Rioters’ benefits

Over the past few nights – time that I have spent glued to facebook and BBC news – I have begun to notice more and more online petitions calling for those convicted of taking part in the rioting to loose all benefits and to be evicted from council housing.

My knee jerk response to these petitions was to vehemently agree, thinking about the distain shown by a small section of society to the state apparatus that has been so good to them and then wishing that the police carried guns.

But then, slowly and fairly reluctantly, the rational part of my brain began to wake up and, as it always does, utterly ruined my fun.

Before I begin on what would be wrong with cutting convicted rioters’ benefits, I feel the need to qualify what might otherwise be seen as an unforgivably liberal point of view: I am not for a second suggesting that cutting rioters’ benefits would not be just – I openly admit that the thought fills me with a thoroughly Victorian sense of satisfaction. What I am saying is that, despite how right it may feel, however much justice seems to warrant it, cutting rioter’s benefits would lead social disorder far worse than that seen over the past few days.

These riots were not borne of serious social problems but by the depleted numbers and confidence of the Metropolitan Police. Those who rioted were not driven to do so by deprivation or social exclusion, but by the desire for trainers and LCD TVs, and the knowledge that they could get away with it. Those who rioted had no good reason to do so, but if they are punished in the way that most people take to be just, they may well.

It is natural, given what they did, to want to push those who rioted as far away from the bosom of society as possible. In Medieval times this strategy worked fine, the wrongdoers were simply ejected from the city and left to die in the wilderness.

Today, however, where there are no city walls to keep those ejected out for good, and with a significant minority of people object to murdering undesirables, things aren’t nearly as simple.

We can push these people out of society in every other meaningful way, but geographically, they must still live amongst us. If we are prepared to cut thousands of people off from society, to leave them to turn as feral and embittered as we think they deserve, we must be equally prepared to pass them on the street everyday.

This is why cutting convicted rioters’ benefits strikes me as such a bad idea.
In an economic climate where masters graduates are struggling to find work, the effect of cutting convicted crimes’ benefits would be to force them back into criminality – this time out of necessity rather than boredom.

If you are a Daily Mail reader, read paragraph (1).
If you are a bleeding heart liberal, read paragraph (2).

(1) Of course, there is absolutely no need to conclude that convicted rioters should continue to eat up tax-payers’ money: All this demonstrates is that punishment should be an all or nothing affair. If, instead of having their benefits repealed, those convicted were to revive the death penalty, the line between not wanting to go soft on rioters and not wanting to create a criminal underclass could be easily negotiated. In fact, I think I’ll start a new petition.

(2) If anything it is the United Kingdom’s benefit system that has kept the country so stable over the past fifty years. It is far better to keep universal it and have teenagers rioting for no good reason, than to deprive thousands of it, and, in a few years time, give them cause to riot. If this all sounds horribly pragmatic, it should. After all, as Stephen Colbert wryly observes “reality has a well known liberal bias”.