Politicians need to start listening, or we could be heading for very troubled times

With the public disorder of this week threatening to escalate into a more nationwide problem this coming weekend, it’s no surprise that those affected have been struggling to capture and understand the narrative of social discontent that seems to be gripping the country.

For the new Labour government it’s been a particularly unwelcome and uncomfortable development, flaring up at exactly the moment legislators were pinning their hopes on a new, improved vision for Britain and a much hyped root-and-branch ‘ reset’ of society.

Untangling exactly what is going on in our streets just now isn’t easy or obvious, as the “violence and thuggery” so strongly condemned by Prime Minister Keir Starmer yesterday has numerous causes and numerous culprits, and has been simmering now for a very long time.

To make matters even more difficult, those who’ve been taking to the streets typify the general mechanism of protest, which sees an initial rallying cry or cause very quickly divide and expand as lateral interests and concerns become enmeshed in the foray.

If one examines the history of civil unrest in modern Britain – and we have quite a tradition of it – one of the central mechanisms in domestic conflict resolution is engagement and in particular the recognition that some concerns are both logical and coherent. Separating these out from the nefarious agendas in the mix is a critical strategy towards restoring social order. Yet it seems that today the British state has found itself in a very different place.

Much of this has come from the breakdown in human rights and free speech, and the chasm that been opening up between the individual and the state. No longer are we living in a country with a national framework of rights and principles that we’d normally describe as a country, rather we have stumbled into a chaotic and conflicting situation where the politics of the day are defined by the disparate and random actions and beliefs of a multitude of individuals acting on a wide variety of impulses.

To make matters worse, the government seems to think that problem can be contained and dispersed by ascribing everything that has happened this week to the deluded and sinister actions and motives of “right wing thugs”, and that an appropriate and proportional response to this is to arrest as many people as possible, introduce draconian intrusions on public liberty and drive the media towards a narrative that contemporary civil unrest is nothing to do with the worries of the general public and everything to do with the actions of extreme political groups.

You could say that there is a fundamental misunderstanding of the public mood right now, and certainly the Conservative government seemed to lack even the most basic realisation that their self-serving actions and behaviours were enanthema to a population struggling to cope with austerity, Covid, uncontrolled immigration, a broken healthcare system, rising crime and the threat cause by global unrest. One could be forgiven for thinking that an incoming Labour Party – with all its foundational promises of representing working people, the elderly, the vulnerable the ‘traditional’ values of British society – might we worth a vote. Unfortunately, within mere weeks, the Labour Party in power is showing all the signs of being even more antagonistic to the population, and to the working classes in particular, than their predecessors would ever have dreamed of.

No-one is naïve enough to think that country doesn’t have incredibly tough economic and social decisions to make, and politicians need to understand that the British public is more than capable of enduring appropriate and necessary hardships, but this isn’t going to be achieved by cutting vital winter fuel allowances to the most vulnerable, and locking up any member of the public who takes to the streets to protest at the present mess we’re all in.

It’s absolutely catastrophic in such incendiary circumstances to hit out at the wrong target, and our modern political breed seem to have been woefully deficient when it comes to recognising where social problems lie, and how they might be resolved. In fact there seems to be a lamentable propensity towards making exactly the wrong (and often inflammatory) response, even when the better alternative is glaringly obvious. In this respect the manner of the Prime Minister’s promise yesterday to come down hard on “Violent disorder” might well go down as one of the most disastrous and inflammatory speeches of recent times. To suggest that everything we have seen on the streets of the UK over the past few weeks is the manipulation of a gullible public by the dark forces of the Far Right is not only a dangerous misunderstanding of the public mood, but a failure to draw the vitally important line between legitimate concerns and criminality.

Whether legislators like it or not there has been growing public discontent about the general direction of society, its legal framework and its moral and social outlook. Coupled to this unease has been the growing problem of crime, violence and marginalisation, and our increasing inability to care for and nurture the most vulnerable in society.

For its part successive British (and indeed many other Western) governments seem to have taken the view that post-modern liberal progress is the new religion, and anything running contrary to that narrative is either out of touch or dangerously resistant, and has to be silenced. We’ve seen this in particular over the past few decades with the marginalisation and suppression of the Christian social narrative. The creation of exclusion zones outside abortion clinics, the criminalisation of alternative gender narratives and restrictions on religious observances were just the first moves in a scheme of broader cultural and moral engineering designed to create an aggressively secular and atheist state.

What we have seen this week is an extremely dangerous escalation of the interference of the state in the public square and it all could have been so easily avoided if the government only had the bravery and intelligence to listen. Unfortunately listening also requires one to acknowledge that the other side has a voice and a legitimate concern, and this is something that heavily agenda-driven and party-compliant politicians really struggle with.

 There was a perfect example of this the other week when Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald gave a press conference following days of violent disorder in Coolock, north of Dublin, where a derelict Crown Paints factory has been ear-marked for an asylum centre. Ms McDonald was at pains to point out her view that the violence and confrontations with the police has been caused by a lack of “meaningful information” being given by the Irish government to local residents, which she says would have put their fears to rest. She pledged that her party would give local residents “an opportunity to be consulted, to make observations” but “We are not talking about a veto; we are talking about respectful conversations with community.”

Many wondered exactly what kind of narrative this was. Well, the political concept that ‘you will be consulted, you will be instructed on how to read the evidence, but you will never be allowed to say no’ is the next, sinister iteration of the nanny-become-autocratic state, and is becoming depressingly and dangerously familiar. It is also exactly the kind of dismissive rhetoric that leads to shops being smashed, buses burned and – God forbid – things far worse.

In many respects all civil wars are the result of a government’s refusal to listen to its people, and legislators need to acknowledge quickly and candidly that the present turmoil around immigration, social exclusion and poverty sweeping across the UK has every potential to become something far worse if all those affected don’t start listening before talking, and soon.

Joseph Kelly is Catholic writer and theologian

Pic: March 26, 2011: The state vs the people as protesters and riot police clash during a large austerity rally in central London.