Biological determinism

After Cameron’s and others rants about how to clamp down on the rioters with a firm hand, we can now start to see the facts coming through from the court papers and there are no surprises there.

Despite that Cameron and his friends tried to make us think that the rioters were only ‘mindless criminals’ and not actually rioters, the facts show a different story. Two thirds of the charged came from the poorest areas of the capital and the average distance between the alleged looting and the suspects home was 2.9km*.

The demand from the top on harsh punishment trickles down the society pyramid and the New Scotland Yard Chief Bernard Hogan-Howe (a favourite candidate with the Conservatives) say that he will make criminals fear the police. This is worrying tendencies. Is it not better if the police force starts to behave in a fair and just manner instead so that people will respect them? Hard core policing is never successful because crime stem from unmet needs and appears when huge portions of society is excluded. Fear does not change that.

But sadly, instead of equality it is very clear that the Government make a difference between people and people when two former Conservative peers only had to serve a quarter of their sentence for fiddling their expenses. Why does not Mr Cameron demand the highest punishment for these rich looters as well as for the poor street looters?

I think it is time for the Government and the parliament as a whole to pay attention to the dangers of excluding people from society with their talk about deserving and undeserving people. We are all humans, none of us is more or less!

We need a loud opposition that speak out about what their politics of austerity actually means. I like to quote Daniel Dorling here to make my point clear, ‘if poor people in affluent nations believed that all human beings were alike, then it would not be possible under affluent conditions to justify the exclusion of so many from so many social norms. The majority would find it abhorrent that a large minority should be allowed to live in poverty if they saw that minority as the same sort of people as themselves**.’

The Government is driving a politics based on ideas of elitism and according to this viewpoint some people are seen as inferior. This view is based on a biological determinism that is horribly close to the eugenics of the early twentieth century.

I surely hope we will not end up with concentration camps for the race of the undeserving poor.

Vote the Conservatives out of Government!

*According to Evening Standard: 5 Sept 2001, p6.

**Daniel Dorking, p.103