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WTF are you Brits doing to your kids? 
Every evening, at around teatime, the occupants of the small council house in the non-descript English market town of Northampton become nervous.
They are waiting for it to start.
Soon stones will be hurled at the home for hours on end. The mother, barely out of her teens herself, keeps her two disabled sons, aged four and nine, away from the windows in case they shatter. On some nights the siege continues until three or four in the morning. On others, the crowd of nine- to 16-year-olds has better things to do.
As victims go, the stone-throwers are hard to pity.
†
The UN’s first ever report on the state of childhood in the industrialized West made unpleasant reading for many of the world’s richest nations. But none found it quite so hard to swallow as the Brits, who, old jokes about English cooking aside, discovered that they were eating their own young.
According to the Unicef report, which measured 40 indicators of quality of life – including the strength of relationships with friends and family, educational achievements and personal aspirations, and exposure to drinking, drug taking and other risky behaviour – British children have the most miserable upbringing in the developed world. American children come next, second from the bottom.
The report confirmed many people’s suspicions about the “British disease,” in the process raising doubts about the Anglo-American model of progress in general. As the older but also weaker partner, Britain may well serve to warn a host of nations following closely behind on its path. While an ageing, ever more crowded Europe looks on anxiously at the stress behaviour currently being exhibited by its own dysfunctional young – be it Parisian car barbeques or riots in Denmark and Germany – our continental cousins can’t help but notice that many of these behaviours debuted in Anglo-American cultures. The report explicitly demonstrated that, at least on this side of the Atlantic, the British are trailblazers of generational instability and social deterioration. On the whole, British children were more disconnected from their families, with nearly half of 15-year-old boys spending most nights out with friends, compared to just 17 percent of their French counterparts. Forty percent of UK youth had sex before age 15, compared with 15 percent of Polish teens. They drank nearly four times as much as the Italians, and, perhaps most saliently, had the lowest sense of subjective well-being among all the youth surveyed.
But to what degree was the report accurate, and how much of it was hyperbole? The Independent’s Paul Vallely quickly dismissed it as just another tabloid chapter in the UK’s ongoing moral panic about its feral children. “Consider the hugely varied responses,” he observed, “Everyone sees in it confirmation of their pre-existing worldview. It’s an indictment of our dog-eat-dog society. It showed how the furious pace of technical and cultural change is accelerating childhood depression and behavioural problems. It confirmed how rubbish New Labour has been on eradicating poverty. It is the result of market forces pushing children to act, dress and consume like adults. It is the fault of junk food, computers and paedophiles lurking round every corner. Pick your prejudice, you can find the evidence here.”
Others were neither as sure nor as reassuring. Veteran columnist Mary Dejevksy noted that “while Labour politicians swerved frantically away from accepting the findings – variously blaming Margaret Thatcher, the subjectivity of the categories, or the supposed obsolescence of the statistics – large numbers of people across the country breathed a sigh of relief. Here was documentary support for their fears. After ten years of official assurances that things were only getting better – greater all round prosperity, less child poverty, more nurseries, fewer teenage pregnancies, and improved exam results – callers and emailers embraced the Unicef findings as an alternative truth more in line with their own experience.”
Around the nation, airtime was cleared for cathartic phone-ins, heated discussions, and a torrent of contributors that simply would not stop. As if sensing that many of the problems might in part stem from the government’s unparalleled obsession with monitoring, measuring and homogenising the very children it once sought to cherish, many former Labour advisors suddenly sought to introduce daylight between their ideas and those of the heavily surveilled nanny state. Neil Lawson of the Labour think-tank Compass bleakly admitted: “Society is hollowing out, but not just in the rotting boroughs of south London. The middle classes are anxious too. Many are richer but few seem happier. Mental illness abounds. White-collar jobs are outsourced to India. Everyone looks for meaning in their lives – but all they find is shopping.”
“The reason our children’s lives are the worst among economically advanced countries is because we are a poor version of the USA,” he said. “So the USA comes second from bottom and we follow behind. The age of neo-liberalism, even with the human face that New Labour has given it, cannot stem the tide of the social recession capitalism creates.”
Others claimed that Labour had conducted a botched experiment in social engineering through financial incentives that favored full-time work for all parents, except the super rich or the desperately deprived. Popular psychologist and Affluenza author Oliver James called on the UK to raise the status of being a parent over the status of the worker-consumer. “Being a stay at home mother has a lower one than that of a street-sweeper,” he lamented, adding that after spending a decade trying to advise the current administration, they had done almost the exact opposite of what was needed.
But what if the behaviour of broken British children is less a violent reaction to their inadequate pasts than calculated defiance against their hopeless futures? Looking ahead, demographers and sociologists have begun to map out the downward trajectory on the bell curve called “progress.” They’ve spotted trouble – the kind of trouble that may already be written in the faces of today’s teens’ older siblings. In their Class of 2005 survey, LSE economist Nick Bosanquet, along with Blair Gibbs of the independent think tank Reform, branded Britain’s under-35s the “ipod Generation” – insecure, pressured, over-taxed and debt-ridden. Warning that Britain was at a generational tipping point when it came to quality of life, they argued, “The common perception is that today’s young people have it easy. But the true position of young people is thrown into stark relief when compared to their parents . . . who enjoyed many advantages of which the younger generation can now only dream, including a generous welfare state, free universal higher education, secure pensions and a substantial rise in housing equity which has augmented their lifetime savings.”
Others have called the tripling of housing costs in under a decade the largest generational asset transfer – from young and poor to old and rich – in UK history, and it is almost certainly the key factor contributing to both the nation’s plummeting birth-rate and its record £1.2 trillion in personal debt, a figure that puts even the most voracious American consumer to shame. Debt, whether measured in a natal deficit or angry letters from the bank, is a sure sign that the good times are up, because the only way the pretence of affluence can be continued is if tomorrow’s hardship is used to pay for today’s brief consumer whims.
The first stirrings of major intergenerational conflict are already being noted. The basic rights of the recent past – a safe job, free education and healthcare, secure homes to raise a family, a modest but comfortable old age – have slipped quietly away, all to be replaced by a myriad of vapid lifestyle choices and glittery consumer trinkets. Excluded from a national social housing scheme sold off by their parents, unwilling to give birth in the UK’s draconian new system of rental accommodation which gives tenants no more than six months grace from eviction, and unable to afford homes of their own in 85 percent of the country, today’s ipod generation is stunted: trapped halfway between childhood and adulthood. It now takes them until 34, on average, before they can afford a house, let alone have a family of their own. Little surprise that they are such a woeful models of grown-up responsibility for their younger siblings to emulate. Mom and Dad aren’t much better. By blowing their children’s inheritance on 80 percent of the UK’s luxury good purchases, from suvs to cruises and antiwrinkle creams, Britain’s baby-boomers seem hell bent on ensuring that, even without coming resource shortages such as Peak Oil, their offspring will be the first generation in living memory to have a lowered standard of living.
The economic impact of baby boomers is certainly no surprise to those in the city, who have long described the boomer charge through the decades as the “pig in the pipeline.” As Channel 4’s economics correspondent Faisal Islam observed, “They embraced social liberalism, flower power and a large state when they were teenagers, and low taxes, a smaller state and loadsamoney individualism in their period of high disposable income. Then on the realisation of their own mortality, up goes spending on the health service and pensions. Fifty to 64 year-olds also have the largest carbon footprints – 20 percent bigger than other age groups – yet the climate change phenomenon will not affect them. Perhaps we are seeing the scary sight of a generation that has been rather brutal in getting its own way squeezing everything it can out of its children.”
Or, as Conservative MP David Willetts, put it: “A young person could be forgiven for believing that the way in which economic and social policy is now conducted is little less than a conspiracy by the middle-aged against the young.”
No wonder the UK is increasingly repressing its youth. As the generational divide deepens, it makes sense for the older generations to stake their claim now, while they have the power of the state on their side. Aside from handing out more than 10,000 Asbos (Antisocial Behaviour Orders, a cross between a human parking ticket and the sort of condemned notice you sometimes see on the walls of derelict buildings), the petty misanthropy that bans hoodie-wearing teenagers from shopping malls, forces parenting classes on failing single mums, and allows 79 percent of police forces to impose curfews on children, comes easily to a nation that thought up the idea that its young should be seen and not heard. But never before have we put them under this degree of surveillance while simultaneously turning a blind eye to our adult responsibilities. Satellites track their phones, marketeers groom them on cyberspace, police add the dna from 600 innocent children a week to a 50,000-sample database, while libraries fingerprint them to borrow books – all linked by rafts of new childhood databases joining the dots. In an age of hyper-individualism we are recoiling from the very children we have created. Monitoring is not enough, we must be protected from them. So Conservative leader David Cameron’s call to “hug a hoodie” was mocked, but Tony Blair won praise for ignoring compelling crime statistics and launching a “Respect agenda” to protect the societies safest members (the over-50s) from those most at risk of crime (the under-25s)
† †
In 2000, the country stood aghast upon hearing of ten-year-old Damilola Taylor, who bled to death, alone, in a public stairwell after being stabbed in the leg with a glass bottle by two boys aged 12 and 13. Fast forward through a few years of steadily rising violent crime rates, to the recent case of a 19-year-old who raped a 79-year-old grandmother, stabbed her to death and then left her body to burn on a cooker – it barely registered on the front pages. In 2005, a Reading teen’s binge-drink killing of his 14-year-old friend and a 16-year-old neighbor – one of whom had his throat cut so deeply that police first thought he’d been decapitated – was equally forgettable. Until recently, victims of crime under the age of 16 didn’t even make the official statistics.
The downward spiral of our progeny has been done to death in glorious tabloid Technicolor, but rather than dwelling on the carnage in order to understand our own part in this tragedy, we’ve instead moved to the role of cynical observer. Now we are busily examining the new life that has emerged from the wreckage: the Chav, Britain’s very own white trash. Although the label is thought to derive from “charva” – the Roma word for child – it is more frequently thought to stand for a different and altogether more lazy, cultural shorthand: “council housed and violent.” Mocked for their expanding waistlines, plummeting vocabularies, “Croydon facelift“ hairstyles, and a slavish devotion to gold jewellery and knocked-off Burberry sportswear, Chavs have become figures of chortlingly ironic ridicule by the media. But only from a distance. Because make no mistake, these most marginalised of children are neither poor nor noble savages. They throw dogs from bridges in front of trains. They beat fathers into comas to make mobile phone videos for YouTube. They are every bit as unpleasant as they are damaged.
Chavs are the foot soldiers of corporate consumerism. They wear branded kit, congregate around halls of bland consumerism – shopping centers, cinemas, fast food outlets – and target anyone who stands out. Their chief weapon is not surprise, but a volley of inarticulate abuse and violence backed up by safety in numbers. Though they suffer from a dearth of so many intangibles in their young lives, one thing they do not know is real material poverty. They own expensive sports gear, expensive mobiles, watch Murdoch satellite channels on large flatscreen TVs, and aspire to a souped-up motor with a massive stereo system. They are not so much poor as culturally and imaginatively impoverished, because the main characteristic of Chavs is not social class but an utter lack of hope.
Once upon a time it was possible to grow up with a genuine pride in being working class. As the UK’s manufacturing sector declined, that pride has all but vanished. Shiny trinkets have bought off whole sections of the working class. That Chavs seek the more crass and vulgar ostentations of material wealth is just a refection having been colonized by consumer capitalism. The Chavs are Thatcher’s revenge.
† † †
Hard as it may seem, there is one sort of youth even more demonized and legally suspicious than the Chav. In this war on terror without end, Blair’s revenge, no child is more frightening than a Muslim one. So it is unsurprising that the group at the front of the queue in Britain’s criminalization of childhood are the country’s estimated half-million Muslim youngsters of South Asian origin. In many respects they are doubly marginalized: once by the hypervigilant and distrustful authorities, who have increased stop-and-searches of South Asians by 302 percent between 2001 and 2003, compared to a 118 percent increase among whites; and again by their parents, who are reluctant to let them integrate with the all-consuming love of binge-drinking and sex that constitutes stereotypical British youth culture.
“While we loathe what happened,” human rights lawyer and cultural commentator Rajnaara Akhtar remarked shortly after the 7/7 tube bombings, “We recognize why and can comprehend the rage.” Noting that many UK-born Muslim children feel culturally distinct from both the inward-looking attitudes of their immigrant parents, and from established religious communities that “fail to recognise and relate to the challenges facing the youth,” she argued that the turn toward extremism is all too easy when “issues such as lack of integration, identity crises and their roles in this society” are left to children to decipher by themselves.
Yet this is not necessarily a simple story of spiritually ablaze, fundamentalist Muslims rebelling against British corruption and decadence. Many commentators argue that by choosing to espouse a distorted version of militant Islam unrecognisable to many first-generation communities, youth are rebelling as much against the shortcomings of their parents as the country as a whole. Just like the Chavs, these youth are torturously dislocated from the communities that raised them.
As Akhtar puts it, “When depressing social predicaments and inadequate adult guidance are coupled with the sorrow and anger arising from unjust wars and occupations, the surge of negative emotional energy is easy prey.”
The tendency towards extremism is even easier to comprehend when one considers just what exactly Muslim youth have to lose. Not much, according to the statistics: 35 percent of Muslim homes have no adults in employment, double the national average; three-quarters of Pakistani and Bangladeshi children live under the poverty line compared to just a third of children in the country overall; and 31 percent of Muslim youth leave school without any qualifications, compared to 15 percent of the total population.* Given the imbalances, perhaps we should not even be asking why a few young Muslims are turning against the society that raised them. Perhaps we should be asking why more of them haven’t already.
† † † †
Just how much more hopeless does the situation have to become before Britain’s children wake up and realise that they no longer want to be monitored, marketed and manipulated for the benefit of their elders? Is it possible to wake and warn them? Some would seem to have neither the skills nor the will to articulate their anger and isolation. If indeed they are angry. While Chavs appear to have been swallowed up by their corporate clothing, it does offer them camouflage as they haunt the benches outside McDonalds and the faceless plains of identikit retail parks that we built for them to inhabit.
As a small, densely populated island that spawned both the industrial revolution and colonialism, Britain has a lot to tell the rest of the developed world in general, and America in particular, about our common future. If the crisscrossing faultlines of greed, geopolitics and social inequality do reach a tipping point, we may well see a conflict between youthful brutality and the power of old age that will only accelerate the decline. Maybe we should hope that our young people never wake. Because, if they do, Britain may soon be no place to grow old.
They are waiting for it to start.
Soon stones will be hurled at the home for hours on end. The mother, barely out of her teens herself, keeps her two disabled sons, aged four and nine, away from the windows in case they shatter. On some nights the siege continues until three or four in the morning. On others, the crowd of nine- to 16-year-olds has better things to do.
As victims go, the stone-throwers are hard to pity.
†
The UN’s first ever report on the state of childhood in the industrialized West made unpleasant reading for many of the world’s richest nations. But none found it quite so hard to swallow as the Brits, who, old jokes about English cooking aside, discovered that they were eating their own young.
According to the Unicef report, which measured 40 indicators of quality of life – including the strength of relationships with friends and family, educational achievements and personal aspirations, and exposure to drinking, drug taking and other risky behaviour – British children have the most miserable upbringing in the developed world. American children come next, second from the bottom.
The report confirmed many people’s suspicions about the “British disease,” in the process raising doubts about the Anglo-American model of progress in general. As the older but also weaker partner, Britain may well serve to warn a host of nations following closely behind on its path. While an ageing, ever more crowded Europe looks on anxiously at the stress behaviour currently being exhibited by its own dysfunctional young – be it Parisian car barbeques or riots in Denmark and Germany – our continental cousins can’t help but notice that many of these behaviours debuted in Anglo-American cultures. The report explicitly demonstrated that, at least on this side of the Atlantic, the British are trailblazers of generational instability and social deterioration. On the whole, British children were more disconnected from their families, with nearly half of 15-year-old boys spending most nights out with friends, compared to just 17 percent of their French counterparts. Forty percent of UK youth had sex before age 15, compared with 15 percent of Polish teens. They drank nearly four times as much as the Italians, and, perhaps most saliently, had the lowest sense of subjective well-being among all the youth surveyed.
But to what degree was the report accurate, and how much of it was hyperbole? The Independent’s Paul Vallely quickly dismissed it as just another tabloid chapter in the UK’s ongoing moral panic about its feral children. “Consider the hugely varied responses,” he observed, “Everyone sees in it confirmation of their pre-existing worldview. It’s an indictment of our dog-eat-dog society. It showed how the furious pace of technical and cultural change is accelerating childhood depression and behavioural problems. It confirmed how rubbish New Labour has been on eradicating poverty. It is the result of market forces pushing children to act, dress and consume like adults. It is the fault of junk food, computers and paedophiles lurking round every corner. Pick your prejudice, you can find the evidence here.”
Others were neither as sure nor as reassuring. Veteran columnist Mary Dejevksy noted that “while Labour politicians swerved frantically away from accepting the findings – variously blaming Margaret Thatcher, the subjectivity of the categories, or the supposed obsolescence of the statistics – large numbers of people across the country breathed a sigh of relief. Here was documentary support for their fears. After ten years of official assurances that things were only getting better – greater all round prosperity, less child poverty, more nurseries, fewer teenage pregnancies, and improved exam results – callers and emailers embraced the Unicef findings as an alternative truth more in line with their own experience.”
Around the nation, airtime was cleared for cathartic phone-ins, heated discussions, and a torrent of contributors that simply would not stop. As if sensing that many of the problems might in part stem from the government’s unparalleled obsession with monitoring, measuring and homogenising the very children it once sought to cherish, many former Labour advisors suddenly sought to introduce daylight between their ideas and those of the heavily surveilled nanny state. Neil Lawson of the Labour think-tank Compass bleakly admitted: “Society is hollowing out, but not just in the rotting boroughs of south London. The middle classes are anxious too. Many are richer but few seem happier. Mental illness abounds. White-collar jobs are outsourced to India. Everyone looks for meaning in their lives – but all they find is shopping.”
“The reason our children’s lives are the worst among economically advanced countries is because we are a poor version of the USA,” he said. “So the USA comes second from bottom and we follow behind. The age of neo-liberalism, even with the human face that New Labour has given it, cannot stem the tide of the social recession capitalism creates.”
Others claimed that Labour had conducted a botched experiment in social engineering through financial incentives that favored full-time work for all parents, except the super rich or the desperately deprived. Popular psychologist and Affluenza author Oliver James called on the UK to raise the status of being a parent over the status of the worker-consumer. “Being a stay at home mother has a lower one than that of a street-sweeper,” he lamented, adding that after spending a decade trying to advise the current administration, they had done almost the exact opposite of what was needed.
But what if the behaviour of broken British children is less a violent reaction to their inadequate pasts than calculated defiance against their hopeless futures? Looking ahead, demographers and sociologists have begun to map out the downward trajectory on the bell curve called “progress.” They’ve spotted trouble – the kind of trouble that may already be written in the faces of today’s teens’ older siblings. In their Class of 2005 survey, LSE economist Nick Bosanquet, along with Blair Gibbs of the independent think tank Reform, branded Britain’s under-35s the “ipod Generation” – insecure, pressured, over-taxed and debt-ridden. Warning that Britain was at a generational tipping point when it came to quality of life, they argued, “The common perception is that today’s young people have it easy. But the true position of young people is thrown into stark relief when compared to their parents . . . who enjoyed many advantages of which the younger generation can now only dream, including a generous welfare state, free universal higher education, secure pensions and a substantial rise in housing equity which has augmented their lifetime savings.”
Others have called the tripling of housing costs in under a decade the largest generational asset transfer – from young and poor to old and rich – in UK history, and it is almost certainly the key factor contributing to both the nation’s plummeting birth-rate and its record £1.2 trillion in personal debt, a figure that puts even the most voracious American consumer to shame. Debt, whether measured in a natal deficit or angry letters from the bank, is a sure sign that the good times are up, because the only way the pretence of affluence can be continued is if tomorrow’s hardship is used to pay for today’s brief consumer whims.
The first stirrings of major intergenerational conflict are already being noted. The basic rights of the recent past – a safe job, free education and healthcare, secure homes to raise a family, a modest but comfortable old age – have slipped quietly away, all to be replaced by a myriad of vapid lifestyle choices and glittery consumer trinkets. Excluded from a national social housing scheme sold off by their parents, unwilling to give birth in the UK’s draconian new system of rental accommodation which gives tenants no more than six months grace from eviction, and unable to afford homes of their own in 85 percent of the country, today’s ipod generation is stunted: trapped halfway between childhood and adulthood. It now takes them until 34, on average, before they can afford a house, let alone have a family of their own. Little surprise that they are such a woeful models of grown-up responsibility for their younger siblings to emulate. Mom and Dad aren’t much better. By blowing their children’s inheritance on 80 percent of the UK’s luxury good purchases, from suvs to cruises and antiwrinkle creams, Britain’s baby-boomers seem hell bent on ensuring that, even without coming resource shortages such as Peak Oil, their offspring will be the first generation in living memory to have a lowered standard of living.
The economic impact of baby boomers is certainly no surprise to those in the city, who have long described the boomer charge through the decades as the “pig in the pipeline.” As Channel 4’s economics correspondent Faisal Islam observed, “They embraced social liberalism, flower power and a large state when they were teenagers, and low taxes, a smaller state and loadsamoney individualism in their period of high disposable income. Then on the realisation of their own mortality, up goes spending on the health service and pensions. Fifty to 64 year-olds also have the largest carbon footprints – 20 percent bigger than other age groups – yet the climate change phenomenon will not affect them. Perhaps we are seeing the scary sight of a generation that has been rather brutal in getting its own way squeezing everything it can out of its children.”
Or, as Conservative MP David Willetts, put it: “A young person could be forgiven for believing that the way in which economic and social policy is now conducted is little less than a conspiracy by the middle-aged against the young.”
No wonder the UK is increasingly repressing its youth. As the generational divide deepens, it makes sense for the older generations to stake their claim now, while they have the power of the state on their side. Aside from handing out more than 10,000 Asbos (Antisocial Behaviour Orders, a cross between a human parking ticket and the sort of condemned notice you sometimes see on the walls of derelict buildings), the petty misanthropy that bans hoodie-wearing teenagers from shopping malls, forces parenting classes on failing single mums, and allows 79 percent of police forces to impose curfews on children, comes easily to a nation that thought up the idea that its young should be seen and not heard. But never before have we put them under this degree of surveillance while simultaneously turning a blind eye to our adult responsibilities. Satellites track their phones, marketeers groom them on cyberspace, police add the dna from 600 innocent children a week to a 50,000-sample database, while libraries fingerprint them to borrow books – all linked by rafts of new childhood databases joining the dots. In an age of hyper-individualism we are recoiling from the very children we have created. Monitoring is not enough, we must be protected from them. So Conservative leader David Cameron’s call to “hug a hoodie” was mocked, but Tony Blair won praise for ignoring compelling crime statistics and launching a “Respect agenda” to protect the societies safest members (the over-50s) from those most at risk of crime (the under-25s)
† †
In 2000, the country stood aghast upon hearing of ten-year-old Damilola Taylor, who bled to death, alone, in a public stairwell after being stabbed in the leg with a glass bottle by two boys aged 12 and 13. Fast forward through a few years of steadily rising violent crime rates, to the recent case of a 19-year-old who raped a 79-year-old grandmother, stabbed her to death and then left her body to burn on a cooker – it barely registered on the front pages. In 2005, a Reading teen’s binge-drink killing of his 14-year-old friend and a 16-year-old neighbor – one of whom had his throat cut so deeply that police first thought he’d been decapitated – was equally forgettable. Until recently, victims of crime under the age of 16 didn’t even make the official statistics.
The downward spiral of our progeny has been done to death in glorious tabloid Technicolor, but rather than dwelling on the carnage in order to understand our own part in this tragedy, we’ve instead moved to the role of cynical observer. Now we are busily examining the new life that has emerged from the wreckage: the Chav, Britain’s very own white trash. Although the label is thought to derive from “charva” – the Roma word for child – it is more frequently thought to stand for a different and altogether more lazy, cultural shorthand: “council housed and violent.” Mocked for their expanding waistlines, plummeting vocabularies, “Croydon facelift“ hairstyles, and a slavish devotion to gold jewellery and knocked-off Burberry sportswear, Chavs have become figures of chortlingly ironic ridicule by the media. But only from a distance. Because make no mistake, these most marginalised of children are neither poor nor noble savages. They throw dogs from bridges in front of trains. They beat fathers into comas to make mobile phone videos for YouTube. They are every bit as unpleasant as they are damaged.
Chavs are the foot soldiers of corporate consumerism. They wear branded kit, congregate around halls of bland consumerism – shopping centers, cinemas, fast food outlets – and target anyone who stands out. Their chief weapon is not surprise, but a volley of inarticulate abuse and violence backed up by safety in numbers. Though they suffer from a dearth of so many intangibles in their young lives, one thing they do not know is real material poverty. They own expensive sports gear, expensive mobiles, watch Murdoch satellite channels on large flatscreen TVs, and aspire to a souped-up motor with a massive stereo system. They are not so much poor as culturally and imaginatively impoverished, because the main characteristic of Chavs is not social class but an utter lack of hope.
Once upon a time it was possible to grow up with a genuine pride in being working class. As the UK’s manufacturing sector declined, that pride has all but vanished. Shiny trinkets have bought off whole sections of the working class. That Chavs seek the more crass and vulgar ostentations of material wealth is just a refection having been colonized by consumer capitalism. The Chavs are Thatcher’s revenge.
† † †
Hard as it may seem, there is one sort of youth even more demonized and legally suspicious than the Chav. In this war on terror without end, Blair’s revenge, no child is more frightening than a Muslim one. So it is unsurprising that the group at the front of the queue in Britain’s criminalization of childhood are the country’s estimated half-million Muslim youngsters of South Asian origin. In many respects they are doubly marginalized: once by the hypervigilant and distrustful authorities, who have increased stop-and-searches of South Asians by 302 percent between 2001 and 2003, compared to a 118 percent increase among whites; and again by their parents, who are reluctant to let them integrate with the all-consuming love of binge-drinking and sex that constitutes stereotypical British youth culture.
“While we loathe what happened,” human rights lawyer and cultural commentator Rajnaara Akhtar remarked shortly after the 7/7 tube bombings, “We recognize why and can comprehend the rage.” Noting that many UK-born Muslim children feel culturally distinct from both the inward-looking attitudes of their immigrant parents, and from established religious communities that “fail to recognise and relate to the challenges facing the youth,” she argued that the turn toward extremism is all too easy when “issues such as lack of integration, identity crises and their roles in this society” are left to children to decipher by themselves.
Yet this is not necessarily a simple story of spiritually ablaze, fundamentalist Muslims rebelling against British corruption and decadence. Many commentators argue that by choosing to espouse a distorted version of militant Islam unrecognisable to many first-generation communities, youth are rebelling as much against the shortcomings of their parents as the country as a whole. Just like the Chavs, these youth are torturously dislocated from the communities that raised them.
As Akhtar puts it, “When depressing social predicaments and inadequate adult guidance are coupled with the sorrow and anger arising from unjust wars and occupations, the surge of negative emotional energy is easy prey.”
The tendency towards extremism is even easier to comprehend when one considers just what exactly Muslim youth have to lose. Not much, according to the statistics: 35 percent of Muslim homes have no adults in employment, double the national average; three-quarters of Pakistani and Bangladeshi children live under the poverty line compared to just a third of children in the country overall; and 31 percent of Muslim youth leave school without any qualifications, compared to 15 percent of the total population.* Given the imbalances, perhaps we should not even be asking why a few young Muslims are turning against the society that raised them. Perhaps we should be asking why more of them haven’t already.
† † † †
Just how much more hopeless does the situation have to become before Britain’s children wake up and realise that they no longer want to be monitored, marketed and manipulated for the benefit of their elders? Is it possible to wake and warn them? Some would seem to have neither the skills nor the will to articulate their anger and isolation. If indeed they are angry. While Chavs appear to have been swallowed up by their corporate clothing, it does offer them camouflage as they haunt the benches outside McDonalds and the faceless plains of identikit retail parks that we built for them to inhabit.
As a small, densely populated island that spawned both the industrial revolution and colonialism, Britain has a lot to tell the rest of the developed world in general, and America in particular, about our common future. If the crisscrossing faultlines of greed, geopolitics and social inequality do reach a tipping point, we may well see a conflict between youthful brutality and the power of old age that will only accelerate the decline. Maybe we should hope that our young people never wake. Because, if they do, Britain may soon be no place to grow old.
Quite hilarious - wonder what kind of funny mushrooms the author is chewing.
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