| notes from a disgruntled anarchist by Penny Rimbaud
TALKING GUNS?
‘making Hackney a safer place’
So the Old Bill are tooled-up up to the nines and the streets they patrol are dotted with surveillance cameras, there’s hooded muggers on every shady corner and dirty dealers doing dirty deals down the alley.
The security gates are rattling, the back door’s being axed, and while the poodle tears at its leash, granny’s hiding in the cupboard alongside a stash of Ideal Home back-issues. Meanwhile, we’re being told by simpering politicians that the current fashion for guns is something to do with bad fathering. Not too much is blamed on bad schooling, bad housing, bad employment and bad social services in the economically and culturally deprived areas of London where the fashion is at its height (South, East, North, in fact just about everywhere but Westminster and Kensington) because, to put it simply, these are all things which could be remedied if politicians and their corporate overlords had the mind for it. Clearly then, crucial within all this is the subject of bad drugs. But what, you might ask, are bad drugs? Put crudely, bad drugs are those that you want or need but can’t afford. While the Kings Road glitterati comfortably snort away their burgeoning bank balances with little to fear but the intrusions of gloating paparazzi, impoverished kids on the street either get locked away or blown away for suffering the same habits, and never mind when they last saw their fathers.
Now we all know that the model English father is comfortably white, comfortably established in his nuclear family, comfortably housed (probably in mock-Tudor Buckinghamshire), comfortably employed (as a salaried professional) and comfortably protected by the State’s interests, those being the maintenance of the status quo of which he is, of course, comfortably a part. We also know that he’s probably got a comfortable G&T habit which will harm no one but the hapless victims of largely unreported drink’n’drive deaths which far outnumber the gleefully reported killings committed by youthful street gangs, but whereas he’ll literally get away with murder, the kids on the street will get life; after all, you pays your money, and that’s the rub. With so many people being forced below the breadline, what the hell else do we expect?
Having so wholeheartedly embraced American-style meritocracy, Blair’s Britain has consolidated the cruel divide between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’ which the Welfare State once stood to protect us from. Basically, meritocracy states that if you fail in life you’ve no one but yourself to blame: after all, even you could be the President of the USA. I recall a TV documentary in which those who were most benefiting through Thatcher’s economic revolution were given the opportunity to publicly sing her praises: stockbrokers, speculators, shareholders, property developers, entrepreneurs. Grabbers and takers all. The last interview was with a couple of masked teenagers who unashamedly justified mugging and burglary on the grounds that if the grabbers and takers could do it, why shouldn’t they? The horrible truth is that they had a good point. Now fast forward to today. While the guns roar in Baghdad to ensure that the ‘haves’ can continue to drive their four-wheeled aberrations through the comfortable leafy lanes of dreamy Olde England, the ‘have nots’ are involved in shoot-outs on the litter-strewn streets of the inner-cities. Like Mr Punch says, as he beats his wife to death, ‘that’s the way to do it’. And that’s the pattern being set by that other puppet extraordinaire, Tony Blair. The daily brutalities committed in Iraq in his (and our) name have been incorporated into our lives and have poisoned our cultural psyche. They have, in short, made violence and greed de rigueur.
When the State is on the attack, they’re fond of using the word ‘defence’ (particularly when coupled with ‘democracy’). They used it for Northern Ireland and they’re using it for Iraq. It’s the same kind of screwed-up double-speak that’s reeled out to justify almost every vicious street attack: ‘I did it in self-defence, guv’. When I was a kid, the Old Bill were kitted with truncheons and manners, and the criminal classes (excluding the Krays) with coshes and attitude. There was, as John Cage might have said, a balance. In those pre-Thatcherite days you could tell the difference between the army and police by the colour of the uniform, but ever since the Miners’ Strike of 1984, the khaki and blue have merged. As any political activist will tell you, the police (the ones in blue wearing ID) are increasingly employed as State operatives on State offensives working hand in hand with the army (the ones in blue wearing no ID). So here’s a tip: whereas the ones with ID might give you the time of day before gunning you down, the ones without are trained to be killing machines, so don’t run or you may become a statistic.
Few people seem to be aware that citizens of the USA were constitutionally granted the right to carry guns for the sole reason that they should then be in the position to protect themselves from an oppressive State. In that respect, and given George Bush’s singularly oppressive regime, you could reasonably argue that they’ve failed, but it’s a nice idea nonetheless. If the two million citizens who marched through the London streets in protest against the Bush/Blair invasion of Iraq (amongst whom there was an unusually large, comfortable Middle England contingency) had been ‘tooled-up’, what a different story it might have been. In all probability another blood-bath, but one that would have occurred here rather than in the Middle East. Nimby or what? |
