Avoiding the Idiots' Lantern

I finished the second series of The Bridge last night. Wow. No spoilers but a twisted ending. You know of course that when the plot appears all tied up with an hour and twenty minutes to go that there must be something else (unless it’s a Harry Potter movie I suppose), but I didn't see much of that coming.

As I don’t watch a lot of TV, the fact that I have spent ten hours over the last four weeks (plus six on Hinterland) on this does make me wonder what I would have done otherwise. I think the answer is that I haven’t been reading as much as I usually would.

 I've been reading widely of late - a mixture of (decent quality) journalism and current affairs, fact, and fiction of wide-ranging heritage and quality. In fact, pretty much the only stuff I don’t read is biography and self-help books. (Anyone reading this blog since the beginning may feel that the second of these omissions probably should be revisited, but I have my pride.)

And The Bridge and Hinterland coincided with having finished some book threads (A Song of Ice and Fire (The Game of Thrones) stuff, the Robert Llewellyn ‘News from’ books and a partial reread of Kurt Vonnegut (still love it).

So I had been fishing around looking for the next thing to read. I was trying to reread the ‘Mapp and Lucia’ novels (EF Benson’s light social commentary – he also wrote some great horror) especially as they were about 40p on Kindle, but just haven’t got into them yet. And TV was an obvious alternative.

Now what I don’t want to do is to carry on with the TV watching. So I will be spending some time today (in advance of about five hours on trains tomorrow) seeking out something new to read. Ideas gratefully received.

Is Britain Sick?

This week's riots in London have proved a profound surprise to most people, except perhaps Darcus Howe. It took fully 25 minutes before the opinions on what must be done started to surface. Within four days a historian specialising in the Tudors was quoting Enoch Powell and causing apoplexy in the chattering classes.

Clearly where we have been going wrong all these years is in trying to let politicians and qualified individuals spend millions of pounds failing to solve a problem that is so simple some talking head on Newsnight can solve it in half an hour.

Lesson One - unless you equate David Cameron with Darth Vader you need to accept he, and all the politicians before him are trying to do what they think is right.

Politicians love success - and the easiest success - the "low-hanging fruit" comes from the easy things to fix. If it was easy, we wouldn't be having this problem.

Lesson Two - various people all have to take some responsibility for this to a certain extent.

NOTHING as far as I am concerned excuses the behaviour of the rioters themselves and some of them will sadly have their lives ruined by prison, conviction, eviction etc. This is a great shame when we are talking about teenagers, but it was obvious the State would come down on the ones who got caught like a ton of bricks.

Where the blame must start to be spread around is in looking at why this happened.

Did those who rioted know they were breaking the law? Probably not much debate about that.

Did they think that a hood and mask gave them Harry Potter-style invisibility? Perhaps - but in the most surveilled society in the world you'd have to assume some people are going to get caught.

Regardless though, if they knew it was illegal, why did they behave in that way? This is the thread I have seen emerging in society - of action without regard for its consequences.

Lives are taken for mobile phones, people are stabbed for being disrespectful. Shops are torched and looted. Most of the time someone - and usually someone young, is caught and convicted.

So the blame we as a society bear is for allowing a situation where people put so little value on life and property that they behave this way. Not just value on other people's property, value on their own lives, that they would make their future prospects much worse for a free new phone.

We have failed - as parents (we are top of the list), as educators (because whilst it's not easy, we simply haven't got through to a wide range of kids), as politicians (14 years of injecting money into the system has done nothing) and as a society in general.

As the dust settles, let's not jump to conclusions and solutions. Short term fixes may cure the symptoms, but we have got to diagnose the root causes and fix those if it is to work long-term. Look at LA, look at Paris - if there are answers they aren't quick and easy ones, and anybody expecting them is extremely naive.