this is why I find relevance in Yeats’ poem, “The Second Coming.” Yeats was writing about the decomposition of the traditional ruling classes of his era under the weight of new political movements with vibrant social cultures of their own. We’re living in the opposite era, where the new political movements are only superficially connected to each community. No wonder we feel so disempowered as to be ever more susceptible to this fear of crime.

Cameron is playing off that and managing to blame it on everything except his own Party’s record on crime for the eighteen years it held office, presiding over a dramatic increase in unemployment and (shock!) crime. Cameron is right insofar as he suggests that there is a limit to what the state can do – but Cameron’s vision falls far short of what the state can actually do. So does New Labour’s vision – and that’s not likely to change until we empower ourselves.

This is one of the fundamental differences between Right and Left. The Right wants to pass tough-sounding laws and blames people for not taking personal responsibility when these laws succeed in doing little except expand the prison population. The Left wants people to take responsibility for the State, for the management of their communities and for the support of progressive ways to cut crime – such as state expenditure to create jobs.

Prevailing economic ethos doesn’t rate that – but then these sort of policies can only ever be temporary. Secure jobs, high unionisation, a State controlled by an active democratic movement; eventually these things will be challenged by the people for whom these things are anathema. In today’s Britain, that’s bosses of British Nuclear Fuels, Virgin or Stagecoach, all hoping for a slice of Privatisation Pie, or the multiple companies that get away with employing immigrants for awful wages.

Eventually we’d have to go all the way and redraw society on entirely new economic lines. That jumps way ahead. For the moment, all we need is the presence of mind to remember that despite all this talk of knives from the right wing press, all the talk of police stop and search in the liberal press, Britain is actually a safe country if you don’t take stupid risks. We should be thankful for that at least.