“The riots spell out a fundamental challenge in British politics: to replace a culture in which people simply take what they want with an ethic of give and take, reciprocity, something for something.”
The Economist reviewed this book not so long ago, so I decided I’d pick it up. David Lammy is the Labour MP for Tottenham, an area of London central to the riots in 2011, and in Out of the Ashes he “explores why they happened, what [he] think[s] they tell us about Britain, and where we should go from here.”
In brief, he suggests the reason is an over-focus on individualism in modern culture. People don’t have a stake in society, and so they feel no sense of responsibility towards others. Unemployment is corrosive to our sense of who we are and what we stand for; businesses fail and we stop feeling like we’re part of a community or that we owe the community anything, least of all respect. Even in prison, the UK isolates their prisoners and prevents them from forming or keeping communities, unlike the Scandinavian model that focuses on giving prisoners social ties, to the extent of creating couples wings in prisons.
Books written by standing politicians are generally terrible, for the simple reason they want to be elected, not inform. This one is better: he still indulges in the periodic unrealistic suggestion or political haymaking to establish his credentials (I’m unconvinced of the value of giving football clubs to the people, but I’m sure it wins votes), but parts of the book are insightful. He writes well about his concerns about our modern focus on human rights, for example: they bring considerable benefits, of course, but they’ve also lead to a modern discourse where we focus on what we can do by right, instead of trying to decide the right thing to do.
Ironically, this is in some ways a small-c conservative argument, with a focus on community and group rights, though I suspect he’d disagree with that. Regardless, I enjoyed it, and it’s a nice expression of feelings I think a lot of people in the UK share about the riots. Most of the policies aren’t new, but he argues well for them, whether requiring young people to help care for the elderly, reforming prisons, or a guaranteed minimum income (also known as a negative income tax). If you’re willing to wade through some standard fluff and electioneering, it’s one of the better books available about the London riots.