Mob mentality

Watching some of the news coverage of rioting students this seems to confirm the apprehension of myself and others about what might be on the horizon over the next few years.  If the economy doesn't pick up and unemployment remains stubbornly at acutely high levels there could be a protracted period of ongoing social unrest, similar to the various strikes and riots which took place in the 1980s, except with civil servants substituting for miners.

Students, their fees, and the decommissioning or loss of funding of some academic departments are probably only a small component of what looks like quite an extensive laundry list of potential problems.

• Inflation is higher than the official target of 2%.

• Soon the VAT increase to 20% will automatically inflate most prices by an additional 2.5%. 

• Fuel prices remain at levels similar to those during the 2008 oil price spike.  There may be longer term benefits if fuel prices remain high, but in the short term when considered in conjunction with other factors it's likely to lead to further discontent.

• If upper limits are not centrally imposed then local taxes seem likely to rise, as local councils attempt to recoup some of the budget shortfalls coming from central government. 

•  Cuts in police budgets may mean that they're less able to respond to any unrest when it occurs.

• Even for those workers who havn't taken voluntary pay cuts, disposable income and the purchasing power of their pounds will relatively decrease as other costs rise, so this is bound to add inflationary pressures into the system as people seek pay rises to try to keep their living standards on an even keel.

There is probably more malaise than I've listed here, and I havn't touched on the problems of the now retiring baby boomers and their pensions, but that's enough collapsitarianism to be going on with for the moment.

So I expect more than just students to protest, and people should protest about matters of importance, but if at some time in the next few years you find yourself (in the style of the Talking Heads song Once in a Lifetime) in a mob which is becoming angry and violent and taking an unscheduled detour off the planned protest route, as the students did today, then my advice is to make a swift exit from the scene.  Avoid populist rhetoric, elaborate conspiracy theories and extremists claiming to have easy answers to complicated problems.

Also in addition to the budget deficit there's a more general democratic deficit.  This doesn't look like a situation which you can easily vote your way out of, and there's a lack of political biodiversity.  The problems we have now originate from the previous Blair/Brown administration, and looking at the photo from today of an anarchist kicking in a window - which will presumably become an iconic image from 2010 - you can trace that smashed window back to Gordon Brown's mistaken belief that the era of "boom and bust economics" was over, his failure to recognise that house prices were getting seriously out of line with average earnings and his belief in "light touch regulation" of the financial industry and the mystical "financial innovation" which turned out to be not much more than fraud, bad maths, or some arcane mixture thereof.

Neither the Conservatives nor the Liberals seem to have much by way of solutions to offer, and talk of a "Big Society" only seems like so much airy rhetoric - extremely hard to pin down to anything practical.  So there is discontent and distrust of all the mainstream political parties, compounded by the expenses scandals of 2009 and ongoing investigations into the alleged criminality of former politicians accused of stealing public money.  At this point it seems that it would be very easy for extremist elements to step in and appear to offer a way out of the impasse.