THE SPECTATOR
UNITING FOR ORDER
Along period of order in Britain has led us to forget a simple and important fact — people like killing one another. This pleasure in killing is spread through all classes, centuries, races and continents. It is restrained by people's even stronger desire to live safely, but that desire needs the support of sophisticated and effective institutions before it can overcome the desire to kill. Institutions have provided that support in Britain for many years. The question, after Handsworth and Brixton and Tottenham, is whether they can con- tinue to do so.
The answer to the question will be negative if people choose to believe either that anyone who riots must be psycho- pathic or that he will be amenable at all times to gentle persuasion. People riot, not because they are crazy, but because they think that they will gain something from it and that it will be fun. They will not stop noting because those in authority smile on them, but because the possibilities of gain and of fun have been reduced. The quick- est way to reduce the possibilities is by more effective order — a better chance of being stopped in the first place, or being badly frightened in the second, and of being caught and severely punished in the third. Parliament should consider clearer definitions of riot offences and the exten- sion of police powers during riots. In a more healthy political climate, discussion after Tottenham would have been almost exclusively concerned to establish the most effective type of public order. But the present political climate is extremely unhealthy. There are several leading institutions which are not prepared to recognise the importance of public order. Some teachers, for instance, and many education authorities, act on the belief that pupils in poorer areas are persecuted by organised society. Whole programmes of education — ostensibly to assist multiracial harmony — are devoted to vilifying British society, particularly the police. Even if they do not instruct pupils to riot, they foster an attitude towards society which makes rioting the most reasonable kind of behaviour. Something similar is true of the trade union move- ment. Now that the miners' strike is finished many union critics of Mr Scargill can be found; but last year, when Mr Scargill was orchestrating the most sys- tematic civil violence this country has known in modern times, only a couple of unions dared to criticise him, and the TUC voted overwhelmingly, if insincerely, to support the strike. Few union leaders could be found actively advocating violence, but they constantly tried to treat the question as a side-issue beside that of 'solidarity' and to set up an exculpatory equivalence between the actions of the police and those of the violent pickets.
Above all, this evasive cowardice afflicts the Labour Party. Even Mr Kinnock, who has now criticised Mr Scargill and other extremists so strongly, has skirted the point. Last year, he linked a vague con- demnation of picket line violence with an attack on the 'violence of unemployment'. After Tottenham, he used the moment to point to the divisiveness of this Govern- ment's policies and the effects of urban `deprivation'. (Exactly who, by the way, is deprived? We notice that Mr Floyd Jarrett, son of the late Mrs Cynthia Jarrett, is unemployed and yet drives a BMW. The white and Asian residents of the Broad- water farm estate who have been mugged, burgled and threatened seem more gen- uinely deprived.) And where Mr Kinnock fears to tread, other Labour politicians rush in. Mr Bernie Grant has said that although he 'regrets' the death of PC Blakelock, he will not condemn the rioters. Even in the modern Labour Party, it is extraordinary, and conspicuously horrible, that the leader of a Labour council will say such things. The logic of Mr Grant's position in fact involves his own destruc- tion too, for rioters have no interest in those who, like himself, have been demo- cratically elected, and Mr Grant has already stated publicly that he is powerless to control the mob. Before long, his own mob will probably give him 'a bloody good hiding'.
It must be true that riots are more likely to occur when a large number of young people in an area is unemployed. It is legitimate and natural for opposition politi- cians to criticise government social policy, but when something as terrible as Tot- tenham happens something more is de- manded of them. The Tottenham riot is comparable in its effect and threat with acts of terrorism. When the IRA attacks, leaders of all parties unite. They should do so over Tottenham. Mr Kinnock must turn on Mr Grant and his followers in Haringey and elsewhere as he has turned on Mr Hatton in Liverpool and on Mr Scargill. If he evades the question, he should be pressed. If his party is equivocal, one of the chief institutions of the nation is unsound.
And what of the Tories? They are unambiguous about public order, but they preside over the nation in its most dis- orderly period since the war. They are
blamed for this, and bewildered by it. They would be wrong to conclude that their main economic policies are at fault and should be altered, or to accept the absurd propaganda promoted by the BBC and others that Mrs Thatcher is a cruel, mean- spirited woman. But what they must do is find a language which calms people's fears and appeals to their sympathies. This cannot be done if the Government con- tinues to refer to itself as if it were a business (Mrs Thatcher spoke on Panor- ama of a 'product' and a marketing team), not because business is bad, but because government is so much more than busi- ness. It has to explain why its devotion to enterprise and economic freedom assists the weak as well as the strong (not difficult — it increases choice, and independence of bureaucracy and unions). It has to be a government and party staffed by men of flesh and blood, rather than crass show- offs or smug smoothies.
The task is difficult, but the very first step is easy. Mrs Thatcher should sack Mr Jeffrey Archer from his new appointment as deputy chairman of her party. In weeks, almost days, the man has proved that he is a prat, incapable, even when speaking the truth, of commanding the slightest respect. Some will argue that it would be less embarrassing simply to silence Mr Archer and leave him in his job, but that is to misunderstand the nature of the beast. Mr Archer will never shut up and will never say anything that is not deeply shaming and damaging to his party. He cannot help reminding people of all the shoddy sides of the modern Conservative Party, while cari- caturing its virtues of energy and self-help, so fatally prone to be portrayed as callous- ness and selfishness. He must go now.
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