Fuck Scottishness. I'm Voting Yes.

To paraphrase Allen Chun who said the same of China, something called "Scotland" unquestionably exists, but, more importantly there is a multitude of expressions to denote different aspects of Scotland and Scottish-ness. There is no room for these multiple perspectives in our official political debates right now as Scotland continues to be represented through flags, whiskey, and mountains by British and Scottish nationalists. Impartiality is impossible so let me explain how my biases and personal experiences shape my politics and my choice to vote yes to Scottish independence. I was born in Scotland and I have lived for several years in England and in China. My father was born in London but left the UK's supposedly cosmopolitan capital because it was "too parochial" and because north of Watford is not barbarian country. His father was from Waterford in southern Ireland and came to London to escape his own involvement in a civil war which pitted brother against brother in a battle for control of the nation against the British empire. He was then told "no dogs, no Irish" on arrival, so he had to start his own small business. He married a woman from England who I was lucky to grow up with and who I can't recall even mentioning countries.

My mother was born in Clydebank outside Glasgow into a family of migrants from Donegal. They arrived in Scotland with Irish as their first language and we spent every summer in the hills of Donegal. My grandmother was an Irish catholic and she read the Bible. My grandfather was an internationalist socialist and read the communist manifesto. The first time I ever wore a Scottish football top as a 7 year old, I was called a "mongrel" with "no right to wear that" by my protestant neighbour. I attended a "non-denominational" school which sent us to the Church of Scotland for every Christian festival! Almost every day of primary school I was called a "fenian bastard" and almost every day I responded in kind to call them "orange bastards" in return. I grew up being teased by my dad for being a "fenian" for supporting Celtic and had to suffer in silence listening to friend's dads calling people "English bastards". Even as children we discussed our identity at school. It's impossible not to given our history. I was always told I'm British because my passport says so yet this inclusion made me feel more excluded than ever as it offered no concern for how I understood myself, the daily reality of mutual exclusion, or my family history. The idea that my identity or anyone's identity could simplify and gloss over these contestations and simply return to being British or being Scottish feels foreign to me.

Ethnic majorities have a responsibility to understand minority and in-between experiences. They tend to forget they have their own identity attachments because they are surrounded by people with seemingly similar ones. Telling someone to be above nationalism when they have been marked their whole lives as different and foreign is not progressive, it's an unconsciously ethno-centric view of the world which seeks to detach themselves from all responsibility from the complex realities of colonialism, marginalisation, and discrimination. To witness the scandal that is the official debate on the subject which frames Yes voters as nationalists and then fails to deconstruct any of the ideological assumptions of why people vote no or feel British, feels like everything I've just written and the colour and fuzziness of the identity politics I know I have lived through is meaningless. The political debate makes a politics lecturer want to withdraw from politics. To have to justify why I am not a nationalist to people who have thought about these things for a few hours when I have been forced to think about these things every day since I was a boy is tiresome and worrying. You are no or you are yes, you don't like the SNP or you do, you are with us or you are against us. The party political machines have the real victory here not because people want to vote no but because it is impossible to have a debate without relying on these childish binaries, which most children know are imagined. Their victory is society's loss because instead of sharing my hopes and fears with many English friends I'm forced to justify why I'm not anti-English instead of discussing how to make things better. Instead of being excited by politics, I feel like it is nothing to do with me.

The political parties have long converged on a neoliberal consensus: the Conservatives are cowboy capitalists, Labour is whatever the Conservatives say with a smile and a tax rebate for working families, and the Lib Dems are part of an illiberal coalition presiding over declining civil liberties and freedom of speech. There is no debate. They are willing the "end of history" to insist we all agree on values, we just differ on detail. The discourse of "austerity" overshadows every possible political discussion. The rapid growth of food banks since 2008 and the media and politician's unwillingness to fully tackle the issue should be the scandal of our age. The value of humans and their right to be seen as good British citizens is judged solely by their contribution to GDP as the most vulnerable in our society are called scum and gazed upon in human zoos such as Benefits Street. There is no hope of any alternative being offered outside this discourse and it is a guarantee of further economic inequality and political disengagement. I'll be voting yes not because it guarantees social justice but because it is the only offer on the table of doing anything whatsoever about it.

The referendum does not ask us how we identify ourselves or how do we understand our history. It asks "do you think Scotland should be an independent nation?". I wanted to say no so I could reject the need for nations altogether but the best way to do that is to say Yes. A no vote simply confirms we are happy to move to the next general election with excluding everyone who isn't British and or economically viable the dominant motif. Leaving the EU and the "threat" of immigrants are now top of the very unconsciously nationalist political agenda which dominates the UK's political discourse. I'll be voting yes because I have never been British and I would like to have a meaningful debate about how colonialism, including the participation of Scots, shapes how we view ourselves and the outside world. The smaller the state the easier it will be to ask how are people being marginalised and stigmatised in Easterhouse, Calton, and East Kilbride, places I've yet to hear being mentioned by our "leaders" crippling the debate. I want to be able to look beyond Scotland V England and look at how we marginalise people on our own doorstep. I want to say Fuck Scottish-ness  and it mean something. 

Identity and Empathy in the Logics of "Terror"

When Islamophobia explodes across England because an individual who happens to be a Muslim commits an act of violence, it suggests our Kingdom is not as United as our politicians like to think. In the wake of the murder of a British soldier in Woolwich, we would do well to take a step back and turn a critical lens on our media before we feel the need to lock ourselves in our homes for fear of the terrorists in our midst.

“In the life of a nation, we’re called up to define who we are and what we believe”1.

George Bush uttered these famous words in defence of the US decision to send military forces to Saudi Arabia during the Persian Gulf crisis. Bush, like most politicians, was linking identity to national security by saying identity is something we must define, enclose within national boundaries, and send troops abroad to kill and die in the name of its assumed unity. In these types of state-centric narratives of identity, we do not and must not identify with the suffering of those outside our national borders. There is the nation and there is outside the nation. “The boundaries of a state’s identity are secured by the representation of danger”2.  It is through danger which we define who we are because danger is intrinsically Other and outside ourselves. It is a representation of what we do not want to be and what we do not want to happen to us.

“Danger is not an objective condition. It is not a thing which exists independently of those to whom it may become a threat”3. Acts of violence are represented in different ways which tell us a lot about how we define ourselves. When the English Defence League assaulted police in Woolwich last night, this was represented by the mainstream media as a “protest” and the damaging of mosques were “attacks”. These are dangers but of a lesser and local order. There is no link to national security in the way the incidents are reported and discussed. On the other hand, a British soldier being murdered by a Muslim has been immediately labelled “terrorism”, a supposed threat to the very existence of our nation.

So who is under threat? For David Cameron, this was “an attack on Britain – and on the British way of life” and that “people in every community will utterly condemn this attack”. Why is this incident an attack on the “British” way of life? Why are racially motivated murders not elevated to this level of threat? Why are the lives lost to violence in working class council estates all across the UK not seen as a “threat” to our nation? These are stories of threats to people’s lives which occasionally make the news but are never seen as matters of national security. These lives are not deemed as valuable as those of British soldiers because they are not seen to embody the nation and so they are represented as local problems of an altogether less threatening nature. This is simply not the type of nation many British people want to live in and it only reinforces existing divisions over class and race to simply pretend they do not exist.

The way the Woolwich violence is represented frames our identity in a way which obscures competing perspectives on the violence and on who we are. It demands we see this attack as a threat to ourselves in a way which racial assaults and violence against young working class men are not. It demands we empathise with the victim and that we must not empathise in any way with the perpetrator. Otherwise, we are excluded from this conceptualisation of “community” which is “sickened” and intellectually paralysed with feelings of condemnation. So we are told we must feel a certain way about this because we are British. When David Cameron says “this attack sickened us all” he may be right but it sickens people in very different ways and for very different reasons. Can we not be sickened by the attack, the nationalist response, and the militaristic UK foreign policy all at the same time? Yesterday, one BBC interviewer even asked “what is that is so annoying about having British troops on their soil?”. To frame British troops invading other countries as an annoyance yet one murder in Britain as a threat to our nation exemplifies an utter dearth of empathy in Britain’s historical and current role in initiating and fomenting violent conflict, simply because it has hurt one of our own.

Condemning comes very easily but trying to understand why this happens takes effort, even empathising with people who you may find disagreeable. Some media coverage has worked to deny British people the right to make up their own minds. The video of one of the attacker’s speech was edited to deny our right to empathise by cutting out the parts where he attempts to empathise. Here is a slightly extended version where he says:

“Remove your governments, they don’t care about you. Do you think David Cameron is going to get caught in the street when we start bussing our guns? Are your politicians going to die? No, it’s going to be the average guy like you”.

You may hate the messenger but it is working class persons who are sent to wage the wars which this man himself highlighted as his reasoning behind the attack. Perhaps not going to wars in the name of national identity might make the people we choose to kill in its name feel more secure. If they felt more secure, they may be less likely to want to wage what they see as very similar wars to what happens when British troops leave our shores in the name of “freedom”.

1. Bush, George (1990) “In Defense of Saudi Arabia” in Sifry, M and Cerf, C (eds) The Gulf War Reader: History, Documents, Opinions.

2. Campbell, David (1998) Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity.

3. Campbell, David (1998).

China's Divided Leadership, China's Divided Society

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) under Hu Jintao has emphasised building a “harmonious society” at home and a “harmonious world” at the international level. Given that official figures tell us that China experiences approximately 500 protests per day, it is safe to conclude that the party’s emphasis on harmony represents the awareness that contemporary China is anything but harmonious. Today’s China may enjoy double-digit growth figures on paper but it is also rampant with corruption, struggling to address a growing wealth gap, and has a state-media increasingly viewed as a form of “brainwashing”. One of the party-state’s greatest concerns following the end of the Soviet Union was an “ideological vacuum”. However, its greatest challenge is not a vacuum but its own irrelevance in the face of competing alternatives in an increasingly diverse China. The party’s inability to offer a genuine economic model to meet people’s needs is placing strains on its legitimacy. Furthermore, its inability to speak to ordinary Chinese people and share in the meanings they give to daily life is driving its own demise.

The present leadership handover has been less than harmonious as we have seen with the arrest and expulsion from the party of one of China’s potential future leaders, Bo Xilai. Bo Xilai is seen as a representative of China’s “new left” and one of the architects of the “Chongqing model”. Bo’s “cake theory” of economics was now that China has a big enough cake, the pressing concern is how to divide the cake. Bo Xilai’s concern for inequality ought to be easily incorporated into the discourse of a nominally Communist party. However, factionalism within the party is so rife that discussion of inequality has become a political sensitive issue. The website of the Utopia bookshop was shut down this year because it supported Bo and his redistributive policies. As one media executive put it, “we don’t mention Chongqing. I don’t eat Chongqing hotpot. I won’t even date Chongqing girls”. When Mao Zedong said that “the Chinese people have stood up”, it was not his intention that protesters who respectfully knelt down in front of his portrait should be arrested as happened earlier this year!

The politics of contemporary China appears all the more bewildering when we see the opening of the Party Congress with a very orthodox celebration of the party’s communist heritage and use of communist symbols. The party has long wished to present itself as the only Chinese voice the world should listen to and this performance was no different. However, thanks to a global telecommunications revolution we know Chinese people are already posting sarcastic and dismissive remarks online where “harmony” is talked about as something that is done to the people and not by them. The ban on knife sales in Beijing lest the proletariat turn on the dictatorship reflects the party’s awareness that public performances of harmony have yet to produce harmony.

The expulsion of Bo Xilai led many to speculate that Wang Yang’s “Guangdong model” of “free-markets” would be the new path for China. Wang Yang’s response to “cake theory” was that China “must bake a bigger cake before dividing it”. His claim that small and medium size enterprises are inefficient and should be allowed to be eliminated by the market is closer to what one would expect from Mitt Romney than a Communist Party leader. This debate on the future of China is not simply about party factionalism but the very heart of daily life in today’s China where the divide between the 128 million people who live on roughly a dollar a day and the number of dollar billionaires is growing. Most of the 500 protests a day in China are focused on economic issues such as evictions, property redevelopment, and labour rights. Educated people in China have always corrected my Chinese to tell me that “class” (jieji; 阶级) does not exist in today’s China, only “status” (jieceng; 阶层). However, those on the bottom rung don’t blink when I mention China is a classist and unfair society. In the words of one taxi driver “China is a capitalist communist country. We don’t even know who rules us anymore because they are hidden away in luxury apartments and plazas buying diamonds and playing on computers. We are slaves.”

Wang Yang’s alleged removal from the Politburo Standing Committee has raised questions regarding the influence of Jiang Zemin and Conservative elders. What appears to be happening is that factional politics inside the party meant that ousting some of the leading proponents of the left and the right was necessary for a workable political compromise for the leadership selection. How long can this uneasy compromise last? Xi Jinping, who will take over from Hu Jintao as the party General Secretary, is a careerist who is happy to jump from left to right to gain power, so this choice may work for now. However, the ongoing pretence of “building socialism” coupled with no transparent debate amongst officials, the party-state appears to be atrophying into its own ideological vacuum while the rest of China diversifies and conducts heated political debates outside official channels.

Hu Jintao’s statement that “we will never copy a Western political system” will speak to nationalists but it continues to define China in terms of what it is not and uses a mythical, homogenised Western Other to do so. Factionalism and multiple ideologies are good things for China but unless the party can find a way to make itself relevant to the daily lives of citizens, these ideologies will blossom and be turned against them. The party is increasingly backing itself into irrelevance by performing Communism yet pursuing a state-led capitalist model of development. Chen Bilan had to live in exile from 1945 after warning the party that if they did not democratise rapidly the dictatorship of the proletariat would degenerate into a self-interested, bourgeois bureaucracy. It turns out that she was right as today’s China has in the words of Yang Jisheng become a “power-market economy” where rent-seeking and corruption are not threats to the system as such because they are the system itself.

Cowboy Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics, Part 2: A View from the Street

Despite the growth of inequality in contemporary China and the precarious means of subsistence for the lowest rung, few voices have shouted above the parapet to protect or increase the lot of the poorest. If we take Beijing, a seemingly booming metropolis, visible indications of inequality and economic problems can be found almost everywhere. In a brief walk through the prospering nanluo guxiang alleyways (南锣鼓巷) of the drum tower area, one can take in street after streets of trendy coffee shops and ‘international bars’, pay 40 kuai for a drink (equivalent to the daily wage of a waitress serving it), or be caught in the jam-packed streets of fashionable young Chinese shoppers dazzled by various arty, luxury consumer fashion items. In less upmarket areas 9 kuai can buy you a relatively healthy meal of noodles. Instead one can consult international entertainment guides printed in English to see adverts for concerts such as ‘progressive’ metal band Opeth for 680 kuai, about three times the price of a comparable UK concert (an upcoming Avril Lavigne concert costs 1700 kuai, about 170 UK pounds). You can then turn a corner and within seconds the streets are empty, the residents are aging, and the homes are without heating, running water, and toilets. The generation gap and the income disparities are visibly staggering. This is not simply about inequality per se but about access to the means of subsistence- a basic income, health, and education. Accessing largely privatised social services is not cheap and housing prices have exploded. For example, it costs about 400 pounds a month to rent a small studio flat with no cooking facilities in the Xiaoxitian area (a relatively affordable district adjacent to Beijing Normal University). This is much the same as a one person flat with separate rooms, a full kitchen and bathroom in Manchester, UK. Average income in the UK is $38,540 compared to China’s $4,260. No surprise then that small shop-owners still have beds in their stalls all over Beijing and rely on small heaters or electric blankets though the winter. Capitalism seems to inevitably produce winners and losers and this is perhaps most dramatic in its global phase where wealth and goods are not confined by national borders. The winners and losers here are worlds apart and there is little responsibility being shown by the winners.

Pun Ngai, author of Dagongmei, brings to light a serious contradiction in the claims of China’s opening up in the reform era. We ordinarily expect capitalism and wealth creation to thrive on social and spatial mobility; business and people have to be willing to move to where money can be made and profit found. However, while the Chinese system has privatised social services and to some extent opened its markets to global capital, it has not abandoned the household registration system (hukou). This divides citizens into urban and rural residents and ties residents to their place of birth if they wish access discounts to the most basic healthcare and early schooling still available under the system. This means the rich are increasingly mobile both in global terms (they can afford to travel abroad or go to see Opeth in Beijing) and in national terms because they can move to other cities and pay for private healthcare and schooling. This maintenance of immobility combined with skyrocketing housing prices has led to the phenomenon of what Pun Ngai termed “dormitory capitalism”; not only does the hukou system make the millions of migrants who move to the city de facto illegal aliens in their own country but due to the cost of housing many have to live in dormitories in basements owned by their employers rather than be made homeless. This provides a lifestyle completely at odds with representations of a rising, powerful China and in utter contrast to the nouveau-rich playing on their laptops and sipping high status coffee. Coupled with the fact that trade unions are de facto outlawed in China, this also enables the owners of such businesses a level of control over their employees such that the most marginalised (poor, rural women) are “instantly disposable” and in many cases cannot refuse to sell their bodies. Approximately 12% of China’s GDP can be accounted for by the sex trade.

I’ll offer a brief personal story of how the process of renting a house works in Beijing. This is written from the relatively privileged perspective of my partner and me. However, much can be gleaned from it to tell us where wealth goes and the attitudes towards it in Beijing today. We were advised by both Chinese and foreign friends that to find a house in Beijing, going through an agency would cost more but it would save us a lot of trouble and avoid the risk of being ripped off later. We explored the xiaoxitian area and discovered that there are perhaps half a dozen of such firms on every street! These firms manage large amounts of property for landlords who often own entire apartment blocks. The streets are not only decked in adverts everywhere but you can see their staff standing on most street corners waiting for clients or waiting for people to look at their adverts which also adorn many street corners. This is big business. Overhearing conversations on the street and in restaurants, housing seems to be the hot topic of the day- everybody needs it but most seem to be struggling to pay for it. We looked at a number of flats and studio apartments to little avail as our rough budget of 4,000 kuai (about 400 pounds) would only cover decaying flats with broken toilets or a tiny studio. Eventually we received a phone-call from an unknown number offering us help to find a flat. We assumed he was from one of the companies we had consulted but we eventually discovered he was actually a middle man to the middle men at the estate agents. He provided clients to the firms who make money finding clients for the under-rich landlords. We eventually met with him and spent the best part of a day or two chatting with him as we looked for accommodation. He offered us a reasonable deal, he said, because we were British. This was an offer he wouldn’t extend to Greeks and Italians in the Eurozone who renege on their debts! As most young men in Beijing, his life revolved around making as much money as he could to pay for housing, keep his family afloat, and save for the future. He claimed his wage for acting as a middle man to the middle men was about 10,000 kuai per month – light years ahead of the national average and equivalent to our individual incomes in the UK. When we discussed tax, he mocked the UK tax system for taking money away from people (China’s income tax is a rate of about 20% for those making more than a very healthy 5,000 kuai a month). He audibly scoffed at our suggested notion that this money could be used to help society. Socialism remains comedic and kitsch amongst China’s youth. In fact, he described life and business in China, in the same way as many here, as “people-eat-people” (ren chi ren; 人吃人). Competition is so fierce here that people believe it demands that one pursues wealth and self-interest without responsibility to others outside one’s family, let alone any socialist commitment to aiding the poorest rungs of society.

After looking at a half a dozen flats with him, we eventually had to lower our standards. We accepted a reasonably sized but decaying and concreted floored flat with a bathroom I could barely stand in. It seemed quite pleasant compared to others we could afford. When we arrived to sign the contract, a problem emerged. Every foreign national in China has to register themselves and their address with the local police station. However, the landlord insisted we register with a fake address at a different station because it would be “more convenient”. This was a way for them to avoid taxes on the rental income as well as the fee associated with this registration. They either had relationships (guanxi; 关系) with police or a landlord in another part of town. Knowing that if anything went wrong we would be the ones in trouble and would probably be sent home, we opted to find somewhere else despite having spent the better part of a week looking at houses. The only way we could both afford to live in Beijing would be in a small and relatively old studio flat. We found such a studio flat in the xiaoxitian area thanks to our anti-Euro middleman to the middlemen in a relatively nice apartment block. We were quite satisfied.

At this stage we still thought our man was just an ordinary middle man but on settling to sign the contract, we realised that this wasn’t the case. An employee of an estate firmed arrived with the contract, refused to say a word, drew up the details, pointed and said ‘sign’. We insisted we read what we were signing up to. He was clearly annoyed but would tolerate this. Our man told him “don’t worry, foreigners are all like this, they just take contracts seriously”. Relationships may be more important than law in China but as travelling foreigners without any networks we opted to stick to the law. On perusal of the contract it turned out they were adding 9 days onto the 6 month lease we agreed. The company man repeatedly urged us to sign as it was “much the same” and would only grin when I said if it is much the same, then change it! After much to-ing and fro-ing I told the company man that I didn’t want to give 1,000 kuai for nothing to a rich landlord. This he found amusing. He agreed to reduce the additional time to 7 days, even though he had claimed it was impossible due to the contract he had with the company who had a contract with the landlord! We both realised this was how these cowboys make lots of money. He, along with hundreds of other agents, was travelling round town all day. If they made a free thousand kuai off every customer they were raking it in without even considering the profit from their legitimate business. After much consternation and urging us to sign, the agreement was made that the original middle man would take the additional cost out of his ‘finder’s fee’. He had of course told us that this would be reduced earlier but now there was no chance- we had to pay him a full month’s rent in cash with no tax paid just for the sake of a few phone calls. No wonder he makes a good wage. The pair of us were then hurled onto the back of a small motorbike and driven to the company office bouncing off a taxi on the way. The company man, who had seemed so aloof and high status from our first meeting, refusing to even engage with our middle man, was suddenly in a different social position. He was being shouted at by his boss and providing us with a place to sit and a drink in this bustling office where multiple deals were being negotiated all round us. The boss grilled him on how much he had got for the flat. He seemed pleased with the 3,500 kuai per month we agreed to pay. All of a sudden, the rate seemed like it had been negotiable and we guessed that the company weren’t just making money as a set fee from the landlord but were probably creaming extra cash off by charging us a higher rate than what they were telling him. I would doubt the taxes are being paid.

The inconvenience of all this was tiresome but quite amusing and a good learning experience. The real story is that so much money is slushing around, tax-free and destined for landlords’ pockets, that multiple middle men can still make a healthy, largely tax-free living by knowing the market but doing very little. This opportunity would not be available to the additional illiterate 30 million adults who merely happened to be born in a poorer hukou (household registration area). Adam Smith and Karl Marx both agreed that under capitalism, the arduousness of labour is inversely proportional to the profit made from it. When we think back to those having to live in their shop-stalls to survive or living in dormitories and basements selling their bodies, this is clearly the case in contemporary China. National television (CCTV) devotes hours to heart-warming stories of peasants, who have to work endlessly without complaint to pay healthcare bills or send their kids to school, as examples to be admired. Perhaps regulating the cowboy capitalists and using taxes to pay for schools and hospitals, instead of mega-pr events like the Olympics or indeed a nuclear arsenal, would mean the poorest wouldn’t have to be admired for the hardship they endure.

Cowboy Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics, Part 1: The Big Picture

The end of the cold war and in particular, the effects of the global financial crisis, has led to a convergence of interests between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the US, the world’s declining hyper-power. It suits both the neo-conservatives in Washington and authoritarian leaders in Beijing to represent the new China as an economic powerhouse. US foreign policy hawks portray China as a threat to the prevailing hegemony justifying military spending and protectionism while the CCP domestically celebrates itself as the only way to prosperity (see the slogan: 只有共产党才能建设好新中国; “Only with the communist party, can we build a new, great China”). Since the onset of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in 1978, China has indeed enjoyed spectacular double-digit economic growth figures. The glitz and glamour image of the ‘new’ China exemplified by Shanghai’s pudong skyline is mesmerising for foreign investors and travellers alike. As important as these images and representations are in recreating an attraction towards the new China or what Joseph Nye called China’s ‘soft power’, there is indeed a lot more happening behind these images and on the streets of China’s ever-expanding cities let alone the hugely impoverished countryside.

The World Bank’s 2011 data tell us average global income (GNI per capita) is just over 9,000 US dollars. According to the same stats, income in China ranks at 121 of 215 in the world at $4,260. This does not diminish the impressive growth China has enjoyed over the last 40 years but it does put it in context; average income in Kazakhstan is $7,440. With economic growth, China has become one of the most unequal countries in the world- ranking at 36, ahead of the US at 44^th and the UK at 92nd. This should make us take a step back and ask who are the 99%? The neoliberal, capitalist United States is actually more egalitarian than the supposedly socialist China and indeed enjoys an average income of more than 10 times that of the purported threat to its global hegemony. The World Bank celebrates its own achievements and the seemingly inevitable logic of the ‘free-market’ by claiming 200 million have been pulled out of poverty across the globe since the 1980s. Chinese people constitute the majority of these yet all is not what it seems. These figures are extrapolated from a handful of booming eastern and southern coastal cities, which are not representative of China as a whole and which present an even greater problem considering the level of inequality across the nation.

The Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative produced a spectacularly detailed set of statistics on multi-dimensional poverty (eg income, education, health, etc) which breaks down different types and levels of poverty across different regions within nations. China is one of the only countries in the world which did not submit regional figures, so we can’t even adequately capture regional inequality in China in ways which we can for supposedly “failed states” in Sub-Saharan Africa such as Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Democratic Republic of Congo. We know that regional inequality is a huge problem and that since the 1990s it has grown. For example, the GDP per capita of Yunnan province is about 10-15% of that of Shanghai, the image of Chinese modernity. We also know that when the World Bank revised its definition of poverty upwards to an underwhelming $1.25 a day, the number of people living in “extreme poverty” in China jumped from 130 million people to 207 million, about a sixth of the total population. This means one sixth of the population of China are neither sharing in the statistically pleasing double digit growth nor the mesmerising hi-tech appearance of the new China. Despite double-digit national growth throughout the 1990s, Shanghai as one of the fastest growing regions saw no relative income growth and the poorest lost income in absolute terms (see Huang, Yasheng (2008) Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

The global financial crisis of 2008 laid bare the lack of regulation of capitalism had opened the most vulnerable in society to the vagaries of financial markets despite their lack of participation in them. In the UK, David Cameron calls for a “responsible capitalism” and in the US, Barrack Obama was initially lauded by many for his goals of extending access to healthcare to all. ‘Responsibility’ to others and the pursuit of self-interest above all else under capitalism may be oxymoronic. However, the political need to attempt to reconcile them in public discourse at least indicates a broader accountability to a wider range of social interests. In China, Deng Xiaoping’s mantra, “to get rich is glorious”, sums up the attitudes of Chinese youth today who see communism as a kitsch yet backward social irrelevance and money as a cure to all ills. Of course, the great leap forward in which 30 million people died of famine, the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, and the gloominess of communist uniformity remain as reminders of the failures of anything but the pursuit of wealth in the self-imagination of contemporary Chinese youth. The cyclical crises of capitalism throughout twentieth century Europe and the US offer very different storehouses of imagination to that of China. Today, the Chinese government, official media, and popular discourse frequently refer to the global financial crisis as the “western financial crisis”. It is often explained it in cultural terms as a failure of “westerners” to save money and pay off their own mortgages in contrast to the Asian traditions of savings and austerity.

What is less said in popular media, both in China and abroad, is that the housing market in China today bears many of the hallmarks of the economic conditions which led to the sub-prime mortgage crisis in the US, which ultimately triggered the global financial crisis. The IMF has warned of the economic crash that could result from soft loans with little hope of return, unregulated lending, concentrated housing ownership, and rising property prices. Like the US at the turn of the 21^st century, this resembles capitalism at its most irresponsible and most unstable. The difference is China has even less of a social safety net than the US, let alone Europe; going to school and visiting a hospital almost universally require payment up front. Those in the most financially vulnerable positions can expect to pay for any crisis as they have in the US and Europe through tax-funded bailouts for failing financial institutions and increasingly squeezed funding for social services upon which the poorest rely. Those raised on the dogma of the pursuit of wealth are unlikely to be willing to give much of it up when push comes to shove. Given the poorest in China are considerably worse off than the poorest in the US or Europe and already lack access to basic social services, any major economic downturn would not just threaten their means of home-ownership but would jeopardize the means of subsistence for millions of people.

Yasheng Huang’s Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics effectively shows us that both the growth of income for the poorest and private access to credit enjoyed during the 1980s has been reversed since the 1990s. The system has now re-directed tax incentives, subsidies, and favourable terms of credit away from small private enterprise and towards large-scale foreign direct investment and businesses closely aligned or partly owned by government. This is reflected in news headlines of large-scale corruption and corporate land-grabs converting farms and poorer housing areas into property developments with little compensation and no hope of being affordable. The result has been stagnation in incomes in rural areas, a decrease in spending on social services, and growth in illiteracy (30 million more people between 2000 and 2005) since the 1990s. China appears to be maintaining the authoritarian political apparatus of ‘communism’ whilst promoting the business interests of large-scale state-owned enterprises. This is becoming the worst of both worlds as freedom for the nouveau rich in urban centres can be bought and the voices of the lowest rung go unheard. Given the lack of regulation of big business and the lack of social responsibility shown in the system, it seems fair to call this cowboy capitalism. The US and Europe pay lip-service to human rights but they say little about the poorest rungs of Chinese society. In the end, the poor are the losers in the geopolitical game, which produces images of an inevitably rising China.

Neoliberalism and the Decline of Global Growth

The post-World War 2 world saw global growth reach 3.5% in the 1960s and even during the crisis years of the 1970s the world enjoyed 2.4% growth. John Ruggie famously described the international system of this period as ‘embedded liberalism’ (Ruggie, 1982). Industrialised states pursued liberal economic policies but international agreements legitimised state intervention in the economy to protect the interests of labour and the socially marginalised. This was largely a compromise between the interests of labour and capital such that free-markets prevailed but the vulnerable could be protected. Neoliberalism then emerged in the midst of the 1973 oil crisis to break this compromise by prioritising capital and the interests of business primarily through privatisation of services, reduced public spending on social services, and the restriction of power of organisations which represented the interests of workers (Trade Unions). Since the adoption of neoliberalism under Thatcher in the UK, Reagan in the US and promoted globally through the IMF, the 1980s saw global growth fall to 1.4%, 1.1% in the 1990s and less than 1% in the 2000s. Meanwhile the top 1% of earners in the UK increased their share of wealth from 6.5% to 13% (Harvey, 2007). The world is getting poorer and the poor are bearing an ever increasing burden to pay to maintain a global financial system which is keeping them poor. Banks have been bailed out and nationalised because we are told we need them and this is a ‘crisis’. On the other hand, Malaria, an easily preventable disease, kills 800,000 people every year. We hear nothing of this ‘crisis’ because it occurs in regions such as Sub-Saharan Africa which have little political power at the global level and limited economic value. We are now in the midst not of a debt crisis but a growth crisis, which has to be paid for by previously protected vulnerable groups. This is being made worse as the UK continues on an economic course which cuts people's ability to support themselves by cutting pensions and restricting public sector pay so that it does not reflect inflation. Fanatical commitment to neoliberalism has meant that when growth slows, neoliberal states demand that the poor and lower middle classes get paid less in order to ‘balance the books’. This will lead people further into the debt, which is supposed to be the wiped out according to the Conservatives.

The Conservatives did not win the election in the UK outright and they did not outline their plans for pensions, the NHS, and public sector pay in their manifesto. They do not have the mandate to proceed with a plan that promotes the interests of capital over those of labour. Support the strikes before there are no social services left.

References:

Ruggie, John (1982) ‘International Regimes, Transactions, and Change: Embedded Liberalism in the Post-War Economic Order, International Organization, 36/2, pp.379-415.

Harvey, David (2007) ‘Neoliberalism as Creative Destruction’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 610, pp.22-44.

Imagining Sectarianism, Imagining Scotland

We have frequently heard the political slogan, “One Scotland, many cultures”, since it was launched in 2007 to brand Scotland a pluralistic society characterised by tolerance of difference. However, judging by a Scottish government poll which found that more than 85% of Scots want “sectarianism” to be an illegal offence with 89% declaring it “offensive”, most Scots now freely admit that Scotland has a problem with “sectarianism”. Roseanna Cunningham, Minister for Community Safety and Legal Affairs, told the BBC that sectarianism threatens the “very fabric of Scotland; we want to be tolerant, respectful, and forward looking”. Roseanna Cunningham’s comments and the first draft of the much-debated “anti-sectarianism bill” reveal how the debate on sectarianism is producing ideas about what type of nation Scotland should be and what it means to be Scottish. When we talk about sectarianism and what it means to be Scottish, we are, in the words of Benedict Anderson, imagining the nation. By limiting who is and isn’t to be thought of as authentically Scottish we produce what it means to be Scottish. Sectarianism is seen as a religious problem and to protect the “very fabric” of Scotland we need legislation to stop people calling each other “insert-religion-here bastards” but not necessarily “insert-ethnicity-or-nationality-here bastards”. This creates the danger that we ignore ethnocentrism whereas we crack down on religious bigotry. Here I seek not to evaluate the extent of sectarianism or to “take sides” but to examine how the term is used and the implications for how people understand Scottish identity.

It is a welcome change for complex issues in which history, nationalism, and religion are entangled in complex webs of self-identification to be on the front of our national newspapers instead of relegated to the sports pages. Complacency has previously allowed those discussing bigotry to reinforce national stereotypes and produce ideas about what it means to be Scottish without being challenged. For example, in 2004 the journalist Stuart Cosgrove criticised Aiden McGeady’s choice to play football for the Republic of Ireland, the country of his grandparents’ birth, instead of Scotland where he was born. Cosgrove claimed McGeady’s choice was representative of international football’s descent to the level of a “Woolworths pick and mix”. How a long history of cross-border flows of people between Scotland and Ireland has affected how people identify themselves in complex ways is dismissed as “pick and mix”. In other words, mongrel-like or not “authentic”. Like many other football journalists, Cosgrove was theorising about what constitutes national identity albeit in a comedic fashion. Cosgrove, like many commentators, employed an uncritical definition of nation as the place of one’s birth to criticise how an 18 year old footballer identified himself. His idea of national identity is exclusionary: you are simply with us (people born in Scotland who call themselves Scottish) or against us (people born in Scotland who call themselves Irish). There can be no middle ground. In a liberal democracy, which seeks to reject sectarianism, this self-identification should be an individual’s decision and the individual’s decision alone. The greatest problem here is not that people have this view of national identity. The problem is that such intolerance of those who identify themselves in a different way is left unchallenged because it is seen as belonging to the realm of football and “banter”. Thousands of people tune in to similar debates on radio stations and in print- this is influence without responsibility. Such football journalists are unwittingly imagining the boundaries of the nation through their writing. They define what it means to be Scottish and frequently exclude those who choose to celebrate what they understand to be their Irish heritage.

Dr John Kelly of the University of Edinburgh argues that the public discourse on sectarianism constructs a unified, non-sectarian identity that purportedly “real” and “authentic” Scots should share in opposition to a set of sectarian ‘Others’. In other words, by excluding certain characteristics, this discourse imagines what it means to be Scottish. In 2006 the now retired pundit, Gerry McNee, dismissed the Fields of Athenry and The Boys of the Old Brigade sung by Celtic fans along with the Sash and Derry’s Walls, often sung by Rangers fans, as “Irish tosh” “we need to get rid of”. In other words, “real” and “authentic” Scots have enclosed national identities without the “sectarian” cross-border influence from Ireland. This is of course ironic. The Sash and Derry’s walls are sung by Rangers supporters and proponents of the British Union in Northern Ireland to celebrate Britishness and how they identify themselves as not being part of Ireland. McNee’s comments were reflective of a widespread simplistic view of complex social issues that “sectarianism” comes from some barbaric outside world which we should contrast our civilised selves against.

Dismissing people’s views as “Irish tosh” because they sing songs to commemorate what they see as their British or Irish heritage narrowly draws the boundaries of acceptable public identification such that people feel their identities are under threat. This imagines Scotland as some enclosed, discrete community yet our history tells us the borders between Ireland, Northern Ireland, and Scotland are very fluid and the trans-border flows of migration are a constant. Being Irish or being British does not make one a bigot but refusing to allow people to understand themselves this way does. As Dr John Kelly noted in his written submission to the Justice Committee on the “anti-sectarianism bill”, celebration of one’s identity is not a social problem unless this involves hatred of other identities. People can disagree over the nationalist political sentiments expressed in The Boys of the Old Brigade or Derry’s Walls but it is difficult find anything in the songs themselves which express hatred of other identities. There are intolerable, racist songs sung in Scottish football grounds which is another issue altogether. However, it would be highly illiberal to criminalise songs because they celebrate identities which are not “authentically” Scottish or because we disagree with their political sentiments.

National identities can be multiple, especially in the United Kingdom. As Benedict Anderson asked “to what nation does the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland refer?”. One can be Scottish and Irish at the same time- the two countries are not sealed off and people travel and have inter-married for a very long time. One can also be Scottish and British at the same time. Many will argue it is impossible to be Irish and British but is this difference really a problem? Difference is not a problem but how it is socially organised can be. If we criminalise or marginalise people not because they hate the Other but because they see themselves as Irish or British we will create resentment and create a much more serious national conflict than we currently witness. Politicians and tourist boards can imagine an enclosed, culturally isolated Scotland but our history has different stories which should be told. If we want Scotland to be a nation of many cultures we have to allow its people celebrate their many origins.

Fear is the Path to the Dark Side

Be it fear of the Jew, the Communist, or the terrorists in our midst, fear clouds people’s judgment and drives them to demand that something, anything, must be done to alleviate that fear. Fear is used by politicians in democracies round the world to win votes and indeed by journalists to sell their writings. One could be forgiven for fearing that Britain was on the verge of the apocalypse given the sensationalist media coverage of the August riots, much of which emphasised fear over analysis. Mary Riddell of the Telegraph wrote of how “the capital city of an advanced nation has reverted to a Hobbesian dystopia of chaos and brutality”. However, the looting and the subsequent response to clean up Britain’s shopping districts, both organised through social networking sites, were utterly anathema to Thomas Hobbes’ description of a frightening state of nature of “a war of every man against every man”. Such consideration though is simply less exciting and less likely to sell newspapers.

The “firebombing” of Canning Circus police station in Nottingham was heavily reported. What media outlets didn’t follow up with was the less frightening story that little damage was done, as the photograph above shows, and Nottingham’s city centre was bustling with shoppers the following day. There were, of course, very serious events breaking out across England. However, by reporting all news in sensationalist fashion with few qualifications and less explanation, fear would keep many of us in our homes and away from the “war of every man against every man” purportedly engulfing our “advanced nation”. This is not old news we should forget about. This fear will be re-activated in the campaign for the next UK general election by politicians looking for media-friendly sound-bites. Law and order will most certainly feature.

Of course we should not be surprised by this emphasis on fear over contemplation and the sound-bite over evidence. In one discussion of the causes of the riots, the BBC invited the likes of David Starkey, known for his deliberate courting of controversy and not for his sociological expertise, to give his ‘expert’ view. His explanation was that the “whites have become blacks”. He then responded to the accusation of having no empirical evidence for his claims by saying “these are times when we need plain-speaking”. On the contrary, these are times where we need evidence and considered analysis to help us disentangle the masses of misinformation such as the Independent Police Complaints Commission’s admission that they “may have misled journalists” into believing Mark Duggan fired on police. The News of the World phone hacking scandal has revealed little but that there exists a murky series of relationships between the media, the police, and politicians. Our right to vote may not be under threat but our right to know how we are governed and thus what we are actually voting for is in jeopardy. This is all the more so when frightening sound-bites trump analysis.

David Cameron’s comments that we are walking into a “slow-motion moral collapse” reflects and helps reproduce the panic following such events. Sensationalism produced the emergence of countless “armchair generals”, in the language of Chief Constable Sir Hugh Orde. Succumbing to fear over contemplation, these “armchair generals” demanded the use of rubber bullets and water cannons, despite their limited knowledge of why such tactics are deployed. As Hugh Orde told the media, these have been deployed in Northern Ireland, the former for self-defence in life-threatening situations and the latter for dealing with massive, unmoveable crowds. Neither of these were primary features of looting which saw gangs moving swiftly from shop to shop. This didn’t stop David Cameron from very publicly announcing his personal authorisation to use both tactics. This pandered to and reproduced a climate of fear. Neither water cannons nor rubber bullets needed to be used in the end but the political drive to appear to be tough on crime and win votes was fulfilled.

More importantly, David Cameron’s claims of “moral collapse” do not reflect any empirical evidence. The Home Office’s own statistics show how violent crime in England and Wales has been in near steady decline since 1996. Despite the repeated references to youth gone wild on Britain’s streets, the Ministry of Justice reported a 9.6% drop in the number of 10-17 year olds convicted of crime between 1999 and 2009. On the surface, the evidence certainly suggests that David Cameron is exaggerating for political effect. He is using fear of moral collapse to build a reputation of being tough on crime yet this fear stops people from calmly considering the details of what is actually happening. What better way to garner support for a law and order driven agenda at the next general election than an electorate frightened of “rising crime” induced by “moral collapse”?

Many of the frightened electorate have called for harsher sentences for looters and they have got them. Judges have guidelines for minimum and maximum sentencing but they also have discretion within those parameters. Judges have responded to politicians and frightened voters with unusually long sentences as both the BBC and the Guardian have revealed. People involved in the looting are being given harsher sentences for crimes than would ordinarily be the case; 25% harsher according to the statistical analysis of the Guardian. The rule of law and equality before the law are central features of democracy. Yet here we see the application of new and unwritten rules emerging from a climate of fear and “straight-talking” instead of debate and analysis. One wonders how the imprisonment of Thomas Downey of Manchester for 16 months for taking donuts from a Krispy Kreme outlet is justifiable with reference to equality before the law. How can placing Michael Fitzpatrick, 18 in a young offender’s institution for two years and four months for drinking stolen champagne be explained with reference to codified rules of law? They can’t be. Judges in Manchester produced their own recommendations because the guidelines they are required to work under, according to the rule of law, did not cover burglary and looting in mass riots. The sentence of two young men to four years in prison for using facebook to incite a riot that never even happened was not determined according to established legal guidelines because they don’t yet exist. Paul Mendell QC, a former chairman of the Bar Association warned “the idea that the rulebook goes out of the window strikes me as inherently unjust…guidelines are not tramlines…I don’t see why [magistrates] should be told to disregard these”. However, as Communities Minister Eric Pickles told the Guardian “we cannot have people frightened in their beds, frightened in their homes”. Fear then seems enough to justify ruining two men’s lives with little consideration for the implications for two of democracy’s central tenets, the rule of law and equality before it.

The separation of powers, particularly the separation of the executive and the judiciary, are pivotal to a functioning democracy. However, many of the responses of democratically elected leading politicians to the riots have revealed serious weaknesses in their commitment to this political ideal. Menzies Campbell indicated this when he said “politicians should be neither cheering nor booing in the matter of sentencing. It is an important part of our constitutional principles that political influence is not directed at the judicial system”. Nevertheless, the Prime Minister saw fit to do just that by defending or cheering these tough sentences. He said it was good that courts were sending a “tough message”. We can leave to one side our feelings regarding the length of the sentences to ponder why the head of the executive sees fit to comment on and ultimately influence the future behaviour of the supposedly independent judiciary. The function of courts in a democracy is not to “send out tough messages” as the executive defines them but to apply the rule of law. It is only the place of the executive to endorse the decisions of the judiciary in authoritarian states where powers are not separated. David Cameron’s claim that he thinks “it’s right that we should allow the courts to make decisions about sentencing” is unlikely to be upheld if they feel under pressure from the Prime Minister to send out “tough messages” instead of applying rules.

Those who are struck by fear are less likely to ask what is going on and are instead more likely to demand ‘action’ regardless of the consequences. Fear is blinding us to look beyond the immediate and consider the future of a country under a government which can set the rule of law to one side if we are frightened. Fear is indeed the path to the dark side.

Civilising Globalisation?

During his scientific socialist phase Karl Marx predicted the inevitability of capitalism’s demise. He predicted that logic of capital was such that capitalist’s drive for ever-increasing returns would result in a spiralling reduction in wages. The increasing squeeze of capital from workers, who would eventually be unable to purchase the products of their own labour, would result in revolt and the seizure of the means of production. This self-defeating nature of capitalism would lead workers to reorganise the social relations of production such that wealth would be distributed more or less equally. Marx was of course writing about 19^th century international capitalism not 21^st century global capitalism characterised by the increasingly free flow of goods and services across national borders. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire argued that with the growth of the power of transnational corporations and global financial institutions, power has been taken out of the hands of the state and dispersed. As globalisation decentres power, resistance too is decentred. Today, capitalism’s discontents don’t simply seize government buildings or factories. They destroy McDonald’s, Starbucks, and other powerful symbols of transnational capital. Thanks to globalisation, it no longer makes sense to talk of the ‘1^st world’ and ‘3^rd world’ as fixed, national, geographical categories. Within the same cities we have pockets of economically prosperous, socially mobile, and aesthetically pleasing districts surrounded by residential areas with stagnating growth, high rates of crime, unemployment, and poor standards of health (Ealing Green/Ealing, Kelvinside/Parkhead, Beverly Hills/South Central). The World Health Organisation’s 2008 report found that in Glasgow, the postcode lottery is such that life expectancy for men living in Calton is as low as 54 years old but for those living in Lenzie, a 15 minute car ride away, life expectancy is 82. There are worlds still far away from what Michael Camdessus, the former director of the IMF, described as the civilising forces of Globalisation.

Recent events across England have led many people ask what is the rioters’ ‘cause’ and indeed many politicians to insist that we do not even ask such questions; it is criminality, end of story. Yet ask we must. It may be that these are rebels without causes for there were no attempts to seize the means of production. But where and what are the means of production today in a globalised economy? Ford makes more money from insuring cars than building and selling them. Pieces of paper which symbolise wealth lead to a greater accumulation of other pieces of paper which symbolise wealth; much more so than actually producing anything in today’s global economy. Wealth is primarily generated through services so seizing factories would be senseless. In the age of globalisation we have seen major protests at every G8 gathering with highly symbolic sites of transnational capital, such as Starbucks and McDonalds, bearing the brunt of the anger. As power becomes globalised and decentred so too has resistance. Today resistance focuses on attacking these global nodes of power, these symbols of transnational capital. What we have seen across England in August 2011 may have started as a response to police brutality but it spiralled rapidly and morphed into something we can’t yet understand. What we saw was different to the transnationally organised protests at G8 meetings. This was not an attempt to seize the means of production or resist the transnationalisation of capital. Through the looting of clothes stores and electrical appliances brands, goods deemed to be of high status or symbolic value, we see attempts to seize the products of capitalism and bathe in the status they bestow. We don’t see a revolution to radically restructure social order. We see attempts of individuals to reposition themselves in more favourable positions within it. The seemingly chaotic mode of resistance reflects the seemingly chaotic mode of power and of social organisation we enjoy today.

One response to this is of course to reject the very possibility of meaning behind these acts, file them under irrational, focus solely on punishment, and get back to business as usual. Another counter-argument is that not all participants are poor or even particularly socially marginalised as the prosecution of primary school teachers and the “millionaire’s daughter” attest. However, the chaotic events and the participation of individuals from various sectors of society cannot conceal that every city affected saw young, angry men who see themselves as disenfranchised take to the streets to steal and destroy high status symbols of consumerism. Are we really surprised that generations who have been encouraged to be selfish and have been told by Margaret Thatcher that “there is no such thing as society” feel little moral responsibility towards people outside of their personal, social network? If there is no such thing as society, then outside of the family and the personal network, there can be no bonds and no restrictions regulating the relationships between human beings other than legal ones. Time and time again we hear interviews with participants saying things like “we’re taking from the rich” or “we’re doing it because the government can’t stop us” (Radio 5 Live, 10/8/11, 13:07). If you tell children you have no responsibility to other people unless you can be legally stopped, then when those restrictions disappear as happened when the police lost control, people will indeed steal, rob, and hurt other people. This selfishness is not a disease of any “underclass” or a “sick” section of society as David Cameron lamented. It is everywhere. Next time you are waiting on a train, notice how half the people around you are waiting to jump in front of you. Or in the supermarket, when people park their trolleys in front of what you want to buy and don’t seem to care that you are standing waiting. These are minor, anecdotal examples but I would argue they reflect a self-centredness that is allowed and encouraged. As long as you can get away with it, anything goes- business is business after all. We normalise and we encourage selfishness into norms of behaviour such that those with power are allowed to be selfish but we call it business or profit maximisation. Most people in the UK will tell you, when bankers steal they are given bonuses and when members of parliament steal they only have to pay half of it back.

David Cameron thankfully acknowledged that this is not simply about all young people in Britain simply being bad. In his terms, many young people live in fear from these supposed ‘bad’ people. But why this sudden admission? What political party has seriously addressed violence and its causes on our streets in the UK? Most young people I know have witnessed assaults on young men by other young men in our city centres whereby police stand on the other side of the road and wave away people’s calls for something to be done. I have visited casualty wards after being the victim of assault and all the medical staff wanted to know was how much I had to drink and then placed me at the back of the queue. This is not because I am marginalised, I am not. Nevertheless, it belies an assumption that as a young male in Britain you will be subject to violence and you are likely to cause it. It’s what young men do. However, as David Cameron admits, this is not just what young men do and often violence is impossible to avoid if one wishes to socialise in Britain’s city centres. One has to ask, why is violence against young men tolerated? It is very telling that when Miss Selfridge’s on Market Street in Manchester is in flames moral outrage is not simply expressed but demanded. However, when young men are assaulted usually by other young men every night in our cities, we hear little outcry. Is it simply that those who are morally outraged don’t see this violence with their own eyes so they leave it be? Are we morally outraged now because it interrupted our selfish desire to go shopping in our city centres and acquire more high status goods from the global economy?

What we become outraged about and choose to label as violence reflects our values. When a young man sets fire to a chain-store we call it violence. These same chain-stores, which most of us buy from, operate in “Export Processing Zones” across the developing world. This strategy is in place to bypass national laws which regulate labour conditions, wages, and indeed safety standards to prevent violence in the workplace. So why do we call it “profit maximisation”? What is ‘violent’ about stealing an ipad but not so when apple uses microchips produced under slave-like conditions in the South of China and which irreparably damage the environment? The important difference is not material, it’s ideological. It’s called socially constructed values. A young man taking a mobile phone from a looted Carphone Warehouse is theft because it is called theft. When Vodafone forego £4.8 Billion in tax payments it’s called the “maximisation of shareholder value” because it was permitted by HMRC. Stealing from apple is theft because it is called theft. However, when Apple bypass the rule of law in order to pay South East Asian workers a low wage it is called “outsourcing”. This is because we encourage people to make lots of money more than we encourage them to consider human rights. Angry young men stealing stereos is theft because it is called theft but when bankers steal, it’s called business because we value banks more than we value young men. This is normalised, permissible, and ‘civilised’ theft but it is still theft. This hypocrisy has produced a widespread, popular perception that there is one law for them and another for us. It de-legitimises the very idea of equality before the law, a central principle of democracy, such that people start to believe there is indeed no such thing as society- you take what you can unless you can be stopped. The chaotic and unpredictable power relations of our so-called global age have no written rules and have produced resistance that is equally chaotic, unpredictable, and without rules. If people wish to see ‘civilised’ resistance they had best work towards ‘civilising’ power.