Multi-culturalism

Here we go again.
As the flames begin to die down, the chancers and political opportunists are emerging from the woodwork.
Following the example of Ken Livingstone, Mad Hattie Harman was on the telly last nigh explaining why thousands of young hooligans - some barely out of nappies - forsook the ersatz violence of their GameBoys and PlayStations for the real world excitement of rioting and disorder.
According to Miss Harman, it was their way of articulating anger at the rise in University Tuition fees and the cancellation of the Educational Maintenance Allowance which has been used since 2004 to encourage (or bribe) some 16-18 yearolds to stay in school. Oh, and don't let us forget the wicked Tory cuts while we are at it.
Right, Hattie.
Most of those who took to the streets go to school only when they need to keep out of the rain or establish an alibi. The concept of anyone willingly subjecting themselves to an additional three to four years of academic toil, let alone being prepared to pay for the privilege, would be totally alien to them.
To be fair, that their lawlessness could have been prompted by the Wicked Tory Cuts, might filter into their consciousness - or be suggested by a sharp defence lawyer - when they are having to excuse their activities in front of a magistrate. I doubt suppose it figured much in their thinking at the precise moment that they were legging it down Tottenham High Road clutching a 42" plasma screen TV.
No doubt, there is need for a huge debate in the country about how we educate our children, what disciplinary powers we give teachers and what rights ordinary citizens have to step in when confronted by lawlessness.
But, all of this will be so much hot air until we confront the main elephant in the drawing room, Multiculturalism.
Over the last two decades, but particularly during the 13 years of Blair/Brown, this country, for reasons best known to a small but powerful elite, set out to recast itself as a multicultural society.
Not only did we allow people to flock here in their millions but, unlike other large centres of immigration such as The US or Australia, we also encouraged them to import and nurture their own traditions and customs, frequently at the expense of the indigenous version. To make them feel as comfortable as possible, we even gave up teaching anything about our own history or traditions in school.
Nowhere has this been more apparent than in England in general and the south of England in particlular. Large pockets of our capital city have now become ghettoised, with the encouragement and approval of the previous government. Ghetto is such an ugly and emotionally-charged word, of course, that we are encouraged not to use it. Instead, people have desperately cast around for other descriptions; the favourite being the much cosier and less-threatening, Community.
Populated for the most part by people linked by family or geographical ties, these communities are self-contained and self-sustaining. However, since they are defined by the majority ethnic grouping or religion, they also tend to be exclusive, and in some cases, reclusive. They do not welcome outsiders into their midst.
Thus, when threatened by the rioters, Sikhs in Southall, Muslims in Birmingham and Turkish shopkeepers in Tottenham were able to mobilise resistance very rapidly. Armed with sticks, swords and knives they made a very public show of being prepared to protect their neighbourhoods and their businesses against all comers. The media reaction to this display of togetherness was one of unreserved approval and admiration.
Christine Odone in the the Telegraph, for instance, has written admiringly of their fierce commitment to their neighbourhoods and questioned why there wasn't the same degree of defiance and organisation in white communities.
Perhaps, she should look no further than Enfield for the answer. Here, white people did decide to band together for the same purpose, to protect their streets, businesses and homes. But, the official response to this display of community spirit has been markedly different. Where there was what appeared to be tacit approval of the stand taken by the Turks, the Sikhs an Muslim groups -tellingly, there were no calls for them to lay down their weapons and trust the duly appointed authorities to defend them - the same is not true in Enfield.
The problem seems to be that the residents marshalling their forces in that particular borough are predominantly white and number amongst them several men sporting closely cropped hair and tattoos. There has been no implied or tacit approval of their self-defence initiative. On the contrary, the man currently dubbed Britain's most senior policeman, Acting Met Police Commissioner, Tim Godwin, appears to belive that they have added a "violent racial element" to an already fraught situation.
Adding a violent racial element? What on earth does he think has been going on in London these last few days? A peaceful, mulitcultural picnic?
When black youths are texting each other to target Turkish and Asian-owned businesses, forcing their owners to arm themselves and stand guard, he doesn't think that is violent or racially-inspired?
While the Sikhs and Turks have been treated as local heroes, their white British counterparts have been dubbed "vigilantes", another word carrying a lot of emotional baggage, conjuring up visions of lynch mobs exacting their own brand of summary justice.
Commissioner Godwin has warned the "vigilantes" that the Met Police will crack down on them as hard as it does on the actual looters and rioters, if they try to take the law into their own hands. The irony of this double-standard - let alone its implicit racism - has obviously failed to penetrate Godwin's thick, helmeted head.
What this situation has demonstrated is the need for colour-blind policing on our streets, where victims and crminals alike are dealt with according to the severity of the crime. That is why the statue of Justice topping the Old Bailey is blind-folded. Because Justice must always be impartial.

How to define deprivation

In case you hadn't noticed, large areas of North London went up in flames over the weekend. Scenes reminiscent of the blitz filled tv screens and pages of the national dailies.
Various police officers made a belated appearance to explain what had happened and why they had been unable to stop the mobs turning significant area of our capital city into a passable imitation of a Beirut or Basra.
If as many had turned up to deal with the violence, perhaps fewer buildings would have been razed and fewer people forced to cower like prisoners behind their own locked and bolted doors.
Of course, the usual suspects have already started using the riots for their own ends. Ken Livingstone, never one to let anything as trivial as a moral consideration block an opportunity to score a cheap political point, has already laid the blame for the riots at the door of the Coalition.
Deprivation was the driver according to our Ken, stopping just short of drawing parallels with the Hunger marches of the Thirties. It was the Tory Cuts was that forced otherwise blameless people into desperate measures like setting fire to shops. Never mind that ordinaryt people, equally affected by the cuts, lived in the flats above those shops and were forced to flee in night clothes and with whatever few possessions they were able to grab before they were consumed by the flames.
In fairness to Ken, the deprivation was hard to miss .
People arrived in Tottenham, summoned by urgent messages pleading for their support, carried by bare-footed youngsters whose ragged clothes flapped around their frail, under-nourished bodies as they ran through the dank, malodorous streets of North London..
Actually, I made that bit up.
For the most part, people were lured to Tottenham and other parts of North London, with messages like, " I gonna roll on Tottenham, get some loot" carried not by semi-naked waifs, but posted on Twitter and FaceBook to be viewed on Blackberries, I-Phones and other smart gadgets.
Some, the genuinely deprived, had to make do with mobiles with no smart capabilities at all. But, still they joined the movement, spreading the word via humble text messaging and, in some cases, basic voice communications. And, in response, others came to join them; the tired, the poor, the dispossessed.
It was probably this group, the most deprived of all, who led the brave raids on the Halls of Capitalism in Tottenham Hale. Some, the more audacious and adventurous, made it as far as Wood Green where they battered down the barricades of privilege and helped themselves and their brothers and sisters in want to vital supplies from Currys, JJB Sports and CarPhone Warehouse.
By daylight on Sunday, sated but not necessarily satisfied, they had calmed down sufficiently to form orderly queues outside the best shops, and as an expression of solidarity in need, sharing their loot and their opportunities with those even less fortunate than themselves.
It must have warmed the cockles of old Ken's heart to see such generosity of spirit triumph in the face of the deprivation caused by those wicked, wicked, Tories at County Hall and Westminster.

There is a service industry - but service is not a business

One of the less appealing legacies of the Thatcher era, magnified throughout the Blair/Brown continuum, is the contention that all Public services will perform more efficiently if they were run like businesses.
This wrong-headed philosophy has landed us with a Post Office which is no longer capable of making twice-daily deliveries and whose employees routinely lie to their customers; national and local transport systems which, despite their nominally private ownership, are as heavily subsidised as they were when all transport was publicly owned; water companies who, after twenty years of trying, still cannot plug the leaks in their networks let alone guarantee continuity of supply; energy companies who exist solely to enrich their foreign owners and crucial health and social services that cannot even provide clean, safe accommodation for their sick and elderly customer base.
Many from these sectors report to or liaise with local and national Government agencies who slavishly follow the dictates of assorted lobbies, pressure groups and the EU rather than the people who elect or appoint them.
What they share with each other is the mistaken belief that services and service businesses are synonymous. The fastest growing sector in the UK economy for the last two decades has been the Service sector. Ergo, all we have to do to achieve the same levels of productivity and efficiency in our public services is to mimic those successful private service industries.
Wrong. Wrong and wrong again.
Despite the Service tag , these businesses exist for one reason only; to make money. They do this by making a profit. If, to achieve this, they need to close facilities, sack people, reduce working hours, relocate staff, slash benefits and even selectively shed customers, that is what they will do.
Public services exist for a very different reason; to provide vital services. That means running buses in rural areas where demand is intermittent, delivering letters to out of the way locations, manning fire and police stations in sparsely populated areas, emptying bins when the local populace wants them emptied; making sure that hospital and care staff follow basic hygiene routines to prevent infections. And accepting that to achieve these aims it will sometimes be necessary to subsidise some aspects of the service.
There is nothing remotely similar between balancing a budget to create value for shareholders, placate the bank manager and reward employees, and ensuring that bins are emptied, streets are cleaned, pot holes are filled, pensioners and other vulnerable people in the community are cared for and the police, fire and ambulance services are both local and respond rapidly when they are needed.
The problem is, of course, that "learning from business" has become the conventional wisdom. Councils, the Civil Service, the Police and Fire Brigades all routinely send their brightest and best to colleges where they rub shoulders with genuine business people. What they bring back from these courses - apart from an unhealthy addiction to management speak - is a mind set that makes no distinction between cost and value.
So, faced with a choice between maintaining a police station in a rural community or taking care of things from a central station twenty miles away, the new Police manager will opt for the latter. As long as he still ticks the right boxes, his decision Will be judged the correct one by his political masters. They, and he for that matter, are unlikely to live in the community thus affected.
The people on the ground might take a somewhat different view. Once the police are no longer in situ, they are no longer local. No glossy brochure can reassure like a blue light over a police station in the centre of town. No matter how artfully presented, all the statistics, pie charts, spreadsheets and matrices in the world will not convince the community that a mad twenty mile dash is as effective a deterrent as a large, uniformed bobby strolling down the High Street.
Does one provide better "value for money" than the other? It depends on your definition of value. If all of your assumptions are based on cost efficiency, then there can be no argument. (Unless, of course, the policies of our latest, mad Energy Minister drive fuel costs so high that a forty mile round-trip becomes as expensive as a month's rent and council tax.)
If, however, you evaluate the service on the basis of its value to the community, then the argument takes on a different complexion altogether. Only a business-man would choose the first option. Someone with the service of the public as his principal obsession would, unhesitatingly, opt for the latter.
Until and unless our political masters and their acolytes learn that lesson, our Public services will continue to decline to the point where, as is the case with the Post Office, it will be hard to make a sensible argument for their continued existence.