So many things have changed for the better in Britain. And yet it seems that even though I am somewhat strongly disposed to give New Labour’s New Britain a New Stamp of Approval (having internally trashed it not so long ago in favour of a new life in the New South Africa), the behaviour of the New British themselves often leaves much to be desired.
True, there is an unusually friendly spirit abroad, particularly when the sun breaks through the clouds. The American New Deal culture of “the harder you smile, the harder they pay” has now become the ruling ethos in every pub and kebab house you walk into —
spurred on by the fact that the service industries to which this applies are now largely staffed by refugees from friendlier parts of the world such as Turkey and Brazil. And the British working classes who formerly fulfilled this sullen role are themselves increasingly crossbreeding into foreign cultures and behaving better as a result.
Youth culture in Britain’s big cities is taking on the aura of Hip Hop and Bhangra like there was no yesterday. And youth, of course, is where it’s at, even in the stuffy environment of big business and McDonald’s hamburger chains.
But that’s all on the surface. Or so it would seem from the evidence of what is going on in the public life of Britain’s “inner cities” – a mysterious term that was coined in the Seventies and Eighties to avoid getting bogged down in terms such as ghetto, council estate and township.
While public life and public politics devolve into Euro-culture and globalisation, the realities of life on the ground continue to revolve around racism and bear baiting. Or, at least, that’s the way it seems.
Northern Ireland is still the colony that England won’t or can’t let go of. Catholic and Protestant youths riot against each other in the streets of Belfast, fighting for territory that nobody is going to win. The British Army gets bogged down in separating them and defending a space that the English people are no longer interested in, but that its government continues to regard as high priority in something called “the national interest”. And so tribal wars rage on in this forgotten corner of northern Europe.
On the English mainland race riots rage in Oldham and Burnley in Lancashire, the former heartland of the industrial revolution that transformed England into an invincible trading nation. The workers are out of work, out of pocket and out for blood.
Bizarrely, cock-fighting is back in vogue, and there are high stakes involved in training and betting on chickens that are set against each other in secretive venues, with yelling men and boys urging them on to tear each other apart. Blood must not only be spilled, it must be seen to be spilled.
When the police raid, there is indignation at this interference in a traditional pastime beloved of the working classes. Men and boys are led away to the dungeons.
Prime Minister Tony Blair is accused of reneging on his pre-election promise to put a stop to the upper-class pursuit of fox hunting, a sport in which men and women on horseback hunt down and watch a furry red animal being torn to pieces by their hounds for no particular purpose.
Meanwhile, back in the working-class suburbs of the towns, greyhound traders are caught feeding their dogs the sex drug viagra to make them more excited as they chase a mechanical rabbit round a race track.
And then there is the terrible case of a two-year-old boy called James Bulger. Eight years ago, while his mother had a brief lapse of concentration as she fumbled for change in her handbag, the toddler wandered off into the impersonal depths of the shopping mall where they had been doing the weekend shopping, never to be seen alive again. His body was discovered many hours later, dismembered at the side of a railway track.
His killers, it transpired, were two 10-year-olds who had idly picked up the little boy and taken him on a doomed walk to nowhere, eventually battering him to death and leaving his body to be torn in two under the wheels of a suburban commuter train. They were just bored kids from poverty stricken and abusive homes in Liverpool’s dark inner city regions, amusing themselves with a new plaything for a couple of hours.
Today, as the state prepares to release them from the corrective (and protective) custody to which they were committed for the past eight years, the mob is yelling for their blood. In spite of the justice system’s painstaking attempts to give them new identities and allow them to start new lives, the two 18-year-olds are still the focus of a vicious lust for revenge, led by the unforgiving mother of James Bulger.
Can 10-year-olds be held responsible for their actions? Or is it the careless society into which they were born that should be called to account?
A hundred years ago 10-year-olds could be publicly hanged in England for stealing a sheep. The laws have changed since then, but in many quarters the hearts of men and women have not.
Archive: Previous columns by John Matshikiza