LONDON/ Blond: There are two enemies that are destroying Britain

venerdì 12 agosto 2011

“The riots were caused by two enemies: left libertarianism, which destroyed social and family ties, and right libertarianism, which squeezed most workers out of prosperity”, Phillip Blond, political thinker and Anglican theologian, advisor to Prime Minister David Cameron, explains after the protests that left a 26 year old Englishman dead. According to Blond, “the protests have nothing to do with politics. They are organized gangs of thieves who grew up in the mentality that every desire is a right, the government is the only thing that can guarantee well-being, and multiculturalism is a dogma”.

What are the reasons behind these riots that now are no longer sporadic?
I believe the cause of the riots is essentially liberalism in the form of libertarianism, both left libertarianism and right libertarianism. The left libertarianism came first and essentially   denounced human relationships. It broke up the extended family, repudiated the nuclear family and separated children from parents such that the state became the main guardian of people rather than people. As a result, it created a whole class that was based on one-way entitlement rights rather than mutual rights and responsibilities. As such, a whole class developed of subsidized output and this subsidized output pursued its own agenda regardless of anyone else’s and it led to its own privatized world where whatever it wished for is what it thought it should have.

That led to a form of libertarianism on the right that produced a form of neo-liberalism that only helped those at the top of society and, increasingly, ordinary wage earners and ordinary working people were squeezed out of prosperity, wealth and advance. We’ve created a whole new generation of serfs who are waited on enough to maintain living standards and people have to go to the state for middle class welfare. Once we cut off the paths to ownership and opportunity, what we’ve actually done is we’ve created a world where the free market produces monopoly and oligopoly. As a result, we’ve produced a cartel capitalism and a state that denies people ownership and opportunity.

Tony Travers of the London School of Economics stated that the Big Society is burning in the bonfires of the ghettos. What do you think about this?
The Big Society hasn’t even got off the ground yet. A lot of the legislation for it hasn’t even passed through Parliament. What we’ve seen in Britain’s cities is the “broken society”. The only response to the broken society has to be a form of the Big Society. If anything, this makes the Big Society more important than ever and more vital to get right and to initiate because, otherwise, we will have no response to this.

Why do you think that Cameron has been unable to stop the riots?

What we have seen in these riots is not the product of this government. I do not see how any reasonable person can say that. It is the product of the last eighteen to twenty years and of both the right and the left for the reasons I spoke of earlier. I am not sure that Cameron could have stopped the riots if he was in the country or if he was anywhere else. The point is that these things have happened, and they are not protest riots, but organized thievery. They are low level criminal gangs who are using new technology to create mobs and steal and rob. That is how we should approach it. They are a national security issue and we need to deal with it very severely indeed.

The Big Society gives much importance to the neighborhood. Does this risk increasing the fragmentation of the ghettos?
You are quite right that the neighborhood is key, but multiculturalism was what led to separate development and the idea that communities could be apart from society and doing their own things. The current situation is the consequence of letting them do their own thing. We have a very nice and charming community of thieves, robbers and violent muggers developing separately from us. That is a multicultural approach, and see what that leads to. We need neighborhoods where everyone is engaged, where we can create new norms and new common standards that bind everybody in. The lesson from this is that liberalism from the left and right have failed and we need a new sense of morality and community and we need to bind that to people using human relationships.

Were the riots influenced by the fear of the spending cuts and the economic policies announced by Cameron?
I think that the riots have nothing whatever to do with the cuts. I think that most of the rioters have a very marginal awareness of politics. The rioters are a product of an entitlement culture and a choice culture with no values and no basis. The rioting is a result of generalized entitlement and low level violence that feels it can rob on a new mass scale. It is not about politics at all.

In Italy, there are a lot of social groups connected to the Catholic Church. Could the lack of these groups in England be one of the causes of the riots?
Yes, I think that when you lose intermediate groups, you lose communities and relationships and that leads to a fragmented society and a very strong centralized state. I think it is imperative that the Church moves into the foreground and starts to create the type of Catholic associations that Italy has done so well with. We have a lot to learn from the role of the Church in Italy.

In a time when the “British Empire” has lost its role as a social landmark, what can drive the integration of the immigrants?

First, Britain remains a world culture of global importance and influence. Our law, our universities and our institutions, particularly our Parliament with its mixed constitution, have global relevance and resonance, and therefore I think that Britain, if it can broker a new relationship with Europe, could actually have a new global sphere of influence. Regarding immigrants, I think that liberalism and multiculturalism have denied us access to our own history. British identity has never been racial, has never been about blood and it has never been ethnic . It has always been civil. In a way, Britain is the European inheritor of Rome for exactly that reason and that is why we have such a good record in terms of race. We had the highest degrees of integration, but multiculturalism aborted that. What we have to do now is create a new identity and build shared values and beliefs in a restoration of British identity.

Do you think that one of the problems could be that the Anglican Church has lost its public role in society?
I think that is one definitely one of the problems. I think the churches need to take on a much stronger public role. I am arguing this and people are agreeing, but these developments take time. However, I am confident that they will happen.

How can the Big Society act to respond to the economic crisis, multiculturalism and the difficulties created by immigration?
I think that the Big Society is the format to deal with those things. For integration, we need a new strong sense of Britishness and British values. In economics, we need much more localized economic development and we need to learn again from what the Italians have done in Lombardy. We need to create a whole new network of small and medium sized businesses, and I think that then we can begin to address what has gone wrong.

How can Cameron stop the riots now?
I think we need a very strong police response. I think we should actually capture all of the people doing the rioting, rather than just standing by, letting them riot, and taking one or two of them. Long-term, we need to tackle the problems of low level criminality and violence. We have been policing only to the middle class. We have abandoned poor areas, and we need policing for the poor, allied with structures and institutions that can provide people with a pathway out of where they are.

Has there been a positive response from English people even in the midst of the riots?
Yes, I think it has been very positive in a large number of ways if you look at the number of people who came out to clean their own areas, hundreds of thousands of people in a mass Big Society response. It was marvelous.  I think we are beginning to see the awakening of the community spirit. The community had been held ransom by a very small group of violent offenders and I think they are realizing that individualism is not enough and individuals cannot defend people.



(Pietro Vernizzi)

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