The world ready has gone mad…
…as I find myself mainly agreeing with a Telegraph commentator (quoted in full below). Except for the bit at the end about Hitler. ‘National Pride’ was restored by identifying and persecuting a minority. Not necessarily by starting up industry.
“The Conservatives like Boris Johnson (commenting in the Telegraph http://www.telegraph.co.uk/com… still aren’t getting it, by claiming there are *a lot of jobs* out there for young people when there are not.And specifically, he refers to jobs in *service industries* being available, and often filled by immigrant workers.
This wholly overlooks that even in service industries, such as the BT customer service centres, to our horror we find when we have a problem, after going through about ten annoying menus we end up talking to somebody who does not speak or understand English very well, who is speaking from Madras, Bombay or some other Indian place.
This is an appalling neglect of duty by our governments to allow this kind of relocation to slave labour nations to take place at the expense of British jobs, as is foreign ownership of companies like Rolls Royce and most of our top British football clubs.
But the very biggest point he is failing to get is that young people, and especially those who join gangs, are looking for *respect*, which is what few jobs in service industries provide.
He is unable to distinguish between the person (often immigrant) who serves on the counter or waits at table in the *family owned* restaurant or takeaway, who feels *respect* and has *self-respect*, and the young person who wears the silly hat and works for the minimum wage in the corporate run burger bar, who unless he believes he is going to be soon promoted to supervisor or manager, feels little or no respect by comparison.
The never ending problem, the “elephant in the living room” which Boris’s predecessor Ken Livingstone pointed out right away on TV last week, was that since Mrs Thatcher destroyed most of British industry in a few short years, both to break the unions, and as a wider strategy of globalisation, *millions* of jobs and futures for young men disappeared in manufacturing industry and *never returned.*
Jobs in manufacturing that produce a concrete end result like building a car or making furniture, pottery, computers, or even pairs of shoes, give those who work in them a feeling of self-respect and social respect, whereas those who work in service industries, unless the business is owned by or part owned by them (such as a family business) unless very well paid, like in some banks, do not feel such respect.
The only way we can ever therefore have an adequate supply of jobs *with prospects* and in which they feel *respect*, for our young men, who comprise at least 90% of all the rioters, is by rejecting globalisation policies and creating numerous more jobs in both the public and private sector.
That would require raising taxes on higher earners and corporations probably up to something like 70%, which is the *only* way proper public services can exist, with proper pay (which is usually dismal in most public services right now), and thereby new industries can be created in which these youth have *real* jobs and prospects, and likewise it is necessary to reject imports from foreign countries where dirt cheap labour is employed, with which we can never possibly compete.
And Mr Johnson talked about the failure of the education system, but why should these lower class youths believe they have any reason to take it seriously, when there are no *jobs* and thus *futures* at the end of it for them?
So the problems are not “many and complex” as Mr Johnson claims – and thus can only be solved by some committee after commissioning some unreadable 1000 page report and ruminating on it for a 1000 years.
Because at root cause they are very simple – it is simply about the fact that the middle and upper classes are refusing to share their wealth – via far higher taxation and thus job creation – with those at the bottom end of society, who thus lacking inclusion in society in a way that gives them *respect*, then join gangs and commit crime, turning angrily and vengefully against the society that they believe does not care about them, and with much justification therefore.
The middle and upper class public is being faced with a simple choice – either accept high taxes and the redistribution of wealth, and gain the benefits of far better public services and social harmony; or face continued criminality and rioting, which is by no means a new phenomenon, but something that the law abiding public has had to put up with increasingly so – as muggings, burglary, car theft, gang culture, profit-driven violence, hooliganism and anti-social behaviour by idle youth and so on – for the last 30 years since the Thatcher era, when the “me first” self serving “yuppie culture” was born, that had as its central creed that greed was good, and to *not* tread on the have-nots in making your pile was just a mug’s game.
Our problem, is that we have a government which demands that people take responsibility for themselves, but itself refuses to takes responsibility in governing and caring for the people.
Specifically by persuading the wealthy middle and upper classes that they now need to be willing to participate in a major redistribution of wealth, so that those at the bottom of society can have their fair share, via doing jobs producing things that the public needs, and simultaneously offering a much better standard of public services, like shorter hospital queues, more police (at least temporarily) more schools with smaller classes, properly maintained roads, more buses, trains and other infrastructure that is properly funded and staffed, and a vastly increased supply of quality housing, even if at times that means building upwards in the rapidly dwindling land available.
If the government had real guts, *that vision* of a life and society reduced somewhat in extravagant luxuries (whose quality would suffer little for that, by not forcing new fashions on us every 3 months) offering safe streets to walk and drive on, properly funded public services that delivered and satisfied, instead of irritated and frustrated, and above all a harmonious friendly and cooperative society in which neighbours were no longer perceived mainly as threats, nuisances and competitors, that vision could be sold to the middle and upper classes, and then the changes required funded by the tax increases could be quickly put into place, so that within 5 to 10 years we would see a dramatically different country, which based on more caring and socially equitable values would be fit for purpose for decent, law abiding humans to live in.
If we could learn any lesson from the otherwise tragic Nazi era, it was that Hitler managed to transform a debt-ridden, industrially broken country inside a couple of decades, into one of the strongest and most efficient industrial nations on the earth, by instilling pride back into his nation.
If even Hitler, with his warped sense of purpose was able to achieve that, why cannot we?”
