{"id":11387,"date":"2011-08-09T10:02:22","date_gmt":"2011-08-09T09:02:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/?p=11387"},"modified":"2011-08-09T10:02:22","modified_gmt":"2011-08-09T09:02:22","slug":"riots-and-routs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/2011\/08\/09\/riots-and-routs\/","title":{"rendered":"Riots and routs"},"content":{"rendered":"

It was a horrid day yesterday.<\/p>\n

Few can have watched the scenes in London without a sense of horror, disgust and fear. I lived in London for twenty two years. It's impossible not to feel empathic for those who will today go about their lives \u00a0their today. And, lest we forget, this is not just now an issue in London: other cities have suffered too.<\/p>\n

And yet this wasn't a surprise to me. Surely it wasn't to the government either? For\u00a0thirty\u00a0years or more economic crisis in this crisis has led, during the summer months, to rioting. That in no way excuses the rioting. It is criminal. It is wholly destructive. It alienates. Hope dies with it for a while, and takes a long time to rebuild.<\/p>\n

But let's be clear. This rioting is not, as some want to cast it, just mindless violence. Violence, yes, undoubtedly and to be condemned as a result. With criminal prosecutions to follow as a result, I also hope. But mindless? \u00a0No it is not that, as Dave Hill argued, exceptionally well, on his Guardian blog<\/a>. There are motives and reasons for this behaviour, and in that case it demeans anyone to call it mindless.<\/p>\n

Those motives and that behaviour may be destructive, but in that sense they may not be so far\u00a0removed from the utterly irrational behaviour we are seeing on the world's markets at exactly the same moment. In a very real sense the stock market is being trashed. The FTSE has over the last few days done this<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Nothing suggested that it was going to crash as it has: a week ago there was some hope of stability. But then fear pervaded: the realistic fear in the eyes of those like me who have long forecast that this would happen that there will, as a\u00a0consequence\u00a0of the economic policies inappropriately and unwisely chosen by our\u00a0political\u00a0leaders, be another\u00a0worldwide\u00a0recession.<\/p>\n

That fear was justified. Hope evaporated<\/span>. Panic took its place and is still gripping the markets - as this morning's trading shows.<\/p>\n

Was that fear that caused\u00a0this\u00a0rout that has trashed millions if not billions of people's hopes - and will do for a long time to come - the same fear that led people to tip over from quiet acceptance of those political<\/span> decisions onto behaviour that is indication of the same loss of hope?<\/p>\n

Can it really just be coincidence that these events happened at the same time?<\/p>\n

I can't see any way that the tow are unrelated. When any real hope in\u00a0political\u00a0leaders - in the US and the EU faded - and with\u00a0those\u00a0in the UK just absent - the\u00a0reality\u00a0of\u00a0despair\u00a0hit.<\/p>\n

This does not mean I condone violence: I am appalled by it.<\/p>\n

But then I don't condone the behaviour of markets and the enormously adverse impact that they will\u00a0have\u00a0either.<\/p>\n

What I am saying is simple: that the promise that underpinned neoliberalism<\/span><\/span> - that unlimited cheap credit would be available to make life tolerable now with financialisation<\/span><\/span> and securitisation<\/span><\/span> promising the\u00a0prospect\u00a0of a better future tomorrow \u00a0- when the charade that this has always been was exposed by the simultaneous failure of the politicians who supported it and the markets that sustained it - then at\u00a0that\u00a0moment the hope of those who had endured its\u00a0consequences\u00a0and who knew its promise of material well being was never going to be theirs to enjoy snapped.<\/p>\n

I can't prove that, of course.<\/p>\n

I can only suggest it.<\/p>\n

I also suggest that this means that the\u00a0only\u00a0way\u00a0forward\u00a0is to now leave neoliberalism<\/span><\/span> - both the form its been\u00a0delivered\u00a0in and even more so the extreme form that the Tea Party and Tory right\u00a0propose\u00a0- far behind us.<\/p>\n

Now is the time for\u00a0Courageous States. My new book on that theme is 85% done. I'll be working on it for the rest of the day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It was a horrid day yesterday. Few can have watched the scenes in London without a sense of horror, disgust and fear. I lived in
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