Margaret Thatcher: Saviour or Devil?

 civil unrest, community, Europe, finance, government, politics, Psychology, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics  3 Responses »
Apr 212013
 

The responses to Margaret Thatcher’s death a fortnight ago (8 April), both at home and abroad, serve to remind us only too well what a divisive figure she was.

A 'Maggie' fan getting ready for the funeral - copyright © 2013 Wenn

A ‘Maggie’ fan getting ready for the funeral – copyright © 2013 Wenn

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As several tributes have been titled – eg: Ian Dunt at politics.co.uk – she was indeed ‘The Woman who changed Britain’.If you were one of those who saw the need unequivocally for those changes or indeed benefitted from them, then she may be a hero to you. My late father, Ted Rice, thought no less than that she had saved Britain. I once said to him: “You think the sun shines out of her arse!” – and he agreed totally.

If you were one of those who lost out badly or were just deeply offended at the wholesale destruction of traditional working class communities as the result of her policies, then you may well view her as, to all intents and purposes, some spawn of the devil. My distant friend Chris Maguire would sometimes wear a t-shirt emblazoned with “I still hate Thatcher!” It wouldn’t surprise me entirely if Chris didn’t end up at one of those parties celebrating her death.

As for the reports – eg: BBC News – of Tony Blair condemning such parties and Ed Milliband telling hard left Labour supporters to show respect for Thatcher, that would have had about as much effect as if David Cameron had told the right-wing arch-Tories not to regale each other with victory stories of Thatcher ‘handbagging’ other leaders to gain concessions at European Union conferences. (Note: notorious hardliner Dennis Skinner’s refusal to participate in the recall of Parliament to pay tribute on the following Monday (15th) and his co-sponsorship of a (defeated) motion to refuse the postponement of Prime Minister’s Questions on the day of the funeral so leading politicians could attend.)

As someone who has lived in the North of England all my life, was raised in the manufacturing town of St Helens and been engaged in projects concerned with ‘disappeared industries’, such as HemsMESH (coal mining in South-East Wakefield)  and Humber MeshWORKS (docks and fishing in Hull), I understand (to some degree at least) the bitter resentment and simmering hatreds of people from areas which suffered under Thatcher.

It took a conversation a few years ago with Jon Freeman of the  Centre for Human Emergence UK, a man I much respect, to really show me that people who were not particularly political and of my own generation (rather than my father’s) thought highly of

Thatcher’s legacy. But then Jon does come from the South-East which, generally speaking, did rather well out of Thatcherism!

 

Lefties celebrating at the news of Thatcher's death - copyright © 2013 The Windsor Star

Lefties celebrating at the news of Thatcher’s death – copyright © 2013 The Windsor Star

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The extremes of hatred for Thatcher and the extremes of unwavering support for her policies reflect an inability to appreciate viewpoints beyond your own perspective and show the workings of the Assimilation-Contrast Effect. In essence, the more the RED vMEME has invested your self-esteem in a viewpoint, the harder it is to see any merit in your opponent’s arguments. Even your less extreme friend may seem like a turncoat because they don’t support your extremes.

Thus, Blair and even the once-supposedly-‘Red Ed’ Milliband can appear to be closet capitalists supporting the Establishment to the hard left while Cameron can be portrayed by the hard right as just the sort of ‘Wet’ Thatcher appeared to despise.

The problem with being fixed by RED in the extremes of a political spectrum is that it leaves you unable to appreciate all other viewpoints and, thus, effectively deluded and incapable of getting a balanced perspective.

Did Thatcher save Britain? If so, what was the cost?
The argument that ‘something needed to be done’ in 1979 is unassailable. As Andrew Crisell (2002, p194) so poignantly reminds us, in the 1970s the country was plagued by “strikes, sit-ins, lock-outs, occupations, demonstrations, pressure and splinter groups…industrial stoppages were so common and inflation so rampant that Britain became known as ‘the sick man of Europe’.” This culminated in the ‘Winter of Discontent’ of 1978-79 when, as a result of various strike actions and union blockades, rubbish remained uncollected in the streets, many hospitals were forced to take in emergency patients  only and , in Liverpool and Tameside, the dead remained unburied.

Unsurprisingly perhaps, Margaret Thatcher swept to power in the 1979 general election on promises to curb trade union power and to reign in public spending. By 1985, following the collapse of the national miner’s strike, Thatcher had pretty much achieved these objectives.

Thatcher’s policies in these respects can be characterised as coming from BLUE thinking. Unfortunately the BLUE vMEME, in its nodal state, is so focussed on doing ‘what’s right’ that the human cost of such policies is all but irrelevant.

Thus, the Thatcher Government’s withdrawal of subsidies for increasingly-unviable state-owned monoliths such as British Coal and British Steel led indirectly to the wholesale devastation of working class communities in the Midlands, the North of England, South Wales and the Central Scottish Lowlands as their big industrial monoliths were wound down and/or broken up and scores of smaller support industries went to the wall without them.

These communities were largely dominated by PURPLE and RED thinking. PURPLE tends to assign rigid gender roles, such as male breadwinner and female mother/housekeeper. The truncation of hundreds of thousands of jobs for unskilled and semi-skilled male labour in a relatively short space of time turned households inside out. Women tended to take 2 or even 3 part-time menial jobs (such as cleaning) while the men dossed at home, trapped in their ‘ex-miner’ or ‘ex-steelworker’ or ‘ex-docker’ identities, claiming benefits (where they could) and doing black market work (where they could). With this collapse of traditional PURPLE certainties – such as young adult males in the family having gone down the mines for the past 200 years – and the economic pressures put on households, family breakdowns multiplied, divorce rates spiralled and drugs and gangs stole in to further ravage the remnants of these communities. (The former mining town of Grimethorpe in South Yorkshire had the dubious distinction of being the first place in Britain where a bag of heroin could be obtained for just £5.) When PURPLE becomes destabilised, a very unhealthy manifestation of RED emerges to take over, seeing the world as a jungle in which the strongest and/or the most devious survive.

The huge expansion of what Charles Murray (1989) labels the ‘Underclass’ – has its origins in Thatcher’s economic policies – see: Underclass: the Excreta of Capitalism. In a very real sense, the ‘Shameless’ culture which permeates so many of Britain’s sink estates is a by-product of Thatcherism.

It’s not clear whether Thatcher didn’t anticipate the effect of working class communities – or she did but perceived it as worthwhile cost to pay. Either way, she had few effective social policies to counter the effects.

So, yes, it can be argued that Thatcher did save Britain from union power and cut down a bloated and profligate public sector…but the cost was horrific and we are still paying the price 30 years later.

No wonder, on the day of her funeral, in the South Yorkshire former mining village of Goldthorpe, they burnt an effigy of the ‘Iron Lady’!

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Thatcher understood the need for growth!
Margaret Thatcher knew that you can’t just cut back but you also have to stimulate growth of the economy – a basic fact that seems to completely elude her successors David Cameron and George Osborne! See: Have David Cameron and George Osborne ruined Britain?

Margaret Thatcher at the Conservative Party Conference 1980 - copyright © 1980 The Sun

Margaret Thatcher at the Conservative Party Conference 1980 – copyright © 1980 The Sun

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thus, powered by ORANGE, she supported inward investment, hi-tech industries and specialist manufacturing, in which Britain could develop a competitive advantage – strongly encouraged by Michael Heseltine. She also liberated capital so that Britain – and London especially – grew to become one of the 2 or 3 major financial centres in the world. On the back of these innovations, Britain went from being ‘the sick man of Europe’ to the seventh richest country in the world (as measured in gross national income) by 1997. (With Tony Blair more or less following Thatcher’s economic policies – at least during his first term – Britain became the second richest country, according to the  World Bank in 2007.)

The downside, of course, is that the wealth was very unevenly spread, being mostly concentrated in the South-East of England, home of the financial services sector. Real deprivation and poverty afflicted parts of the country, with Cornwall, Glasgow, Liverpool and South Yorkshire meeting the criteria to receive EU Objective One structural funds – meaning they were among the poorest places in the entire EU. (South Leeds would have met the criteria too but affluent north Leeds pulled Leeds as a whole beyond even Objective Two.)

So, it can be argued Thatcher not only saved Britain but launched the country on a new path to prosperity. The problem is that Thatcher’s policies failed to bring a great deal of Britain into that new prosperity. In essence, a few got very rich indeed but an awful lot of people got much poorer. The global financial collapse of 2008-2009 also exposed the over-dependence on the financial services sector of Thatcher and successive governments for growth.

Evaluating Thatcher’s legacy
From a 2nd Tier viewpoint, away from the extremes of the Assimilation-Contrast Effect, Thatcher’s legacy is far from all bad. If the Government in 1979, of whatever party, had had a less strong and determined leader – another muddler like Edward Heath or James Callaghan, say – the economic decline might have continued over decades with the consequence that Britain might have ended up a Greece-like drain on the EU. Instead Thatcher’s hard right and ruthless tactics stopped the rot quite forcibly – and violently on the miners vs police battlefields of West and South Yorkshire.

The likelihood, if Thatcher hadn’t come to power, is that everybody would have suffered a deterioration in living standards as Britain slowly ground to a halt, ever more dependent on begrudgingly-given International Monetary Fund and EU handouts. How that economic decline would have played out in terms of further social unrest is hard to imagine from a perspective of 30 years later.

That being so, it has to be conceded that Thatcher undoubtedly changed Britain and she saved the country for the benefit of those ORANGE-driven wealth creators and those who made a reasonable living as a by-product of that wealth creation. Left behind, more or less to rot, were those – for the most part the traditional working class communities – whose thinking was dependent on there being steady jobs with steady incomes that required little more than low skill labour.

Thatcher, then, saved us all to an extent. To ORANGE thinkers, she was a godsend who facilitated the generation of wealth by individuals. To those PURPLE-dominated working class communities, she was a devil who tore apart the lifestyles they had unthinkingly taken for granted for decades (and longer!) and offered nothing to compensate them for what was lost.

The question to consider, then, in evaluating Thatcher’s legacy is not whether she had to do what she had to do. But could she have done it differently? Or, could she have done more for those who were displaced and dispossessed by the changes her economic policies brought about? Zygmunt Bauman’s (1988) concept of the ‘seduced’ and the ‘repressed’ is relevant here. The ORANGE culture of the endless pursuit of wealth Thatcher inaugurated led to a 25-year firestorm of wealth creation in this country, seducing many of us into the consumer society it spawned. But what about the repressed – those thousands upon thousands cast upon the human scrap heap and lacking the psychological wherewithal to get off it? Did there have to be so many of them?

And now we’ve got them and the country is buckling on the verge of a triple-dip recession, what do we – what can we do – for them? The repressed are as much Thatcher’s children as the seduced.

Have David Cameron and George Osborne ruined Britain?

 business, community, finance, government, politics, prejudice & discrimination, regeneration, schemas & memes, society, Spiral Dynamics  No Responses »
Mar 242013
 

Of course, the rot set in well before David Cameron and Nick Clegg formed the Coalition Government in May 2010. Public Sector BorrowingAs the Public Sector Net Borrowing chart shows, it was during Gordon Brown’s ill-fated premiership that the deficit increased massively. (The Public Sector Deficit is the difference between what the Government spends and what it takes in via taxes to fund that spending - that difference being borrowed.) To give them some credit, as the chart shows, the Coalition did bring the deficit down quite markedly in their first couple of years primarily via swingeing cuts in the public sector.

However, there are significant signs that the rate of decrease in borrowing may be slowing down. In December’s Autumn statement Chancellor George Osborne predicted that borrowing would be £108B this year, and £99B next year and just £31B in 2017-18. In his Budget last week, just 3 months later, Osborne revised those figures to £114B this year, £108B next year and £61B in 2017-18.

Hand in hand with this, Osborne was forced to revise December’s estimate of growth this year from 1.2% to O.6%. While it looks like the UK may just about avoid a triple-dip recession, the outlook for growth in the British economy is poor, with 2014 revised down from 2% to 1.8%. With the ‘Age of Austerity’ now officially extended from 2015 to at least 2018, it’s no wonder Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls shouts repeatedly that austerity isn’t working and that his Labour leader, Ed Milliband yesterday, in a speech in Birmingham, spoke of the Government having resigned itself to a ‘lost decade’ over the economy.

Of course, it isn’t Cameron and Osborne’s fault that the UK’s borrowing requirement spiked so highly in 2008-09 and 2009-2010. Nor, strictly speaking, is it Gordon Brown’s - other than that he and Tony Blair, in their spending review of 2000, moved away from the tight fiscal policy they had adopted from the previous Conservative Government and allowed public spending to increase. The result was that the mild surplus they had created was quickly reversed. Thus, when the world went into financial meltdown in 2008-09, Brown had no recourse other than to go to the markets and borrow heavily to keep the country in the style it had been accustomed to…and more than double the Public Sector Deficit in the process.

By 2010 no leading UK politician, other than Balls, was in any doubt that public sector borrowing had to be reduced. Even outgoing Labour Chancellor Alistair Darling championed cuts. The debate was not about whether to cut but how far and how fast. Labour, with their concern for the impact on the less well-off, advocated a slower reduction than Cameron and Osborne who opted for as fast and as deep as possible. Their concern was Britain’s reputation in the financial markets. Last month the UK lost its Triple A rating with leading credit agency Moody’s Investors Services. Balls was right: austerity isn’t working.

Austerity or growth?
Moody’s cited ‘subdued growth’ as one of the reasons for the downgrading.

A major problem with austerity – and something Cameron and Osborne don’t seem to get - is that you can only cut so far. What happens when there is little or nothing left to cut? This is part of the problem faced by Ireland, Greece, Spain and, to some extent, Italy as they struggle to meet the stringent reductions in debt reduction demanded as a condition of bailout by the German-dominated European Union. Since a large part of the bailouts come from the German taxpayers, it’s not entirely unreasonable that they should attach conditions to them. But how far does it go? Will a number of European governments end up stealing their citizens’ private savings to finance debt, as the Cypriot government proposed doing until its parliament was ringed with angry savers ready to commit violence upon their MPs if they had approved the proposal…?

Some see the Cypriot government proposal as a test for how such a strategy might be received elsewhere in Europe!

Last year new French president François Hollande proved a keen advocate of economic growth, daring to challenge the German mantra of austerity. (Since the Germans tend to prudent spenders anyway and their juggernaut economy is said to be pulling back from a relatively minor slip in growth of 0.6% in the last quarter, the impact of an austerity programme on others is something they might find difficulty in appreciating.)

The problem is Hollande, the socialist, doesn’t really know how to stimulate growth. The French economy remains stalled.

Neither, it seems, does Ed Balls. Since 2010 he has championed such strategies as investment in infrastructure and housebuilding as stimuli for growth. Lately - and perhaps surprisingly! - Confederation of British Industries director John Cridland (2013a) has come to agree with him, calling for an investment of £1.25B to build 50,000 new affordable homes. After the Budget Cridland (2013b) castigated the Government for not doing enough on infrastructure.

The problem is that neither strategy in itself is a wealth generator - and it’s surprising, given his position, that Cridland doesn’t champion wealth-generating measures more vociferously. As he points out, investment in housing is a surefire way to kickstart the economy. It creates jobs, workers and their families are more likely to spend in the consumer society and affordable housing meets a huge social need. And certainly investment infrastructure is necessary if the economy is to grow, enabling people and goods to move around more easily. But neither strategy in itself will create sustainable growth.

Henley modelThe graphic above is adapted from the Henley Centre Model for Regional Competitiveness (2001). It shows clearly the relationship between the institutions of society and wealth generation through an export-driven economy. For sure, it’s a neat and overly-simplistic Functionalist model that addresses none of the social, moral and philosophical issues that a society faces such as distribution of wealth amongst its citizens. But, if a society in a late-Modern Capitalist world, doesn’t create wealth, then it is effectively dysfunctional. Road-building and house-building may create a trickle-down effect of people feeling more confident about spending which can have powerful short-term effect…but, in the long-term, like hairdressers, it is recirculating the same money within a closed economy.

For the institutions of society to be sustainable in the long-term, that society must earn as much as it spends. For it to grow wealthier in a sustainable manner, it must consistently earn more than it spends. In a chain of such economies - as shown in Marxist Critiques of Development - inevitably there are winners and there are losers - the poor and the exploited. But the morality of that is for a discussion on the nature of Capitalism. Until Capitalism is superseded as the dominant economic system in the world, the UK needs to ‘play the game’ which means generating wealth to support its people.

A deficit in thinking
The big problem for the UK in playing that game is the poor quality of its leadership. Cameron and Osborne seem to be dominated by the BLUE vMEME in thinking in that efficiency is the only way to manage the deficit. Growth, for the most part it seems, can be sacrificed on the ‘Altar of Austerity’.

That Moody’s disagree with Cameron and Osborne on the importance of growth clearly hasn’t undermined their determination to stick to Plan A: austerity. Perhaps the reports of a second agency, Fitch Ratings, being about to take away Britain’s AAA on their scoring might give them pause for thought. Though probably not!

The unfortunate thing is that their much-vaunted Tory predecessors understood the importance of growth. While Margaret Thatcher reined in public spending viciously - in the 1979 election campaign she famously said: “You cannot spend what you do not have!” - she also liberated and encouraged business to make money. Indeed, wealth creation might be said to have been her mantra! Thatcher, at least in her public persona, was dominated by ORANGE (with a dash of RED ruthlessness and power-lust). There was, of course, a truly-terrible social cost outside of the South-East to her policies and it may be that she made the UK over-dependent on the financial services sector - and that in itself was a factor in the internal crash of 2008-2009. However, in overall terms, Britain recovered from the near-bankruptcy of 1976 and was on its way to becoming a wealthy country again - policies Tony Blair clearly saw fit to continue initially after being elected in 1997.

Perhaps a better model for Cameron and Osborne would be Thatcher’s sometime-nemesis Michael Heseltine. He clearly agreed with Thatcher that Britain’s old industries were unsustainable in a changing world increasingly influenced by transnational corporations who would site their manufacturing operations in the cheapest labour source – see The New International Division of Labour. But he understood the crux of the Henley Model – that export is king in the world of buying and selling and so championed niche and specialist manufacturing, arguing that British design was amongst the best in the world. While doubt has been since been cast on just how effective some of his strategies (such as the DTI Enterprise Initiative) really were, there can be little doubt that Heseltine’s championing of industry and exporting enabled an element of British manufacturing to change, survive and prosper. If Cameron these days sometimes talk up manufacturing as playing a role in any growth that might occur, he has Heseltine to thank for that. While he may have had some very different beliefs to Thatcher about strategy, Helsetine clearly was driven by ORANGE, innovating against the odds to further British industry.

The paucity of quality thinking amongst the Tory strategists these days is shown clearly in Cameron’s delusion that the private sector would grow so fast it would give jobs to all the public sector employees made redundant in the cuts. According to David Blanchflower in March 2012, in the previous year 44,000 more public sector jobs have been lost than private sector jobs created. In the 3 years of the Coalition Government, little has been done either to increase inward investment (from abroad) or to boost exports.

Cameron and Osborne’s BLUE strategies to cut public spending may be successful to a notable degree so far in cutting the requirement for public borrowing; but, in addition to doubts about how much further it is possible to cut, there is the ‘elephant in the room’ that hardly anybody is talking about and which the Cameron-Osborne tactics are not going to even scratch: the size of the National Debt. Both Moody’s and Fitch have expressed concern about UK debt. National Debt

As seen from the chart left, this was stable but not decreasing under Blair. However, it has grown considerably since Brown’s spike in public sector borrowing 2008-2009 and has continued to increase under Cameron. This, put simply, is because each year of deficit and the interest that goes with it increase the overall size of the debt - estimated in December 2012 to be around 89% of gross domestic product (GDP). Some commentators, such as MoneyWeek magazine, believe the size of the National Debt is simply unsustainable and that Britain going bust sometime in the next decade is inevitable. This is probably unlikely, given that other Western or ‘westernised’ are carrying far higher debt-to-GDP ratios. For example, Japan has a national debt of around 194% of GDP whilst that of Italy is more than 100%. The US national debt reached 100% of GDP in November 2011. In the aftermath of World War II, the British National Debt reached 180% of GDP.

What is clear, though is that, if the National Debt can’t be reduced in the short term, then British GDP has to increase.

The social cost of debt reduction
BLUE cut-back thinking on its own is simply not enough for the economic problems Britain faces. It requires at least ORANGE thinking. So, if Cameron and Osborne can’t manage that, they have to go.

There are certainly signs that a number of Tory MPS are profoundly dissatisfied with Cameron’s leadership. There is even talk of a leadership challenge prior to 2015. There will certainly be one if the Tories are unable to form a majority government the day after the election. While Cameron and Nick Clegg appear to have formed a reasonable working partnership, many Tory backbenchers hate the alliance with the Liberal Democrats. Their natural preference under pressure is to lurch to the right and try to appeal to voters on xenophobic issues such as immigration and the testy relationship with the EU – appeals that hit on PURPLE’s susceptibility to prejudice & discrimination against those not-of-our-tribe.

A slide down the Spiral is not, however, what the UK needs. Such slides on a macro-cultural level tend to lead to extremist groups gaining ground - eg: the rise of the Golden Dawn neo-fascists in Greece. In a country like the UK, where there are large Muslim populations, a slide down the Spiral may also lead to increased fundamentalism amongst such communities.

What the UK needs is at-least ORANGE thinking in economic issues. However, there needs to be thinking more complex than that if a real economic recovery, along the lines, Margaret Thatcher piloted, is not to produce the kind of huge social costs British society is still paying for more than some 30 years after Thatcher first started implementing her policies.

While ORANGE is well-suited to driving economic performance in a Capitalist global system, its workings need to be managed from a 2nd Tier perspective. This meta-thinking can anticipate the effects of economic and fiscal actions on communities and modify them and/or compensate for the unavoidable side effects. 2nd Tier overviewing is also necessary to keep ORANGE on the right tracks and prevent it deviating into the kind of loans and investments which led to the burst bubbles of 2008-2009.

Unfortunately there seems to be little sign of 2nd Tier thinking amongst our political leaders. Without it, regardless of which party is in power, the mess is likely to get worse, not better.

Moral Panic and the Great Horsemeat Scandal

 civil unrest, community, crime, government, Health, morality, politics, schemas & memes, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics  1 Response »
Feb 212013
 

The current furore over horsemeat being found in some processed foods shows the media still likes to create what Stan Cohen (1973) termed a ‘moral panic’. The ‘folk devils’ this time around initially were food processor Farmbox of Aberystwyth and  the Peter Boddy Slaughterhouse in Todmorden who, it is alleged, knowingly introduced (unregulated) horsemeat into the British human food chain. Increasingly there is talk of an ‘international criminal conspiracy’ – led by no less than Environment Secretary Owen Paterson who was reported by the Daily Mail’s Tom Kelly (among others) to have said (12 February): “’I'm concerned that this is an international criminal conspiracy here and we’ve really got to get to the bottom of it…. This is a conspiracy against the public. Selling a product as beef, and including a lot of horse in it is fraud.” Kelly goes on to speculate that the Italian and Polish Mafias are behind the operation.

Rightly there are concerns about food hygiene standards not having been adhered to and that there is a risk of dangerous substances entering the human food chain through unregulated meat. The only substance to be identified so far, however, is the veterinary drug phenylbutazone (‘bute’) which was found in less than 4% of horsemeat-contaminated samples taken in the 9 days of 30 January-7 February. As the BBC’s Medical Correspondent Fergus Walsh has written, based on information Chief Medical Officer Sally Davies provided: “In order to get a single therapeutic dose of bute from horsemeat you’d need to eat 500-600 250g horse burgers. That’s an awful lot of meat.”

Walsh goes on to write: “you assume that there is a strong health angle to the horsemeat contamination scandal. The evidence so far would suggest otherwise. This is a food fraud rather than a food safety issue.” Clearly the labelling of some of the foods under scrutiny may have little correlation with what is actually inside the packaging and that substances potentially harmful to humans are entering the food chain – albeit in almost microscopic amounts.

So the ‘Great Horsemeat Scandal’ appears to throw up 2 issues:-

(i)             Does the poor regulation of food processing pose a genuine threat to human health?

(ii)            Is consumer confidence in meat processing and the labelling of food undermined…and, if so, how can it be restored?

The answer to (i) has to be Not so far but potentially Yes. If – and, to some extent, it is still ‘if’ – regulation of food in and into the UK has been circumvented as easily as it appears to have been by entrepreneurial but relatively low-level criminals, what would happen if an intelligent and well-funded terrorist organisation wanted to infect the human food chain in this country with a deadly bacterial and/or chemical agent…? The results would most likely be catastrophic and scarcely bear thinking about. Thinking about them – and hopefully preventing them – is the job of the Government’s ‘COBRA Committee’, MI6, the police anti-terrorist squads and other pertinent agencies. Preventing such an attack is a considerable task one can only hope the COBRA planners are wised up to.

Point (ii) is a strange one. A number of polls were reported on 18 February – most notably The Herald (Michael Settle, 2013) and The London Evening Standard (Press Association, 2013) – which were remarkably consistent in reporting that around 25% of the sample groups questioned will now buy less processed meat, with a further 15%+ saying they would do so if they could afford to. Around 20% have already started buying less meat per se. Just short of 70% trust food labelling less and a little over 60% will buy more unprocessed meat from local butchers. Of course, these are self-reporting surveys and subject to all the usual caveats about results from this research method. In terms of whether we have a full-scale ‘moral panic’ on our hands in the way Cohen meant when describing media reaction to and manipulation of the ‘Mods vs Rockers’ conflicts that blew up in several English seaside towns in the early 1960s, it’s difficult to conclude from the polls reported. A 25% change in meat shopping habits – assuming it’s both enacted and sustained – is certainly significant and would seem to give the lie to Angela McRobbie & Sarah Thornton’s (1995) contention that the very concept of a ‘moral panic’ is now outdated. Nonetheless, the fact that 75% of people seem to be willing to carry on buying meat as they did before…while being very suspicious of what the label actually specifies…could be said to lend some support to McRobbie &Thornton’s view that the public are just a little too sophisticated nowadays to be taken in in quite the way they used to back in the 1960s and 1970s.

It’s also worth noting that investment in the food retail sector has actually risen since the start of the year, with shares rising 6.2% in total and 1.2% in the week ending 16 February, the worst week of the scandal. (James Davey & Neil Maidment, 2013) Clearly such people are not panicking!

Why don’t we kill folk devils in Britain?
As a sociopsychological commentator, I’m fascinated by the ‘monster story’ the media has created, the public uproar that results and the pressure this puts on politicians to ‘do something about it’ – all classic features of Cohen’s moral panic concept. TV, radio and the internet all attract greater numbers of viewers wanting to learn more – especially if there is a possibility they and their loved ones may be at risk. As for the printed media, they can bask in a boost in newspaper sales – short-lived though the boost may be. Meanwhile pertinent politicians, civil servants and local government officers desperately look for someone else to blame and to be seen to be either doing something about it (if you’re part of the government machine) or harassing Government to do something about it (if part of the opposition).

Moral panics, of course, illustrate the power of certain memes to spread virally, through the media, and infect our schemas. So the issue becomes personal to us: it matters. To borrow from Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs concepts, the lower down the Spiral the vMEME which is engaged by the issue, the more powerful and emotive the response and the more people are likely to be activated to respond. Thus, a scandal about food products consumed by millions touches a BEIGE nerve – it can comprise the evolutionary driver to survive – possible even the evolutionary driver to reproduce.

A BEIGE/PURPLE vMEME harmonic comes into play if we have children of our own or just generally value children. Now, it is not just our own survival which may be compromised but perhaps that of the next generation. There is a risk to the replication and carrying forward of our genes.

Thus, even though the real risk to public health seems very small in the ‘Great Horsemeat Scandal’, it touches upon fundamental (evolutionary) values shared by most people at a very deep emotional level.

In 4Q/8L terms, the BLUE structure and processes of the Lower Right Quadrant that consumers trust in have failed. In Functionalist terms, a vital ‘organ’ of society (the food supply) has been compromised. Thankfully, the failure is small but the hullabaloo is huge, with the media running it as a headline story for over a month now. The ORANGE vMEME of the newspaper and the news programme editors has jumped at the opportunity to sell more newspapers and attract more viewers. However, as noted earlier, while the headlines have got the politicians performing on every news bulletin, either condemning the latest revelation or promising some new action, the response from the general public has been relatively muted. There have been no abattoir owners lynched for putting children at risk; not even a boycott of Tesco or Asda for retailing contaminated food!

But then, apart from a potshot through the window of one of the homes of disgraced ex-NatWest boss Fred Goodwin, no bankers were killed or even assaulted in 2008-2009 – and they were the catalyst for the financial meltdown which did real and lasting damage to the economy of this country which the people will pay for over perhaps the complete decade to come. And this despite the media pillorying bankers on and off for several years!

In some parts of the world, mobs would have formed to kill the folk devils – eg: in Jamaica last year a spate of mob killings of men suspected of child abuse and other sex crimes was reported (Michael Aitken, 2012). But this kind of mob violence against people is a rarity in the modern UK. (Riots damaging property and challenging the police are more common – from the Toxteth and Brixton riots in 1981 through to last Summer’s riots across England.) Perhaps it’s something to do with being ‘British’ – eg: it’s just not ‘cricket’ for a mob to hack a man to death or torch him with a ‘flaming necklace’.

Certainly there seems to be something in the collective psyche that by and large inhibits people from forming vigilante mobs.

And this presents  an interesting conundrum in analysing responses to the ‘Great Horsemeat Scandal’. Spiral Dynamics orthodoxy has it that, as Life Conditions in the Environment change (Lower Right Quadrant), so there should be a vMEMETIC adjustment in the collective cultural (Lower Left) and individual psychological (Upper Left). Yet, despite a clear failure of BLUE systems in the Lower Right, there has been little change in the Lower Left or Upper Left. Usually, when BLUE fails, there is a regression to the RED vMEME. Certainly this can be read as a factor in numerous civil conflict situations in the UK, from the Catholic communities in Northern Ireland in 1969 calling for the IRA to protect them when police failed to prevent Protestant gangs burning them out of their houses to the spread of looting riots last Summer when the police were widely perceived as unable to protect property. But, when it comes to mob attacks on individual folk devils, it seems the Brits just don’t do that sort of thing.

It will be interesting to see how the growing ethnic diversity in Britain affects such behaviours in the coming decades.

Resolving the Great Horsemeat Sandal
“The consumer cannot be left to face a Catch-22 where they can either pay for food that complies with the highest standards of traceability, labelling and testing or accept that they cannot trust the provenance and composition of the foods they eat,” Anne McIntosh, cross-party chair of the Commons Food & Rural Affairs Committee, said last week. (Davey & Maidment)

However, the British Government is locked into the European Union Food Information Regulations (2011) which means food and labelling standards could not be lowered legally even if the Government was inclined to do so.

To comply, therefore, there will have to be more tightly-controlled processes carried out, audited and enforced by highly-trained specialists. The BLUE vMEME will naturally drive these processes but getting it right to the perfectionist standards BLUE will aspire to will not be cheap. DNA testing can cost up to £500 per sample. As Peter Garbutt, chief livestock adviser for the National Farmers Union, puts it: “Producing high quality, fully traceable, high welfare standard livestock costs money to put on peoples’ tables.”

According to Davey & Maidment, analysts believe value lines, such as frozen beefburgers or spaghetti bolognese ready-meals, are currently so cheap and profit margins so thin that supermarkets have little room for manoeuvre. That means increased margin pressure for already squeezed suppliers and price rises for consumers.

Neil Saunders of the retail research agency, Conlumino, comments: “I don’t think there’s any way that we can escape the viewpoint that the price of having guaranteed food in terms of it contains what it says it contains is ultimately higher prices. We might be speaking about a couple of pence on an item, because this is a game about volume.”

Davey & Maidment cite market research agency Kantar as stating this will accelerate food price inflation, already running at 4.9% in the 12 weeks to January 20 as a result of high commodity prices.

So the moral panic the media have attempted to create will cost us all dearly. The likelihood is that, as living standards in general have declined since 2008-2009 and, in particular, since the Coalition Government introduced its austerity programme in 2010, paying more for food will come to be accepted by most people as just another element in that decline.

The irony, as Fergus Walsh points out, is in the question: “How many of us have unwittingly eaten horsemeat and how long has the mislabelling of products been going on?” Walsh goes to note: “Horsemeat is popular in mainland Europe, in countries like Italy, France and Belgium. It is a lean meat…widely used overseas to build the strength of patients who were convalescing.”

So, while the labelling should reflect accurately what’s in the packet – and something does need to be done about that – we’re now going to pay higher prices to avoid mistakingly eating a perfectly healthy meat product.

Oh, the power of memes and moral panics!

Do Arabs need a New Awakening to win True Democracy?

 civil unrest, community, cross-cultural, government, Middle East, politics, prejudice & discrimination, Psychology, religion, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics  3 Responses »
Aug 292012
 

Written by GERALD BUTT

Annotated by KEITH E RICE

Gerald Butt wrote ‘Do Arabs need a New Awakening to win True Democracy?’ as the BBC’s Middle East correspondent. It was published on the BBC News web site on 16 August 2012.

Reading it, I was mightily impressed that Gerald’s understanding of the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ effectively provided a Spiral Dynamics analysis of the phenomenon - though without the jargon and the concepts. Accordingly I contacted both Gerald and the BBC who gave me permission to republish his piece here, annotated with a Spiral Dynamics/Integrated SocioPsychology commentary. (The text of my commentary is in red.)

Gerald’s piece is timeless in its analysis of conflict between different value systems and the sheer lack of other value systems - vMEMES - hindering the progress of peoples – in this case, the Arabs – in achieving Democracy as we in the Modern West understand the term.

 I am deeply indebted to Gerald and the BBC for their permissions.

________________________________________________________________________

 Arabs in several countries around the Middle East are relishing the prospect of a new era built on political reform and democratic rule.

This craving for democracy was motivated by a desire to throw off the shackles of the past and finally achieve independence in every sense of the word.

As Gerald, to all intents and purposes, reveals later in the piece, it has to be queried just how much many of those thronging Tahrir Square in Cairo or skittering about in the Libyan desert on the back of machine-gun mounted rebel pick-ups really understood the spirit of Democracy beyond the trite motif of one man/one vote. (Then again, clearly not all Westerners truly understand the concept either!)

This is hardly surprising. For decades, Arabs’ self-esteem had been smothered by the totalitarian rule that followed colonial occupation. Colonialism itself had been preceded by centuries of Ottoman domination.

This long legacy is enduring and invidious. For all the euphoria and the undoubted bravery seen on the streets of Cairo and elsewhere, there remains a fundamental and persistent doubt amongst Arabs that democracy can work for them as free-thinking individuals.

And these doubts are prompting voters to seek the reassurance of religious or ethnic affiliation. This trend, by definition, limits freedom of choice, which is a pillar of independent, democratic life.

Don Beck & Chris Cowan (1996) hold that, often, the first response to the challenges, pressures and opportunities of change, is to slip down the Spiral. Thus, when confronted with the what next? of revolution, the BLUE/ORANGE thinking required for Western-style Democracy is too complex – and, because of that, too scary – for many whose thinking has been driven by the vMEME harmonic of PURPLE/RED. Grinding poverty (BEIGE), ethnic and/or regional tensions (PURPLE) and a stubborn refusal to obey and conform anymore (RED) have played their part in all the Arab uprisings. But, for many such people, used to being governed by ruthless RED/BLUE dictatorships, the jump up the Spiral to BLUE/ORANGE thinking simply cannot develop quickly enough to fill the void left by the collapse of the dictatorship. Therefore, a sideways retreat to the PURPLE/BLUE of safe and orderly institutionalised religion is attractive.

‘Not fair’
In Tunisia and Egypt, for example, post-revolution politics has been dominated by Islamist groups.

The electoral success of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and Salafists has set a pattern that will not be easy to break. President Mohammed Mursi’s promise to create an inclusive society will be hard to keep.

Prime Minister Hisham Qandil, on forming a new government, said it was time for Egyptians “…to stop asking who is a Copt, a Muslim or a Salafi. I don’t see that. All I see is that we are all Egyptians and this should be the main principle.”

This might be the ideal. But the overwhelming desire thus far in democracies in Arab countries has been for representation, first and foremost, on a sectarian or ethnic basis. This has been the case most obviously in Lebanon and Iraq.

Egypt looks like following suit, as the reaction to the formation of a technocrat-dominated cabinet has illustrated.

Egypt’s Salafists complained that their strong showing in the parliamentary elections was not reflected in the apportioning of cabinet posts – they received none.

Muslim Brotherhood supporters felt aggrieved that only two of their members had become ministers; and the Copts were unhappy at the appearance of only one Christian in the cabinet.

“It is not right that Copts get treated in this way,” Bishop Bakhomious, the acting head of the Coptic Church, told a Cairo newspaper. “We had expected an increase in the representation of Copts. The way the cabinet has been formed is not fair on us.”

Egyptian Christians’ unhappiness at the cabinet composition is an indicator of their lack of confidence in the new democratic system.

They feel that only their own strong representation in government would safeguard their interests. As a result, Copts are seeking to form political parties, thus strengthening further the grip of religion on democratic life.

What Gerald is identifying, to all intents and purposes, is the effects of the PURPLE vMEME seeking safety-in-belonging - and belonging requires you to know who you don’t belong to as well as who you do know. Thus, PURPLE emphasises and drives differences. Copts, for example, identify with each other as the in-group and make Muslims and Salafis the out-groups. The other tribalist groupings do exactly the same. In Iraq, Sunni vs Shia conflict has severely restricted post-war reconstruction and destabilised attempts to form a government representing all communities.

As I point out in the Global feature, Stratified Democracy vs Modernisation Theory, attempts to imposed Western-style Democracy on tribal societies are doomed largely to failure unless PURPLE, RED and BLUE needs are tackled in sequence, thus enabling people’s capacity for ideas to move up the hierarchy of the Spiral.

Political Paralysis?
The problem that President Mursi and other newcomers to Arab leadership will find is that democracies are being created in countries lacking political institutions and political parties that cut across sectarian and ethnic lines.

Secular parties, such as they are, were emasculated and discredited during the era of totalitarian rule and offer few attractions to first-time voters.

Give it time, one might say. Europe needed centuries to fine-tune its democratic traditions.

Perhaps new political parties might be established, rooted in Islamic traditions but espousing modern economic and social policies that could appeal to voters from all backgrounds.

Is Gerald asking for a kind of Islamic equivalent of the Church of England where the fundamentalist approach (RED/BLUE) to the religion is largely washed away by scientific rationalism (BLUE/ORANGE) and an increasing valuing of the human spirit freed of restrictions (GREEN)?

Looking at these ideas in terms of vMEMES shows vast gulfs in values and understanding between the different ways of thinking.

But can this process be fast-tracked? The evidence in Lebanon and Iraq points unequivocally to the fact that turning the political machine around, once it has headed off down the sectarian and ethnic route, is well nigh impossible.

Sectarian conflicts can burn themselves out if more complex vMEMES gain influence. An example of this was the withering of the PURPLE/BLUE passion in Eire to recover the ‘6 Counties’ – as the Irish Republic’s economy boomed in the early-mid 1990s and ORANGE’s focus on wealth creation and personal advancement became stronger. But, almost always, the ending of sectarian conflict requires a combination of war weariness and the emergence of more complex vMEMES to change thinking.

As many as 80 parties were formed after the ousting of Tunisia’s President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali

The Taif Agreement of 1989 was supposed to bring an end to political sectarianism in Lebanon. But cross-community politics is as elusive as ever.

Iraq, for its part, has slipped into a political system where Shia, Sunni and Kurdish loyalties are paramount. Iraqi national politics, as a result, is paralysed, while the major sectarian and ethnic groups vie for ascendancy.

Iraqis today face the unwelcome realisation that the removal of Saddam Hussein and the subsequent departure of the US military have failed to bring them true independence as free citizens of Iraq facing a range of political choices that are free of religious association.

Against this background, liberal and secular Arabs are bound to feel uneasy. For them, the euphoria experienced during those early days of protest has passed.

 Al-Hayat columnist Raghida Dergham, writing in November 2011, observed: “We are on a swing of uncertainty, going up in celebration of the ouster of regimes that monopolised power for 30 or 40 odd years, then down in frustration over the alternative that is now coming to monopolise power with theocratic authoritarianism.”

The Arabs, therefore, may have to wait for the next awakening before they can achieve true independence.

 Such an awakening will need to have more complex vMEMES in the mix if a sustainable path to Democracy is to be achieved.

Family Systems and Crime & Deviance

 community, crime, cross-cultural, morality, society, Sociology  2 Responses »
Jan 152012
 

Written by EILEEN CONN

Long-term correspondent Eileen Conn sent me the following thoughts with regard to the Pro- & Anti-Social Behaviour feature Crime and Deviance – the Difference. We agreed to post them in the Blog to see what others might have to say about the points Eileen raises.

Keith

___________________________________________

Hi Keith

A useful analysis and commentary as usual. Thank you!

One thing that went through my mind when reading your piece is to ponder on the subcultures in our UK society which have strong family processes.

Two in particular I often think about are

  • criminal subcultures like the Krays, Richardsons, the modern one – Adams (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clerkenwell_crime_syndicate) where it is said the head is in prison but still controlling the empire from inside. The values of these subcultures are very deviant from the main - acceptance of violence, torture and murder, for example, as well as all the actions involved in taking material and finance which doesn’t belong to them, in any way feasible. It may be that the boys that murdered Stephen Lawrence came from the same kind of subculture though not so extreme – but outside the norm, bullying, violence and organised crime mix.
  • religious subcultures like some Muslim ones when the value set deviates from the main one in cultural behaviour, eg: attitude to women, gay people, violence and punishment even to murder (‘honour’ killings) to enforce their values.
  • In some cases there is a convergence of these two, where immigrant populations have both a minority religious adherence (not just Muslim but also some reported as Hindu and Sikh) and also get engaged in organised crime in the drugs and protection business.

The ‘travellers’ subcultures whether Irish, Romanian, Gypsy or … all share characteristics with some of these other phenomena.

Anyway, I do quite often puzzle about these groupings sparked off by behaviour I observe or news reports I read, and ponder on what is going on, and your new piece got me going again. The thing they all have in common is strong family systems and children growing up with them and perpetuating the subculture.

I will be interested in any thoughts you have, sparked off by what I am saying.

Eileen

The Riots: who’s right – Cameron or Blair?

 celebrity, civil unrest, community, crime, government, heroes and inspirational figures, human rights, morality, politics, Psychology, science, society, Sociology  6 Responses »
Aug 232011
 

Today what appears to be the final battle to overthrow Colonel Muammar Gadhafi’s regime in Libya is rightly dominating the news - as it probably will for several days, as stories of valour, celebration, desperation and atrocity are told from the streets of Tripoli. There will also be much speculation about what kind of Libya will emerge from the civil war - even whether the rebels can hold off splintering into their own warring factions. And, inevitably, since the West invested so much in the NATO bombs that so potently aided the rebel victory, there will be speculation as to what the West can do to help build a new Libya that is friendly to the West and accepting of its interests in North Africa and the Middle East.

In and amidst this focus on Libya, we also need continue the debate about what brought violent rioters and looters onto the streets of London and other cities just a fortnight back and what we should do about these issues.

Both David Cameron and Tony Blair had key articles in this weekend’s Sunday newspapers, setting out their positions.

Moral decline, moral panic and folk devils
As you might expect for a piece in the Sunday Express, Cameron was aiming squarely at the traditional grass roots Tories who make up a substantial element of the Express’ readership. In a piece so right wing, he’s almost certainly not comfortable with it, Cameron wrote: “…a social fightback means instilling in our children and young people the decency, discipline and sense of duty that make good citizens.

The first place people learn these values is in the home. That is why I make no apology for talking about the importance of family and marriage. Every government policy must pass what I call the family test: does this make life better for families or worse? Does this make it easier to bring up well-behaved children or harder? Family is back at the top of the agenda.

Children also learn values in schools. Every school should be a place where children learn manners and morals but that is only possible when there is order in the classroom. So we are taking action to restore authority and boundaries, with teachers able to discipline pupils as they see fit and heads having the freedom to set uniform and behaviour policies and enforce them.

But I believe we can and should do more. When we see events as shocking as the riots and so many young people whose lives have no shape beyond the shape of their gang, no purpose beyond the next time they get smashed on drink or drugs, it is clear that the need to restore values calls for something new. That is why this Government is establishing National Citizen Service.”

Though he doesn’t actually use the term ‘moral decline’ in the Express, the tone of the piece is about reversing it and the term is being widely attributed to him and other senior Tory ministers, particularly Iain Duncan Smith. Attributing the term to Cameron and Duncan Smith in the context of blame for the riots fits with the ‘broken Britain’ theme which the likes of Cameron and Duncan Smith have been playing since at least 2007.

With their emphasis on broken - even ‘sick’ – Britain, Cameron and Duncan Smith are playing the old ‘moral panic’ card, first named by Stanley Cohen (1973) in his famous study of media reaction to events like the mods-‘n’-rockers beach fights in the early 1960s. And when Duncan Smith goes on about gangs and gang culture, he’s making them into what Cohen terms ‘folk devils’.

Cohen identifies the process as the media whip themselves up into a frenzy, creating a moral panic and exaggerating the menace of the folk devils so everyone is terrified o them - and this forces the police, local authorities, central government, etc , etc, into strong action to tame the folk devils and quiet the moral panic.

Which is not to say that there hasn’t been a change in morality and attitudes towards “decency, discipline and sense of duty”. As I pointed out in the Blog post, ‘Is Britain really broken?’, in January last year there have been considerable changes in public morality and consequent behaviour over the past 50 years, with the result that many institutions of society - especially the family and education - have changed considerably. Behaviours that were once relatively rare - eg: taking recreational drugs, men and women cohabiting as an alternative to marriage, young women having children outside of marriage, people conducting same sex relationships openly - are now fairly common and some of these changed behaviours are now so accepted they have become the norm.

Nor is this to deny that there is a problem in a number of areas with gang culture. Much of London’s rise in gun crime over the past 5 years has been unequivocally linked to gangs. Clearly there were organised gangs at work carrying out some of the looting during the riots.

Nor is this to belittle any of what went on during the riots. A handful of people died, many more were injured - some very seriously - and many, many more were traumatised by their experiences. Property was damaged and, in some cases, destroyed; and livelihoods were wiped out.

But were the riots really just the result of a changed public morality? If so, why hasn’t the whole country descended into arson and looting anarchy?

Blair and the Underclass
Writing in The Observer allowed Blair to present a more reasonable and reasoned argument to the so-called ‘chattering classes’. His article, ‘Blaming a Moral Decline for the Riots makes Good Headlines but Bad Policy’, is clearly aimed at presenting the Cameron-Duncan Smith approach as over-simplistic. He writes: “The big cause is the group of alienated, disaffected youth who are outside the social mainstream and who live in a culture at odds with any canons of proper behaviour. And here’s where I simply don’t agree with much of the commentary. In my experience they are an absolutely specific problem that requires a deeply specific solution.

The left says they’re victims of social deprivation, the right says they need to take personal responsibility for their actions; both just miss the point. A conventional social programme won’t help them; neither – on its own – will tougher penalties.

“The key is to understand that they aren’t symptomatic of society at large. Failure to get this leads to a completely muddle-headed analysis of what has gone wrong. Britain as a whole is not in the grip of some general ‘moral decline’…

This is a hard thing to say, and I am of course aware that this too is generalisation. But the truth is that many of these people are from families that are profoundly dysfunctional, operating on completely different terms from the rest of society, either middle class or poor.”

Though he never actually uses the term, Blair is clearly referring to the ‘Underclass’ - those of (usually petty) criminal attitudes and behaviour, living beyond the fringes of society. Benefit cheats, prostitutes, small-time drug dealers, burglars, etc, etc, – the kind of characters you see on Shameless - are the kind of people who fit Charles Murray’s (1989) criteria for the Underclass. (See: Underclass: the Excreta of Capitalism in the Society section of the main web site.)

The fact that the looting was largely of luxury goods, not basic essentials, indicates that those looters were not the desperately poor; they already had the basics of life sorted - perhaps through fraudulent benefits claims and/or ‘black market’ jobs and/or petty criminal activity. These looters were people who wanted more and had no hesitation in using serious criminal means to get it.

So far so good for Blair’s theory of the Underclass being a large element in the rioting: the profiles fit.

That is, until you start looking at the statistics on the occupations of those who were processed through the courts in the week after the riots. The most common occupation cited was ‘student’. Despite the best efforts of Lib Dem Deputy Leader Simon Hughes to point out that there are some benefits in the way university tuition fees are to be funded from 2012, undoubtedly the next tranche of potential university students do feel pretty aggrieved. But what excuse do the current ‘students’ have for causing such mayhem? Other occupations noted included soldier, scaffolder, chef, lifeguard, postman, hairdresser, forklift driver, electrician, journalist and an Olympic ambassador. There was even the 19-year-old daughter of millionaire parents in the dock!

An estimated 1 in 5 of the rioters were under the age of 17.

Sorry, Tony! While there can be little doubt a sizeable percentage of the rioters were from the Underclass, there were many who weren’t.

Andrew Gilligan, in the previous week’s Observer, wrote: “There were broadly three groups of rioters – organised career criminals targeting specific high value merchandise; semi-organised youths wanting ‘pure terror’ and whatever they could lay their hands on; and those who got carried away in the excitement. Many of those turned out to be very far from the stereotype of the hopeless underclass.”

A context for the riots
To explore the issues of who and how further, let’s do a bit of scene setting - because, as Gilligan illustrates, it’s a hugely complex issue which neither Cameron’s article nor Blair’s get to grips with successfully.

The country is still struggling to emerge from recession. Public sector cuts are beginning to bite deeply, with hundreds of thousands having either lost their jobs already, about to lose them or worry they are likely to. The private sector, which was meant to pick up the slack of the unemployed from the public sector, is largely not doing this. The rate of business liquidation is still high and tens, if not hundreds, of thousands are being wiped off the stock markets virtually each day. Some ministers, like business secretary Vince Cable and justice secretary Ken Clarke are warning this misery could go on for years and years.

Everybody it seems who understands anything of finance and economics - except Ed Balls! - agrees the cuts are necessary. It’s just the details - how far, how fast - on which most of the major politicians quibble. David Cameron (and Nick Clegg), when first announcing the cuts, promised that everyone would feel the pain equally - that we were all in this together. Except now it seems the bankers who are widely perceived to have precipitated the whole crisis in the first place. They’re back to getting enormous bonuses…even when their banks are mostly-owned by the taxpayer! And then what about the ‘super rich’ - including the multi-six-figure salary civil servants? (Especially those who buy their groceries on their department credit cards!?) There aren’t many stories of 16-bedroom mansions being repossessed or Ferraris and Bentleys being returned to the showrooms because their owners can’t keep up the repayments….

And George Osborne talks of reducing the top rate of tax from 50p in £1 to 45p?!? Has the man no common sense at all? Osborne may well be right when he says that, in the grand scheme of things, the amount recovered by the Exchequer in that 5p difference has little real effect on the country’s finances but that it does scare off many top wealth generators to other more tax-friendly countries…but, George, it’s a matter of perception! While the common folk suffer, the Tories are seen to look after their rich pals and the Lib Dems are seen as weak wimps unable to restrain the Tory greed.

Of course, it’s not that simple; but that’s the kind of message that takes hold not just in the real Underclass but among both those who are genuinely disadvantaged by the cuts and those who aren’t but perceive the way the Government is handling things to be grossly unfair. In Zygmunt Bauman’s (1988) terms, the club of the ‘Seduced’ is becoming more and more exclusive while more and more of us, even those don’t sink completely into the Underclass, join the ranks of the excluded ‘Repressed’, no longer able to afford a foreign holiday or buy the kid the latest PlayStation. While we suffer, through the likes of OK! and Hello! and various TV shows about celebrities and the wealthy, we can wind ourselves up with seething jealousy of those whose opulent lifestyles are not in the slightest compromised by the cuts.

Everyone sharing the pain equally…? I don’t think so, Dave!

In vMEMETIC terms, BLUE is disillusioned because people who pay their taxes, conform to the best nuclear family tradition, try to bring their children up ‘decently’ and vote Conservative - in other words, they do everything they’re meant to - only to lose their job through no fault of their own. That destabilises PURPLE, with money worries and a lack of purpose for the newly unemployed putting immense pressure on family life.

And, as anyone who has studied Spiral Dynamics knows, when BLUE order falls apart, the RED vMEME comes roaring through which means power, not order, determines what happens.

An explosion of RED
So now locate yourself, reader, in the late afternoon of Saturday 6 August outside Tottenham police station as the peaceful protest over the police shooting of Mark Duggan turns nasty, just as it seemed to be petering out. Undoubtedly there was real anger at the shooting of Duggan - rumours were flying around that he had been effectively executed! - and at the police being unable to give the protesters the information they wanted about the investigation into the shooting. From reports about him, Duggan’s profile would fit ‘Underclass gang member’ and the protestors could probably be categorised as a mix of Underclass and community/political activists.

“]
Burning police car, Tottenham, 6 August [Copyright © 2011 ITN/Channel 4

It’s not yet been revealed who it was set the 2 police cars on fire; but, as soon as the police failed to deal with those incidents, they signalled the weakness of BLUE. What followed over the next 3 nights in London was an orgy of RED destruction, self-indulgence and wilful criminality. The more the police failed to control it, the more RED felt free from BLUE’s shackles and able to do exactly what it wanted.

With the ORANGE instant and mostly monitoring-proof technology of Blackberry Messenger (BBM), rioters and looters were able to organise incredibly quickly, easily outstretching those police units that did deploy. Other units failed to deploy properly, watching impotently from hundreds of yards away as rioters and looters tore apart and burned shops.

"]
Police watching a burning bus, Tottenham, 6 August [Copyright © 2011 Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images

Through BBM, the Internet and TV news, the ineffectiveness of BLUE to contain RED was flashed around the country. By the third night, there were copycat riots in various other parts of England - although in Birmingham and Manchester, there appeared to be little burning - more, it was just outright smashing and looting.

Where the BLUE vMEME appeared strongest in some of the London riots was not in the police attempting to maintain order but in the meticulous planning with which some of the looting was carried out.

In the week afterwards the Metropolitan Police came in for considerable criticism. Clearly the Met were caught out by the scale of the violence and there was confusion in their command - journalists David Barrett & Patrick Hennessy claim they were told by some frontline officers that they were instructed not to advance on rioters. Barrett & Hennessy also offer evidence that some officers were reluctant to battle the rioters without assurance that they would be immune from prosecution and/or being sued if rioters were seriously injured in the confrontations. That assurance was not forthcoming apparently. The bizarre situation where police officers were reluctant to do their job through fear of being suspended or sued by violent lawbreakers is the work of the GREEN vMEME, with its positive discrimination to protect the rights of all, including lawbreakers.

The short-term fix: stopping the violence
If we want to make sure nothing like the Tottenham riot of 6 August escalating into a series of riots and looting sprees over 4 days ever happens again, then policing needs to be much more robust. For a start, that means intelligence on those in both the Underclass and the professional criminal networks of whom there is serious reason to believe would jump at the chance of exploiting a riot to loot high value goods. As soon as something like the protest of the 6 August starts, they need to be picked up and held in cells until the protest is over

Then the police response to violent protests must be able to curtail them. Standing back while shops and homes are looted and burned is not an option. As soon as they do that, they signal BLUE has failed and liberate RED to do whatever it wants. If water cannon and rubber bullets are needed, they must be used. In the extreme, when the lives of innocent people are clearly at risk, then the police must be authorised to use live ammunition. If the police cannot curtail the violence, then the army should be brought in.

BLUE must not be perceived to have failed. If it has, then not only does it liberate RED to commit wanton mayhem – but those who are threatened by the mayhem are given the de facto right to take the law into their own hands to protect their families and their property. Vigilantism. When BLUE fails to protect, RED can also dominate in those who seek to fight off the lawbreakers – even though they may trash the law themselves in the way they defend themselves. (See the Society feature ‘When BLUE fails, call for Clint!’ ) We saw proto-vigilantism in the Turkish men who defended their shops with baseball bats and knives and in the Sikhs who rushed to defend their temple from rioters and looters. If not for the calming appeal of the magnificent Tariq Jahan, father of one of the 3 young men killed by a rioter’s car in Birmingham, vigilantism may well have led to some very ugly reprisals and further escalation of the violence.

Do the kind of tactics I am advocating impinge upon the human rights of individuals? Most certainly…but the protection of the community has to be of greater importance than several hours inconvenience for a handful of individuals. Would the kind of tactics I am advocating require additional legislation? Most certainly…then get on with it!

Do police officers still need to be accountable for their actions in what might effectively be a pitched battle? Of course…but, in the heat of battle, you need RED daring much more than BLUE caution. And it must be remembered that the rioters and looters deliberately put themselves in harm’s way. Police officers committing abuses on prisoners after a battle would need to be prosecuted in the usual way.

Would such tactics cost extra money? Of course; but as London mayor Boris Johnson has pointed out to David Cameron, he urgently needs to rethink the Coalition’s policy on cuts to the police forces.

BLUE order must be maintained.

The longer-term: healing sick Britain
Firstly, David Cameron has got to get his head around image management. As was illustrated last May-June by 10 Downing Street hiring a personal photographer for Cameron in the same week he first talked about just how savage the cuts were going to be, he doesn’t always think about how his behaviour may be meta-stated by others.

Allowing Osborne to propose lowering the top rate of tax in the same week as the riots was a public relations blunder of epic proportions!

People in general are much more likely to ‘grin and bear it’ if they really do think everyone is feeling the pain equally. Bankers’ bonuses and ‘fat cat’ public sector salaries being seen to be protected or even championed by government ministers is to invite dissent!

Secondly, as discussed in Underclass: the Excreta of Capitalism, we need to develop 2nd Tier perspectives on how Capitalism operates in the Western world because ORANGES’s combination of drive for profits and labour-reducing technology is putting more and more people out of work or into low-paid menial jobs - with some of those people sinking into the Underclass and swelling its numbers. The ever-widening gap between rich and poor is a recipe for violent disorder. As Gadhafi’s regime enters its death throes, it’s worth remembering that the ‘Arab Spring’ revolutions were initially ignited by poverty and economic hopelessness. Allowing that gap to widen ever further could well lead to more and more violence in the UK.

We need a country where reward in life is related fairly to contribution to society, where there are opportunities for everybody to contribute and where there are clear routes for social mobility. The Underclass then should be small in size, despised by the vast majority of citizens and relatively manageable.

Using the 4Q/8L model, we can see that addresses the lower right quadrant but we also need to address the left quadrants, focusing on culture and individual responsibility.

It’s not possible to turn the clock back to the 1950s and restore those values but we can - indeed, we must – restore the strength of the BLUE vMEME at a cultural level so that it is perceived as a good thing to take responsibility and to support the structures of society. That support should not be unquestioning but, if we are working towards a fair society, then questioning and drive for change should possible from within. As Don Beck & Chris Cowan (1996) point out, when discussing spiral wizardry, in managing any kind of institution, you need to scan constantly for change - because change is inevitable. Therefore, you need to have strategies to accommodate and incorporate change, rather than suppress it.

In the UK we have a mixed message culture - typified by The Sun regularly engaging in moral panics and calling for draconian measures to deal with the folk devils (RED/BLUE zealotry) while also showing topless girls on Page 3 and female celebrities flashing their knickers in the Entertainment section (ORANGE unashamedly milking RED’s thirst for ‘naughtiness’ and excitement). If we are to change people’s values, then we need to be crystal clear in the messages that are sent out. If the mindset of many is governed by RED, then we can’t demand it instantly change it to BLUE. Clare W Graves showed years ago that changes in motivation don’t work that way. But there are things we can do to encourage vMEMETIC change. Eg:-

  • Reward those who marry – Cameron’s idea of tax breaks for people who marry is one way of doing it
  • Show in simple, layman’s terms the psychological science which demonstrates time and time again that, generally speaking and exceptions apart, people in long-term relationships with a partner are happier (overall), usually healthier and often live longer – and their children tend to do better emotionally, socially and academically
  • Make it cool to conform to ‘family values’ by getting the media to focus on public figures and big name celebrities who do exactly that – thus, making them role models for younger people

Designing the future of the United Kingdom – which is what we’re really talking about - is, however, a remit way beyond this Blog. That’s for the Centre of Human Emergence UK , the academics and the various think tanks, using a MeshWORK process. But what is needed is a common understanding of the sociopsychological forces which have brought us to this present state of being.

In their key articles in the Sunday newspapers, David Cameron and Tony Blair each saw some of the problems; they didn’t see the complete picture. Consequently they could only offer partial solutions which may not work much, or even at all, because the problems are all so interconnected. As Ken Wilber (1996) says, we must ‘transcend and include’ the partial views and solutions to create the full picture of what is going on. Only then can we create sustainable long-term solutions.

Northern Ireland…quiet for now?

 community, politics, prejudice & discrimination, Psychology, racism, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics, terrorism  No Responses »
Jun 282011
 

It all seems to have quietened down again but the explosion of sectarian violence in east Belfast last week was truly shocking - both that it happened at all and the scale of it. Petrol bombs and pipe bombs are deadly enough but when guns are used…as local MP Naomi Long told the BBC: “When you have guns back on streets, it is very clear that the intent here is to take life. There is no other reason why people would bring a gun onto the street…”

The violence must be deeply disturbing for the majority of people in Northern Ireland who will dread a return to ‘The Troubles’. And it will be truly alarming for many politicians, economists and business people who thought, 13 years after the Good Friday Agreement, that the peace process was too deeply embedded in Northern Ireland culture for the province to regress back to open and large-scale sectarian violence.

But how ever shocked, disturbed and alarmed we may be, we should not be surprised. Nor should we be lulled into a false sense of security by the news that east Belfast has been mostly (though not completely) quiet since last Monday (20th) and Tuesday (21 June). There were plenty of young men from both sides of the divide on the streets Wednesday night (22nd) but community stewards were proactive in discouraging them from further violence.

The underlying problem is that relatively little has been done in those 13 years since Good Friday to address the deep-rooted tribalism which underpins the sectarian divisions and has its foundations in history.

The large-scale settling of the northern 6 counties (Ulster) by Scottish Presbyterians in the 17th Century inevitably led to the further disadvantaging of the (mainly Catholic) indigenous Irish, already subjected to stern (and often brutal) rule by their English colonial masters following the Irish Confederate Wars (1641-1653) and the Battle of the Boyne (1690). It also led to a sense of 2 large tribes, marked out by different religions and different racial/national characteristics, in competition for the same territory. That tribal competition has gone on now for over 4 centuries, sometimes in open conflict, sometimes in festering tension. The 1707 Act of Union between England and Scotland, for the indigenous Irish, made getting rid of the Scottish (now British) invaders synonymous with getting rid of their English (now British) rulers.

The history of Nationalist/Catholic-Unionist/Protestant conflict in Ireland is, of course, much more complex than portrayed in this paragraph; but, nonetheless, it does set out the core issue: there are 2 large-scale tribes competing for the same territory. There is a distinct timeline from 1707 to Good Friday, with such punctuations as the Fenians, the Irish Republican Army and the Provisionals on one side and the various Unionist paramilitaries such as the Ulster Defence Association and the Ulster Volunteer Force on the other.

Until the issue of tribalism is dealt with, the peace in Northern  Ireland will always have the kind of fragility that the violence last week  exposed so unequivocally.

Failing to deal with tribalism – sophisticated politics and populism
Time and time again tribalism has caught sophisticated political rulers out, often resulting in barbaric tribal warfare. In recent times, just for starters, we’ve seen the tribal genocide of Hutus against Tutsis in Rwanda, Yugoslavia torn apart by a level of barbarity and ethnic cleansing not seen in Europe since Adolph Hitler’s storm troopers marched East, the former Soviet Union wracked by various tribal rivalries that frequently resulted in large-scale bloodshed - see ‘Tribal Warfare in South Ossetia’ as an example – and the Americans’ decidedly-vague post-invasion plans for Iraq shredded (in part at least) by Sunni-Shia internecine warfare . On a smaller scale, Spain has similar problems with the Basques that the UK has had with the Nationalists in Northern Ireland.

Tribalism is all around us. As Desmond Morris (1981) pointed out, it’s in the chants on the football terraces when the teams play and in the streets around the football grounds when the rival groups of fans clash. We also see tribalism in the not-always playful rivalry between Yorkshire and Lancashire, deriving its ethos from the Wars of the Roses over 600 years ago. When I lived in Hull, triabalism manifested itself in the divisions between East and West Hull and on the huge, sprawling Bransholme estate on the northern edges of the city, where the North Bransholme, South Bransholme and Kingswood tribes each guard their territory from the others. Even in my current hometown of Harrogate, one of the most wealthy and affluent middle-class towns in the north of England tribalism is unavoidable - with gangs of kids from the secondary school tribes arranging mass fights on the Stray (the lawned common land that runs around the edges of the town centre), one school versus another.

It may even be demonstrated soon, via Alex Salmond’s plans for a referendum, that a majority of Scots want their tribal independence from England!

One of the most socially-unacceptable forms of tribalism in a modern Democracy is racism but tribalism is at the centre of the formation of every in-group and the demonisation of every out-group.

Tribalism is driven by the PURPLE vMEME’s need to find safety in belonging. For this vMEME, knowing who you belong to and differentiating your group from groups you don’t belong to is critical and totally normal – which raises the ugly question: Is racism natural…?

Abraham Maslow (1943) established the need to affiliate as coming before the need for self-esteem and this fits with Henri Tajfel & John Turner’s (1979) Social Identity Theory - see Prejudice & Discrimination – which proposes that it is our investment of our self-esteem in our in-group which leads us to compare our group with others and to seek to dominate or drive out other groups. Muzafer Sherif et al’s (1954/1961) Robber’s Cave Experiment is just one of a number of studies which shows how competition over resources (such as land, food supply, weapons, etc) can amplify the In-group/Out-group Effect. The formation of strategy to dominate or drive out the other groups requires both leadership and management - thus, the need for the RED.vMEME to take assertive, or even aggressive, action to ensure the investment of individual self-esteem is protected through the success of the group.

Leaders need to be strong to impose their vision on the group and they must be seen to be at least protecting and preferably advancing the interests of their group. If the leaders are on the Psychoticist side in their temperament, then this RED-Psychoticist centre of gravity is likely to be ruthless and cruel in their treatment of the out-group. It’s perhaps no coincidence that some of the greatest wartime leaders have been utterly ruthless in their treatment of the enemy. Hitler’s war crimes speak for themselves but Winston Churchill connived all too willingly in the firestorm bombing of Dresden while US President Harry Truman not only sanctioned the atomic bombs being dropped in on Hiroshima and Nagasaki but in 1948 advocated nuking the Russians. Even Barrack Obama made sure he was photographed in the White House operations room earlier this year, watching live the execution of Osama Bin Laden from a soldier’s helmet cam.

Thus, the nature and vision of the leader are critical to how and in what direction tribalism is exploited.

So why then, if tribalism is such a fact of life and leaders need to be strong and biased in the interests of the tribe, do tribal divides catch the political leaders out so often?

The answer lies in the fact that much of the political and philosophical elite in countries think in the higher, more complex and more sophisticated 1st Tier vMEMES most of their time in public office. BLUE (do the right thing), ORANGE (individual material progress) and GREEN (egalitarianism) either despise PURPLE and RED thinking as retrogressive or simply don’t understand it. No wonder commentators frequently record that ordinary voters feel disconnected from leading politicians and the political process. The more populist politicians are often despised by their more sophisticated political colleagues…but, in fact, the populist politicians are actually better able to understand the (PURPLE/RED) concerns of the ‘common man’. Accordingly, it is usually a more populist politician who is to be found leading and/or exploiting tribal aggression. Recall Slobodan Milošević’s rousing speeches to Serbian farmers in Kossovo in the late 1980s and early 1990s as the perfect example of RED exploiting PURPLE tribalism to build up his own power base.

Tribalism is alive and thriving in Northern Ireland
The ongoing problem of tribalism in Northern Ireland is recognised by some social and political commentators. For example, The Workers Party (2005) stated: “The people of Northern Ireland are now more deeply divided than ever. Sectarian antagonisms between Catholics and Protestants are as intense as ever. Recent studies show that sectarian attitudes and practices are present even among children as young as 5 or 6 years. This is at the root of the current political instability….”

A couple of years ago Johann Hari (2009) wrote in his blog: “The Good Friday Process has - from the beginning - been focused on the small elite of politicians at the top. Ian Paisley and Martin McGuiness have been sitting together – inspirationally - but in the streets and estates beyond Stormont, Northern Ireland has been becoming even more divided. Dr Peter Shirlow, of the University of Ulster, has conducted the most detailed survey of inter-communal relations in Northern Ireland – and found an almost completely segregated society. Only 5% of the workforce in Catholic areas are Protestants, and vice versa. Some 68% of 18 to 25-year-olds had never had a meaningful conversation with a single person from ‘the other side’. The young are more likely to fear and hate the ‘Prods’ or ‘Taigs’ than any other group. We have been fixing the ceiling, while the foundations fracture.

You can see this when you visit Belfast or Derry. To a British person, they feel like any familiar CloneZone town - except they are layered with a strange hatred you cannot grasp. Taxis will either take you to green or orange areas - never both. Even the KFC is covered with a mural memorialising a centuries-old battle. The cities are sliced by vast 40ft tall steel walls, keeping Catholics and Protestants apart. And there are more of them now than ever before. Talk to the kids, and they will gleefully tell you the other side stink, or are stupid, or lazy. We are currently spending £1.5bn a year keeping the two sides physically apart.”

In this Sunday’s Observer, writing about the violent flare-up in east Belfast, Sean O’Hagan added in another factor: “Like their Republican counterparts in towns like Lurgan, where support for the Real IRA is strong, the youth of Protestant east Belfast feel that they have somehow been sold out by the mainstream parties that claim to represent them. They are economically disenfranchised, have little hope of ever finding meaningful employment and, in many instances, live in communities in which they have been brought up to hate the police and distrust their tribal opposites.”

O’Hagan neatly links the tribalist traditions to the economic disenfranchisement: “For most of the time, save for these sporadic outbursts of violence, they are also bored. For many young people in these areas, the worst years of the Troubles have been mythologised to the point where many feel they have missed out on the one thing that gives their lives any real meaning: the chance to fight for a cause they believe in. They provide fertile fodder for extremists.”

Again the hopelessness of these young men’s economic circumstances destabilises PURPLE’s drive to attain safety in belonging, You can hardly feel ‘safe’ in your community when the community is blighted by poverty, unemployment and despair. And, when PURPLE is destabilised in this way, unhealthy RED will rise up to fight the perceived threat. If the populist leaders then threw in a bit of ‘duty’ and ‘cause’ to feed justification to whatever nascent BLUE might on the vMEMETIC horizon of their audiences then the followers transform into that most dangerous of men: the RED/BLUE zealot….

How then to deal with the 2 factors: tribalism; and the populist leaders who exploit that tribalism?

We could, of course, ‘take out’– jail, assassinate – the leaders and that can certainly have a powerful short-term effect. It is rumoured that one of the reasons the Provisional IRA started serious negotiatons with the British Government in the early 1990s was the degree of success the British Army and secret services had had in taking out high level Provo leaders.

But the tribalism will still be there for the RED vMEME of some other would-be leaders to exploit. In fact, positively-oriented RED leadership – RED in a vMEME harmonic perhaps with ORANGE or above – can have a profoundly-beneficial effect for the community. It’s said that Northern Ireland first minister (unionist) Peter Robinson got directly involved in the negotiations with east Belfast community leaders after last Tuesday’s violence. Certainly the RED of the ‘community stewards’, who calmed the would-be rioters on the Wednesday evening in what were quite dangerous circumstances, must have been very strong!

But, if unhealthy, exploitative RED can be a real problem in situations such as east Belfast, it can only exploit what is already there or has the very real potential to be there.

PURPLE tribalism is the deeper issue.

Dealing with tribalism, honouring tribalism
From one point of view – the GREEN vMEME’s point of view – tribalism is wrong because it discriminates against those who are ‘not of our tribe’ and does not treat everyone as equal.

You can see this viewpoint underpinning The Workers Party paradigm when they
write: “There is a need to create a new political space which is neither Unionist nor Nationalist, Protestant or Catholic. This should be the political priority…for all those concerned with the future of Northern Ireland.”

The problem with this theoretical foundation is that, when the PURPLE vMEME is dominant in the culture, then tribalism is natural. People who think they can eradicate tribalism are deluded. It’s a natural consequence of a certain pattern of psychological development.

Repeated, peaceful exposure to those of another culture certainly has been shown to reduce stereotyping and, consequently discrimination – and this is a principle reason why Hari advocates developing a programme of integrated schools in Northern Ireland. He writes: “A major 6-year study by Queen’s University, Belfast, has looked at the long-term consequences of being schooled alongside ‘The Enemy’. They interviewed adults who attended these schools – and found that, whatever their parents’ attitudes, they were ‘significantly more likely’ to oppose sectarianism. They had more friends across the divide, and they identified as ‘Northern Irish’, rather than ‘British’ or ‘Irish’. Their politics were far more amenable to peace: Some 80% of Protestants favour the union with Britain, but only 65% of those at integrated schools do. Some 51% of Catholics who went to a segregated school want unification with Ireland, but only 35% of those from integrated schools do. The middle ground - for a devolved Northern Ireland with links to both countries, within the EU - was fatter and happier.”

Hari’s evidence most definitely shows a reduction in sectarian attitudes – but the bigots are still in the majority. Integrated schools will only provide a partial solution – and that solution is fragile and likely to crumble if placed upon sufficient pressure. (They had integrated schools in Bosnia and Chechnya!)

Rather, what is needed is a recognition of the tribes and that tribalism can be healthy. An honouring of these things, if you will. After all, to feel safe in your community, proud of it and your identification with it can only be beneficial, both for the individual and the group. That element of tribalism, surely, is healthy! What is needed, though, is the means to minimise inter-group strife which, Tajfel & Turner tell us, is a natural output of Social Identification.

Ways to do this might include:-

  • Facing the tribes with daunting challenges that they can only overcome by co-operation. This was how Sherif et al resolved the Robber’s Cave tribal conflicts. This concept is at the heart of Samuel Gaertner et al’s (1993) Common In-Group Identity Model.
  • Creating common umbrella identities into which the tribal identities can fit - eg: English and Scots are both British identities. Andrew Tyerman & Christopher Spencer (1983) failed to reproduce Sherif et al’s inter-team conflicts with different boy scout groups because the different groups not only saw themselves as sharing the common super-identity of ‘scout’ but they also bought into scouting values. Tyerman & Spencer even found it relatively easy to increase co-operation between the different scout groups!
  • Facilitating the tribes learning from one another – so that they can see value in the ‘others’ and what they do. An example of this in Northern Ireland could be inter-community forums where solutions that one tribal group found to a problem such as getting the local council to spend money on maintaining children’s playgrounds are shared with other groups.

Preferably such strategies should be played out together as they can be mutually reinforcing.

With any attempt to tackle the unhealthy aspects of tribalism, there needs to be the understanding that, once there is healthy, co-operative tribalism and a reduction in sectarianism, the struggle to tackle the unhealthy aspects of tribalism is not over. As they learned in the former Yugoslavia, after more than 40 years of Marshall Tito’s particular version of totalitarian Communism – as we in the UK are learning in the Scottish independence debate - tribalism may be subsumed into a larger identity…but it doesn’t go away.

Therefore, there needs to be constant monitoring of the state of the tribalism and periodic adjustment to the strategies needed to keep the tribes co-operating rather than warring.

Is the Big Society in BIG trouble?

 celebrity, community, government, heroes and inspirational figures, morality, society, Spiral Dynamics  1 Response »
May 252011
 

So the day after David Cameron effectively relaunches the ‘Big Society’, with a new ‘white paper’, his key figure in charge of implementing the Big Society, Lord Wei of Shoreditch, resigns….

That could hardly be worse timing! Surely Cameron knew Wei was going?!? In which case it would have been much more politically astute to have rescheduled the launch of the white paper. As it is, Wei’s departure is a gift to Labour, with Shadow Cabinet Office minister Theresa Jowell saying, “….yet again”  the Big Society is “descending into farce. Only a day after Cameron told us all to take more responsibility, it appears that there will now be nobody in his government responsible for bringing the Big Society into reality.”

If Cameron didn’t know Wei was going, then it says something about Wei that he could time his resignation to such negative effect or about either Cameron’s judgement in recruiting such a fickle ally or  Cameron’s treatment of Wei that he could undermine his boss in such a damaging way.

Whatever the circumstances of Wei’s depearture, the effect is damaging both to Cameron personally and to the development of the Big Society concept.

Whether you think Cameron is being honest when he says the Big Society is the thing “I’m most passionate about in public life. This is what is in my heart. It’s what fires me up in the morning” - or it really is just an attempt to distract from the damage the cuts are doing to the social fabric of our kingdom, he certainly seems to be sticking with the theme. Even in face of withering criticism such as that of Jowell who said of the latest Big Society relaunch: “Under the indiscriminate impact of accelerated cuts, the essential elements of community life are slowly being starved of sustenance. What we lose in the next two years may become impossible to rebuild in ten.”

The Big Society and the cuts
Part of Cameron’s problem, of course, is that the cuts are doing very real damage - and the damage is going to get a lot worse before it eases off. Plus, that easing off may be some distance in the future if Vince Cable’s weekend statements about the abysmal state of Britain’s economic prospects are anything to go by. Thus, it may be that Cameron’s cuts and the general economic malaise of the country see damage to our social fabric on a par with the devastation of the traditional working classes in the early 1980s under Margaret Thatcher.

It is, of course, the Coalition Government’s mantra that there really is no way out of Britain’s financial mess other than the 25% cuts programme Chancellor George Osborne decreed last October. For all that Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls is said to really still believe Britain should invest and grow its way out of the deficit, Labour leader Ed Milliband is insisting Balls sticks – in public, at least! – with predecessor Alistair Darling’s view that the cuts should be at a slightly lower rate of 20% and over a longer periodof time. So even though Osborne now acknowledges some need for investment and growth, the major players are pretty much agreed on the cuts – it’s only quite how deep and quite how fast on which they disagree.

The conundrum then is this: when people are losing their jobs…and then their houses…and then their relationships crack under the pressure, will they want to donate to charitable and community ventures from what little money they have? It could be argued that all the newly-unemployed will have the time to get engaged in charitable and community ventures…but will they be motivated to? When you’ve done everything right - done your job to the best of your ability, looked after your family and been a good, tax-paying citizen – only to lose much of what’s really important to you through no obvious fault of your own, do you really want to be told to take on unpaid work to help others by the man who ordered the cuts which have cost you so much?

It’s a slap in the face for the BLUE vMEME. Do what’s right…and you lose almost everything. It’s not supposed to be like this! Since the theory is that vMEMES ebb and flow according to the Life Conditions, if the Life Conditions are no longer appropriate to BLUE, then expect something very different. In the students fees protests last November, we saw a lot of angry RED damaging the property of those the demonstrators saw as being unaffected by the cuts - banks, high-end retailers, Conservative Party headquarters…even Charles & Camilla’s car!

My hunch is that we’re going to see an awful lot more of that kind of thing in the next couple of years. In Zygmunt Bauman’s (1988) terms, we’re going to see more and more people no longer able to participate in - be ‘seduced’ into – the consumerist society. Instead, they join the ranks of the ‘Repressed’. What we saw in the student fees protest could also be seen as those who feared they were going to be barred from the ranks of the Seduced - not being able to go to university being perceived as a severe restriction on career prospects.

Of course, the real story is not as simple as that. Students can still go to university and enhance their career prospects - it’s just that the debt incurred works in a different way and may prove more burdensome for many. Unfortunately, the Government is failing it get its message across - even with as formidable a figure as Lib Dem deputy leader Simon Hughes spearheading the campaign to give students the real facts about the new fees structure.

Getting the message across
When it comes to the economy, it seems the Government is not entirely sure just what the message it is failing to get across actually is.

According to Vince Cable at the weekend, Britain’s economic malaise is more than just a return of the old boom-and-bust cycle Gordon Brown supposedly put an end to; it’s also a consequence of an ongoing restructure of the global economy. Eg: “Britain is no longer one of the world’s price setters. We take our prices from international commodity markets driven by China and India.”

This is bad news for Cable’s party boss. Nick Clegg has staked the Lib Dems’ electoral fortunes on the Coalition Government being able to turn the economy around sufficiently by 2015 for there to be a ‘feel good’ factor working for the Coalition partners in that year’s general election. Considering the drubbing the Lib Dems received in this April’s elections, the last thing Clegg wants to hear is Cable saying that Britain will have to get used to being poorer on at least a semi-permanent basis..

In a poorer Britain, of course, people doing it for themselves, rather than relying on a cash-strapped government - the essence of the Big Society meme – might be a highly practical approach. In fact, it may turn out to be the only way some things get done!

The question then comes back to: how do you get people - many of whom will have suffered severely because of the cuts – motivated to give to time and some of the little money they have to charity and community programmes?

That Cameron is not a particularly good communicator - and struggles to get his message beyond his core electorate - is indicated by the failure of the Tories to achieve a majority in the Commons when up against a jaded Labour Government and a prime minister (Brown) perceived by many to be petty and ineffectual. Many Tory campaigners reported they found it difficult to get the Big Society message across to voters on the doorstep – and a number simply dropped it from their list of issues to discuss.

Even now Cameron struggles to define just what the Big Society is, The best he could manage at Monday’s relaunch was: “The Big Society is not some fluffy add-on to more gritty and more important subjects. This is about as gritty and important as it gets – giving everyone the chance to get on in life and making our country a better place to live.”

To underline the Government’s commitment to the Big Society concept, Cameron wants his ministers to undertake a day of voluntary service over the course of the year with a charity or community group.

Yet, how much Cameron fails to understand how messages are received - the heart of Memetics - is demonstrated by his appointing Tory party donor and former ‘non-dom’ tax avoider Lord Ashcroft to head a review of British Army bases in Cyrus. When people are losing jobs and homes and being told by Cameron to give to charity and community projects,  Ashcroft’s appointment (though nominally unpaid) looks like more ‘jobs for the boys’ amongst the wealthy and the elite. No wonder Nick Clegg is said to be furious about the appointment!

A similar insensitivity with regard to how messages are perceived can be found in Cameron’s comments to the Daily Telegraph in April about it being OK to appoint political interns on the basis of personal contacts, rather than the more formal but equal opportunities-oriented basis Clegg was championing. The cynics might point to this and argue from that Cameron is really an old-fashioned Tory who just does as he wishes and only bothers with the ‘little people’ when he needs to exploit them. Certainly at times he seems to run off a RED/BLUE vMEME harmonic of pure arrogance!

Successful communication is about values
Or, more specifically, understanding and appreciating diversity in values.

While RED and BLUE might seem to dominate in his thinking on political appointees, when it comes to the Big Society, David Cameron’s language seems to indicate more that it’s GREEN (look after people on a community basis) and BLUE (because it’s our duty). GREEN thinking is way too complex for most people  – in 1976 James P Shaver & William Strong raised doubts as to whether most people develop beyond what is now termed BLUE..

As for that vMEME, if many people are downscaling from BLUE to RED because of adverse Life Circumstances, then a BLUE call to duty – when they’d done their ‘duty’ and got made redundant as a reward - is not likely to have much influence.

Rather than pitch the Big Society at BLUE and GREEN levels, Cameron would do better to make it ‘cool’ for RED so that helping out in a community project becomes a means of gaining status and respect. A short cut to achieving this would be to get celebrities to volunteer.

The ‘cult of celebrity’ has grown exponentially in tandem with the growth of mass media.  One psychologist interested in our fascination with celebrity is Kate Douglas. Douglas (2003) has suggested that it is evolutionarily adaptive to model successful individuals because, by learning from them, it may shorten our own route to success. So, who better to be seen demonstrating Big Society attitudes, values and activities at a time when many people are struggling to be successful (due to the cuts).

It the people need to learn to do for themselves what the Government can no longer afford to do, then, to maintain our society, the ability of the people to do has to grow at least that little bit faster than the Government’s ability to do decreases. Which means people have to be persuaded to volunteer ahead of the sheer necessity to take it up on themselves.

Which, in turn, means David Cameron has to persuade more than cajole. And persuading means working with what is important to people – their values – more than what’s important to you (your values).

More people in this kingdom think in PURPLE and RED than BLUE, ORANGE and GREEN. Which is why The Sun sells more copies than The Independent and why more people watch Coronation Street than Panorama. Thus, Big Society advocates have got to learn to talk the language of the people they want to communicate to.

So, Dave, maybe give Take That a call…get as many celebs doing Big Society stuff as you can. Make it cool. Make it fun!

…oh, and Dave, if you want to get re-elected in 2015, you’ve got to be seen as more trustworthy than the other lot. No more Ashcroft deals, huh?!

The Northampton ‘supergran’ and the issues she raises

 community, crime, government, heroes and inspirational figures, Middle East, morality, schemas & memes, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics  3 Responses »
Feb 172011
 

The footage of ‘supergran’ Ann Timson belting hell out of a bunch of would-be ‘smash ‘n’ grab’ scooter boys at a jewellers in Northampton the other week (7 February, to be precise) has had me musing ever since it was first  broadcast. The fact it is has become a ‘viral phenomenon’, spreading right around the world, has only caused me to muse further.

By pure coincidence, a camera man was over the road filming for a documentary and he managed to capture the entire event on film. The footage was aired on ITN News that evening. Within hours, it was on YouTube and received nearly 6,000 views over the next 24 hours. Now there are multiple versions all over YouTube, Daily Motion, etc, using Superman logos and music like Chris De Burgh’s ‘Lady in Red’, etc, etc, etc. Ann Timson’s onslaught has made news bulletins in the United States, Australia and many other countries.

The event itself raises important questions - as does the fact it has become such a ‘viral phenomenon’. Just in case you haven’t seen it or you need a reminder, here’s the original footage…

Play Video

Ann Timson 
So what made a 71-year-old grandmother with arthritis in her legs all but sprint up the street and take on a gang of young male raiders in crash helmets? Some of them were revving up their scooters, ready for the getaway, while others were pounding the jewellers’ reinforced glass with sledgehammers and yet another was helping himself to the goods through the holes smashed in the glass. 

The danger Ann put herself in was remarkable - as she herself described one part of the tussle: “I landed several blows against one lad on the back of a bike and brought him to the ground. He raised a hammer to me so I just kept hitting out….” 

If it had been a young man full to the gills with testosterone and, therefore driven by the impulsiveness and compulsiveness of Psychoticism, the furious assault on the raiders would have been more understandable. 

But, from several interviews with her in the days afterwards, it appears that, while her actions that Monday were rather on the extreme side, Ann Timson has taken on the ‘bad guys’ many times before. 

Ray Nicholson of Ann’s Spring Boroughs Estate told the Daily Mail: “I’ve known Ann for 20 years and she has always stood up to criminals. Often she got herself into a lot of trouble because of it….‘When she moved in ten years ago it was a nightmare. The police were called every night because of the drugs and prostitution here….I’ve been threatened with a knife on many occasions and I know that Ann has. But she kept going. She kept challenging the criminals and she made life difficult for them.” (Rebecca Camber, 2011) 

Another neighbour, Nicholas Welch, added more detail: “This place used to be a proper dive before she turned up. It was known as the jungle. People were having sex on the stairs and smoking crack in the corridors. But she has played a massive part in changing it. We now have security fences and intercoms that work. We feel safe.” 

Such testimony indicates the importance to Ann’s values of defeating the petty crooks, the gangs and the drugs dealers - and, by so doing, make the local environment pleasanter and safer to live in. In terms of the Assimilation-Contrast Effect, Ann is what Spiral Dynamics co-developer Don Beck would term a ‘Zealot’: driven by a harmonic of RED and BLUE vMEMES, she will seek to dominate a situation to make it the way she knows it should be. 

Ann’s description of how she got involved that day is revealing: “I became aware of a loud revving noise at the top of the street. I looked over and saw a kid run up to the doorway of the jeweller. Three lads followed him and when I saw their arms going I thought the kid was being beaten up. My mother’s instinct kicked in and I ran across the road, shouting at the lads to stop it. Only then did I realise that they were smashing glass and that it was a raid. There was a scooter in my path revving up but by now I was in full flight and I started whacking the lads over the head with my shopping bag…angry that they felt they could get away with what they were doing in broad daylight.” 

I would suggest that Ann’s reference to her ‘mother’s instinct’ kicking in is a folklore explanation she has given herself. There is little evidence that mothers have a ‘mothering instinct’ for the adult male offspring of other women. A cognitive explanation of her actions would be much more viable. She has deeply-ingrained schemas about morality and justice and responded initially to a perception of injustice - one man being hurt by 3 others – and these schemas of justice/injustice were then were activated even more strongly in her anger “that they felt they could get away with what they were doing in broad daylight”. 

It looks to me as if Ann has a ’Crusader’ identity - she crusades against injustice and against those who would make our streets unsafe. What she did, she did from very deeply-held beliefs about what’s right and wrong. 

That she could do what she did – the very real dangers present, the arthritic legs stretched to (and perhaps even beyond) their limit - is testament to the power of belief when those beliefs are inextricably linked to our deepest values. 

It’s not altogether different to the powers of belief - again propelled by a RED/BLUE vMEME harmonic - that led unarmed young Egytian men (and not a few older men and not a few women) into Tahrir Square in the early days of the anti-Mubarak protests, in the face of police tear gas and rubber bullets, sniper fire and horse charges from pro-Mubarak thugs. They knew what they thought was right and they had the energy, determination and arrogance to fight - and, in some instances, die – for it. 

The bystanders 
As remarkable as Ann Timson’s intervention in the raid was, equally remarkable was the failure of the other observers to intervene. No one else in the immediate vicinity attempted to do anything about the attempted robbery until Ann had driven off the raiders, bringing one them down in the process. Then there was a rush to keep the downed raider down and to see Ann was okay. Before her intervention, plenty of bystanders stopped and gawped and drivers turning into the street steered around the scooters – but no one did anything. Even the jewellers’ staff - clearly terrified - did no more than try to get the shutters down. 

Ann herself said she was ‘amazed’ that bystanders did not intervene at the start of the attack. She described herself as “shouting and shouting for others to help and bring them down…They all seemed mesmerised. A lot were standing there filming or taking photos….” 

Psychologists, however, will not be surprised by the lack of intervention from others. The Bystander Effect is a recognised psychological phenomenon – that there is an inverse relationship between the number of people present at an emergency situation and the willingness of those people to offer help. This relationship was first proposed by John Darley & Bibb Latané from their investigations into the notorious murder of New Yorker Kitty Genovase in 1964 when something like 38 neighbours heard her screams and cries for help and/or actually saw part of the attack but did not call the police or otherwise intervene. 

Explanations put forward for the Bystander Effect’ include evaluation apprehension and diffusion of responsibility. Evaluation apprehension is the anxiety produced by the fear that others will be judgemental about your competence in dealing with the situation. Diffusion of responsibility occurs when individuals feel less responsibility for taking action in a crisis when there are others about because responsibility is perceived as shared and, therefore, spread out. The more bystanders there are, the less likely any individual is to act. In effect, everyone puts the responsibility for doing something about the crisis onto others. 

That the bystanders finally realised it was a little old woman screaming for help and that she had succeeded in driving off the raiders may have been the catalysts which finally spurred the onlookers into action in Northampton. 

While there numerous documented examples of the Bystander Effect in history - arguably the greatest and most notorious example being the German people’s acquiescence to the Nazis’ treatment of Jews, Slavs, etc, during World War II - there is an interesting question as to whether the Bystander Effect has become more common and possibly embedded into British culture since World War II. 

Were people more willing to get involved in earlier decades? Did they see it as the kind of thing they should do? 

My father has told me many tales of men, during his youth in the 1930s and 1940s, coming out of their houses to clear away troublesome groups of teenagers. He also told me of vigilante-type groups coming together from time to time to take on gangs that were coming into their neighbourhood. 

How thinkable would it be for male householders in a street to do that kind of thing today? (Unfortunately when people do ‘have a go’ these days, all too often they end up doing it alone! Ann Timson, anyone?) 

My father’s evidence is, of course, anecdotal and may be relevant only to the area of Liverpool in which he grew up. However, I have heard a number of similar anecdotes relating to different parts of the country. 

Attitudes these days towards the idea of ‘having a go’ seem rather mixed. Newspapers like The Sun and the Daily Mail usually can’t find enough superlatives to praise ‘have a go heroes’. However, ‘official’ attitudes are all too often reflected in the words of Detective Inspector Ally White who said of the Ann Timpson incident: “We would like to thank all of the members of the public who assisted in the incident. However, we would always advise the public to call the police if they witness a crime, rather than risking their own safety by getting involved themselves.” 

So the police don’t actually want us to have a go but to rely on them….? So the Bystander Effect is okay with them?!? Perhaps it is becoming embedded in our culture, encouraged by ‘officialdom’? Hmmm….well, the lone constable I stopped to support when he was investigating a late night break-in some years back actually seemed very appreciative of my company till back-up arrived. 

The obvious problems with not having a go and relying on the police are:- 

a) the time gap until they arrive 

b) the fact there simply aren’t enough of them to cope with all the crime being conducted - and there will be even less of them and more people feeling they are driven to crime as a result of the Government’s cuts!

Intervening, of course, can carry serious risks; but, if we are to have a functioning society where people can go about their lawful business safely, can we afford for everyone to be that risk averse? 

If David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ idea is to work - ie: local people band together to do ‘it’ for themselves, rather than rely on government - then can that ‘it’ include have a go’ law enforcement? If it can, then clearly Ally White really doesn’t understand that. But, if it is officially okay to intervene, how close can ‘have a go’ get to outright judge-jury-executioner vigilantism? 

If the nodal BLUE law & order system can’t protect those who put their trust in it, then inevitably there will be a Spiral downshift to RED/BLUE when people will take the law into their own hands in the same way as Munir Hussain - see ‘Munir Hussain and the wrong messages of Judge John Reddihough’ - and Tony Martin have done in recent years, with severe consequences for the criminals they dealt with. 

As the cuts cause the law & order system in this country to malfunction increasingly, perhaps a BEIGE/PURPLE vMEME harmonic will drive more people to have a go at defending themselves, their families and their property. Again Egypt helps illustrate this point - neighbours forming little groups armed with knives, baseball bats and the occasional firearm at the ends of their streets to repel the looters taking advantage of the civic disturbances and rioting. 

The ‘Viral Phenomenon’ 
Why, oh, why has footage of a little old lady swinging her handbag at a - let’s face it! - decidedly amateurish (though undoubtedly thuggish) group of would-be robbers captured so much interest right around the world? 

The answer will lie at least partly in the ongoing failure of BLUE to contain escalating crime - especially violent crime. From the daily routine of murders, rapes, muggings and robberies infesting Johannesburg to Somali pirates reviving the tradition of buccaneering in as bloodthirsty a manner as any of their forbears to the epidemic of drugs and sex trafficking right across Europe and many other examples, the globally-connected world seems to be awash with examples of criminals getting away with it - the message all too often being that crime actually does pay. 

Thus, heroes who emerge unexpectedly from seemingly nowhere and suddenly decimate the criminals are the stuff of folklore. So often, for us as observers - bystanders- they embody our own desire to ‘do something’ and our frustrations at not being able to do so. They take the law into their own hands - as Ann Timson did - when the law is clearly not working. Of course, there may be all kinds of complications when the hero figure does this - there’s good reason why these kinds of heroes are sometimes termed ‘anti-heroes’. 

For a fuller discussion of this point, see the Society feature: ‘When BLUE fails, call for Clint!’ 

The Ann Timson seen in the footage is a small-scale old lady version of the kind of hero figure so often played by the likes of Clint Eastwood or Arnold Schwarzenegger in their action hero heydays. Like we loved them sorting out the ruthless gangsters the law can’t, we love her for sorting out the scooter boys. The fact she isn’t a muscle-bound violent psychopath but a gran-like old lady also conveys the message: if she can do it, why can’t we all? 

Clearly there is a memetic virus effect here. According to a YouGov poll published in the Sunday Times (13 February),   35% of respondents thought Ann was heroic to intervene. 13% thought she was foolish, and 46% said she was both heroic and foolish. Given a list of crimes, 54% said they would intervene if they saw someone burgling a house and 60% said they would step in if they saw an unarmed aggressor assaulting someone in the street. Some 40% of respondents said they would take action if they witnessed a gunman or someone armed with a club assaulting someone in the street, and 29% would intervene on witnessing an armed robbery. 

All hot air and fantasy or real inspiration to action…? Of course, we’ll never know whether the YouGov respondents get involved in breaking up criminal activities. But, if we see more spontaneous group action against criminals and fewer Bystander Effects, then maybe some of that may just be attributable to the inspiration Ann Timson has provided. 

But the very real and increasing need for what is not far off vigilantism says a lot about the effect crime is having on our society and the decreasing capacity of conventional law enforcement channels for dealing with it.

David Cameron’s right about Multiculturalism BUT…

 Afghanistan, American Foreign Policy, community, cross-cultural, government, international conflict, Neurological Levels, politics, prejudice & discrimination, Psychology, racism, religion, schemas & memes, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics, terrorism  3 Responses »
Feb 082011
 

This past weekend David Cameron pushed forward considerably ideas his predecessors Tony Blair and Gordon Brown had been moving progressively towards …. In essence, this is to say pretty explicitly that, if you want to be British, you need to buy into the British identity and British values. (Ironically, freed from the collective responsibility of Cabinet, Blair on these issues is almost certainly well to the right of Cameron these days – see: ‘”Radical Islam” and the Return of Tony Blair’)

Cameron criticised ‘state multiculturalism’ and argued the UK needs a stronger national identity to stop people turning to extremism. With MI6 warning last week that Britain faces an “‘unstoppable wave of home-grown suicide bombers”, Cameron could hardly have ignored the threat from radicalised young Muslims; and it seems logical to ascribe their lack of identification with ‘British values’ as one cause of their radicalisation.

In his speech on Saturday (5 February) Cameron accused multiculturalism of leading to a Britain of ‘divided tribes’. The prime minister posited that the multi-culturalist dogma, which increasingly dominated political and social thinking from the early 1970s on, had meant the majority had to accord each minority ethnic group respect and the freedom to pursue its own cultural practices and traditions. Anti-discrimination legislation had protected the minorities – though arguably not so much the majority - leading to a failure to integrate into ‘mainstream British culture’.  Then the very existence of multiple cultures - multiculturalism - with each one given equal due meant no one culture could dominate, leading to a diminishing of mainstream British culture - with a sense of loss of ‘Britishness’ and even confusion as to what ‘British identity’ might actually mean.

Cameron’s attack is certainly not new or isolated. The formal identification of multiculturalism as a source of racial, ethnic and cultural divisions began with Trevor Phillips, the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, commenting on the reports on race riots in Oldham, Bradford, Leeds and Burnley during 2001. He told The Times (Tom Baldwin & Gabriel Rozenberg, 2004) that multiculturalism was out of date and no longer useful – not least because it encouraged ‘separateness’ between communities. He said that multiculturalism – one of the founding principles of his own organisation - “means the wrong things…. We are now in a different world from the Sixties and Seventies.”

Lord Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, said in a speech last year that the concept of multiculturalism had been developed to create a more tolerant society – one in which everyone, regardless of colour, creed or culture, felt at home. However, multiculturalism’s message ended up becoming: “There is no need to integrate.” Further, Sacks saw multiculturalism as dissolving national identity, shared values and collective identity which “makes it impossible for groups to integrate because there is nothing to integrate into”.

I’ve touched upon the undermining of national identity via multiculturalism in Blog posts such as ‘Is restricting Immigration discriminatory?’…while Jon Twigge has taken the issue fully head-on in the Blog ‘The Curious Case of Being British’. There is little doubt that Cameron is describing, not theorising or speculating. Inevitably, though, for a politician trying to play the ‘populist card’, Cameron has oversimplified the issues.

Then there is the conundrum: if we accept that multiculturalism has led us to become a Britain of ‘divided tribes’ and the majority have lost much of their unique sense of Britishness, then what do we do about it?

What is the ‘British Identity’ and what are ‘British values’?
If we want to embody or become something, it’s a good idea to spell out just what that something is. So what is ‘British identity’ and what are ‘British values’?

On Saturday Cameron said: “Frankly, we need a lot less of the passive tolerance of recent years and much more active, muscular liberalism [which] believes in certain values and actively promotes them…. Freedom of speech. Freedom of worship. Democracy. The rule of law. Equal rights, regardless of race, sex or sexuality. This is what defines us as a society. To belong here is to believe those things.”

That’s helpful. But the values the prime minister espoused are pretty much those formally held by any modern western democratic state. It hardly informs us what ‘Britishness’ is.

To expect people to adopt values unrelated to their identity is a fallacy. As Robert Dilts’ Neurological Levels model shows clearly, truly-held values come from the identity you hold in relation (contextually) to the environment you are in.

So, for people to cherish ‘British values’, they must have a ‘British identity’. When people wholeheartedly see themselves as ‘British’, then they are much more likely to hold British values.

Just over 18 months ago the inaugural Centre of Human Emergence - UK event featured Spiral Dynamics co-developer Don Beck leading us through an exploration of the British character - see: ‘”Britishness” at the Regent’s College Summit’. What we came up with was:-

  • Leaders in many, many ways
  • Great innovators
  • Quirky and eccentric - often precursors to innovation
  • Resilient and supportive of each other in face of external threats
  • Humour-full -– we can usually see the humour and irony in most things and we don’t usually take ourselves too seriously
  • At the centre of the world, a bridge between Europe, America and the Commonwealth

In large part our assessment was based on the past - our recent history from the days of Empire, through the Blitz to the ‘Swinging Sixites’ - though an echo of the ‘Blitz Spirit’ was acknowledged in the carry-on attitude displayed by many Londoners in the wake of the 7/7 bombings.

Of course, in identifying Britishness, we can’t simply go back to the 1960s before multiculturalism really began to take hold. That was then; this is now. As noted children’s author Rosemary Wilkie said at Regent’s College: “We have had a great story. Now we need a new great story.”  So we need a new sense of Britishness, one that does indeed draw on Britain’s illustrious past but one which also takes stock of the peoples we are right now and one which can inspire us as a nation into our future.

Britain is not the land of white anglo culture it was 40 years ago. A walk along the high street of most towns will reveal a plethora of Asian, Chinese and Thai restaurants and takeaways – with the occasional West Indian or North African nestled in between them. These establishments couldn’t stay in business without substantial patronage from amongst the white majority.

This fact alone should tell anyone with the ability to view these things objectively that you can’t just turn the clock back 40 years - just imagine: no Chinese or Indian eating houses or takeaways! So the British National Party (BNP) pipedream of shipping 2nd and 3rd generation Asians and blacks off to some place their grandfather came from is just that: a fantasy pipedream. Short of the BNP being able to impose a totalitarian state in Britain and pursuing the kind of 10-year blame and dehumanisation strategies the Nazis employed against the Jews which eventually enabled them to pursue the ‘Final Solution’, black and Asian Britons are here to stay.

Even with the will to integrate, it is inevitable that many of them will be bi-cultural: they have the culture of the land they live in and belong to now and the heritage of the land their grandparents came from. On the one hand, it is essential to developing Britishness that they do assimilate into the mainstream; on the other hand, from their heritages, many ethnic groups have much to offer beyond eating houses.

So we need a ‘British identity’ that not only draws inspiration from the past but also incorporates, to some degree at least, the amount of diversity found these days in Britain’s streets.

Another factor to take into consideration in developing a new British identity is that Britain is, in fact, composed of 3 nations in a United Kingdom with Northern Ireland. While the Welsh and especially the Scottish contributed much to the explorations and innovations that developed Empire, ‘Britain’ all too often meant England and ‘England’ meant Britain. That code was particularly prevalent in foreign portrayals of the ‘British’ or the ‘English’ - the terms being effectively interchangeable. Just look at the way Hollywood movies portrayed us in the 1930s through to the 1960s. The Welsh hardly got a look-in and Scots were only usually included if it was to caricature the ‘wild highlander’! 

That simply won’t do now. With Welsh nationalism an ever-strong presence in the Welsh Assembly and a minority Scots Nationalist Government in Hollyrood, any new sense of British identity must incorporate sufficient elements of ‘Welshness’ and ‘Scottishness’ to appeal to those more assertive and confident peoples no longer prepared to acquiesce compliantly to the Englishness.

Creating the new ‘Britishness’
Back in 2004, Trevor Phillips said: “We need to assert there is a core of Britishness…. What we should be talking about is how we reach an integrated society, one in which people are equal under the law, where there are some common values.”

The question then becomes: how do you create that integrated society Phillips talked about?

A strategy Tony Blair’s Government introduced in 2005 in an attempt to inculcate knowledge about Britain into immigrants applying for British citizenship (or long-term residency) was the mandatory ‘Life in the UK’ test. It covers issues such as Britain’s constitution, the originating countries of previous UK immigrants, family life in the UK and where dialects like Geordie, Scouse or Cockney come from. Knowledge of practical matters such as the minimum age to buy alcohol and tobacco and what services are provided by local authorities are also covered. Finally, the test requires a certain level of fluency in English, Welsh or Scottish Gaelic.

Last May the Home Office revealed that a third of applicants fail the test.

Out of interest, I gave my GCSE Sociology classes the following mini-version of the test:-

  • What is the Queen’s official role and what ceremonial duties does she have?
  • What is the role of the Prime Minister? Who advises them and what are the main roles in the  Cabinet?
  • What is the Opposition and what is the role of the Leader of the Opposition?
  • What are MPs? How often are elections held and who forms the government?
  • Do women have equal rights in voting, education and work - and has this always been the case?
  • How is political debate reported? Are newspapers free to publish opinions or do they have to
      remain impartial?

Close to a half failed the test. But, as several students - all of them white anglo – protested, their parents would probably have failed too and they were undoubtedly British!

As Dilts’ Neurological Levels model demonstrates only too clearly, it’s much more likely that identity leads to the values which make you want to acquire relevant knowledge than being fed knowledge shapes identity. The high level of failure in the Life in the UK test would indicate many applicants don’t value the knowledge…and the reason for that is almost certainly because they don’t really see themselves as British. Forcing knowledge at people in the hope they will ingest it does not mean they will. Ask any teacher!

By all means, from Phillips through Blair to Cameron, there needs to be pressure to integrate on the basis of the old proverb: ‘When in Rome, do as the Romans do’. But that pressure alone - which comes from BLUE’s do-what’s-right thinking – will not produce integration. Indeed, in immigrant communities where the acculturation strategy - as identified by John Berry (1997) – is to marginalise (have only minimal contact with the majority culture) or, even worse, separate (avoid contact altogether) to preserve the purity of the immigrants’ cultural identity, such pressure may even lead to extreme separation,  a sense of persecution and deep-felt alienation from the mainstream culture. And that can only fuel the radicalisation of young Muslims in such immigrant communities.

What Government strategies life ‘Life in the UK’ miss is the need to target the PURPLE vMEME as well as the BLUE vMEME. What also needs to be understood by the strategists is that PUPRLE naturally differentiates between ‘my tribe’ and ‘your tribe’ - with race/colour, religion and ‘ethnic dress’ being the more obvious markers of difference – see: ‘Is Racism Natural?’ in the Society section of the main site.

If tribalism is natural and the markers of difference are needed to distinguish the tribes, how then can integration ever be possible?

The answer is that complete integration is likely to take generations as people grow beyond the boundaries of their tribal areas – and there are signs this is starting to happen naturally, led by one of the most powerful instincts of all: sexual love. While at the above-mentioned Regent’s College Summit in June 2009, I was impressed with how many white/black and white/Asian couples I saw in the pubs around cosmopolitan Finchley where I was staying. Around the same time last year, I attended the wedding of a white friend’s daughter to a Muslim man.

Using techniques adapted from sociopsychology, this process can be manipulated and accelerated. Muzafir Sherif et al ‘s famous Robber’s Cave Experiment (1954) demonstrated that you can create super identities with shared values if you create challenges which are so daunting, it is only by working together that they can be overcome. In 1984 G Andreeva, to all intents and purposes, repeated Sherif et al’s study but in a different culture - Russia – and this concept of uniting the tribes via common challenge (or threat) is at the heart of  Samuel Gerners’ Common In-Group Identity Model (1993). However, while Gerner expressed concern that there could be a reversion to tribal identities once the challenge was accomplished, an interesting study by Andrew Tyerman & Christopher Spencer (1983) found it effectively impossible to turn the lesser identities against each other provided there was a potential for the super identity to endure and there was a moral element to the identity. In this case, the super identity was boy scouts, the study was carried out on different scout groups brought together and the moral element was the Boy Scouts Code of Honour.

Of course, it is difficult - if not impossible (short of genocide) - to eradicate tribal identities entirely and those tribal identities will always require managing. Just think how PURPLE tribalism tore apart Yugoslavia and  the Soviet Union’s successor Russian Federation once the repressive BLUE controls of the Communist state were removed! But, if the memetic focus is on shared/common values, desires and needs, then the tribes can be brought together to work on achieving shared/common aims. After all, most people, whatever their tribe, want a decent income, good schooling for their children, freedom from crime and the fear of crime, value for money local services and amenities, etc, etc. David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ concept, if presented correctly, could actually stimulate inter-tribal co-operation. After all, if government does less, then the people need to come together to do more.

Last Summer, working with Councillor Darren Reynolds of Burnley Council, he and I tentatively mapped out how gatherings of seemingly-disparate tribes might work together in that ‘race relations hotspot’ to achieve things the Council could not.

Who do you belong to: God or the State?
This, for the devout – Christian, Jew or Muslim- is always going to be an issue if the state’s laws and/or requirements conflict with religious duty. For the devout, at the end of the day, it is usually God who wins. Eg: for the Christian, Acts 5:29 says simply: “…obey God rather than men…”

Thus, national identity needs to be constructed in such a way that it is not at odds with mainstream religious teaching.

David Cameron’s linking of a failure to become ‘British’ with extremist Islam is only valid if other causes of radicalisation are acknowledged and strategies put into place to deal with them.

For Muslims, there is a duty to fight with other Muslims against oppressors – viz:-

“And slay them wherever ye catch them, and turn them out from where they have turned you out; for tumult and oppression are worse than slaughter; but fight them not at the Sacred Mosque, unless they (first) fight you there; but if they fight you, slay them. Such is the reward of those who suppress faith….
And fight them on until there is no more tumult or oppression, and there prevail justice and faith in Allah; but if they cease, Let there be no hostility except to those who practise oppression.” (Sura 2: 191, 193)

All too easily radical imams have been able to turn the Anglo-American blunders in Afghanistan and, especially, Iraq and insensitivity to untold numbers of civilian lives lost or ruined into tales of the West oppressing Islam.

Thus, it’s difficult for a Muslim to be ‘British’ if the British are perceived to be carelessly slaughtering Muslims. The PURPLE/BLUE vMEME harmonic of loyalty and duty tells them they should be standing alongside their brothers and sisters fighting the oppressor.

In terms of whether young Muslims can be reconciled to a British identity, the Government has been losing the propaganda war since 2002 and first talk of invading Iraq. And there’s no sign yet that the new Government has any better idea than the previous one of how to win the war of hearts and minds. No wonder MI6 is predicting ‘an unstoppable wave of home-grown suicide bombers’!

For young Muslims appalled at Anglo-American actions in Afghanistan and Iraq to be reconciled to being British, their BLUE need to be told by those with high authority as Islamic scholars that violence is not the way to express disquiet and disgust. Rather, that their voices can be heard through the British political systems.

I’m still baffled why so much more was not made of Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri’s fatwa last year denouncing terrorism and stating suicide bombers could not go to Heaven - see: ‘Why is the West ignoring a leading moderate Muslim?’ As one of the most scholarly texts based on Islamic scriptures in recent years from one of the religion’s leading thinkers, it was literally an instruction to Muslims not to commit violence against civilians whatever the cause.

Yet it was largely ignored by western leaders.

The works of ul-Qadri –  an appropriate teacher for the BLUE of many Muslims – and similar scholars should be being promoted through the mosques as the correct interpretation of Islamic scripture. With such memes forming their schemas, it is then possible for young Muslims to be British and use our democratic systems to articulate their needs, desires and dissatisfactions.

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