Just remember: you’re all in this together

Britain: a place where people born into wealth
and privilege can rise into even more wealth and privilege

Learning disabilities, terminal illness and cancer? Sounds like you need to be getting ready for work, you little slacker.

Isn’t it annoying when you hear about workshy shirkers loafing around on sickness benefit when they could be filling call-centres and Primark store-rooms? Take twenty seven year old Ruth Anim, who apparently “can’t work” just because she needs a “one-to-one carer” and has such severe learning disabilities she can’t even cross a road. Since when did a terminal illness stop anyone manning the phones at Claims Direct? Are we going to let so-called ‘cancer sufferers’ lie around enjoying their chemo when they could be made to do low-paid shifts for big companies?

Another lazy good-for-nothing avoiding work

It annoys the government at any rate, who are busily turfing mountains of the idle sick onto jobseeker’s allowance with a secret weapon known as its ‘Work Capability Assessment’ (actually a New Labour baby, for the record). Because this is a party which believes in helping yourself. More of these claimants need to follow the example of Stephen Hill, who was successfully forced by the government back into work – so successfully, in fact, that he keeled over from a heart attack 39 days later. Now that’s the kind of determination everyone’s looking for! Just look at the Cabinet itself, which is full of inspiring examples of riches-to-riches. Did they just sit there lying around waiting for somebody else to make it happen? No: they pulled their finger out, gritted their teeth, and inherited substantial sums of money. And if they can do it, so can’t you.

Let’s face it, austerity has to be borne equally, which is why the hugely wealthy  families and friends of the Cabinet are committed to not bearing much of it. In fact the rich have fascinatingly novel approaches to taxation – which revolve around a complex Economics concept known as ‘not paying any’. Not that any of this ‘tax avoidance’ could be called ‘tax avoidance’ or anything dirty like that. It’s just a different way of working. Thinking outside the box, if you like. Currently the wealthy are thinking so far outside the box on the issue of tax that they’ve actually flown the box to an offshore haven, probably via private jet.

Cameron's pad: just like you and me, really

Top Shop owner Philip Green, for example, was so excitingly progressive in his approach to tax on his dividend of £1.2 billion (the biggest pay check in British corporate history) that he channelled it, excitingly and progressively, straight to his wife in Barbados, without paying a single penny – a £285m loss to the taxpayer. David Cameron was so impressed  he made him a senior consultant to the government.  

Of course you could say that it’s sickening to watch a Tory cabinet born into enormous privilege attack sick people for not having the energy to work in a call centre sweatshop twelve hours a day. You could say that all this is a cynical and predatory attack on the most defenceless in society from those who wield huge amounts of power, thinly disguised beneath a veneer of hard work and entrepreneurialism. Because ‘austerity’ is a magic word that’s full of magical surprises, and one of the most surprising of all is that it means something completely different when it comes to ordinary people – who instead face an exciting new era of falling wages and benefits cuts, while the government does everything it possibly can to protect its cabal of landed gentry, Royals, bankers, media moguls and fox hunting visitors from the nineteenth century from the tiniest bit of financial pain.

All of which raises a new possibility for trying something radical. You listening? Okay. Developed by economists and tested a little bit in places like Scandinavia, this drastic and untested measure is known by economists as ‘taxing the rich’, and could, if done gently, do some amazing things. Michael Meacher, Labour MP for Oldham West and Royton, has pointed out that the wealthiest 1,000 persons (just 0.003% of the adult population) in Britain possess ‘enough for themselves alone to pay off the entire current UK budget deficit and still leave them with £30 billion to spare.’ Luckily our own beloved Tory government is unlikely to listen to such crackpot ideas! So let’s get back to hounding those terminally ill, learning difficulties, heart-problem loafers into underpaid jobs, in the hope that it might raise a few pence here and there. That’s thinking out of the box – carry on like that and there’s a good chance some of these people might end up in one.

Dale gets arrested

‘We’ve got to process you along with the other criminals,’ the officer explained as she led me into the police station, suppressing a yawn. ‘Then we’ll see what happens.’

          Other criminals? I bristled at the inference. "Processed?"

          Life is an astonishing journey of discovery, I’ve always said, and one of the most astonishing discoveries of all is that the police can take your fingerprints, biometric and DNA data and sling you in a cell, simply because – as in my case – you obviously look a bit like a criminal. Who needs ‘evidence’ in these times of institutional efficiency? All you have to do is sit in Starbucks until one of the staff mistakes you for the bloke who stole her iPhone – they’ll be delighted to throw you in a cell for the evening until they get round to watching the CCTV tapes. Protect and serve...

          The interior of a central London police station is a lot less exciting than I’d imagined it to be. I’d grown up on films where every police headquarters was a heaving pit of thieves and hookers and pushers. Holborn Central felt less a buzzing hub of crime-fighting activity and more like the place you go to sign for a parcel: a few uniforms standing around, a bored sergeant, silent figures melting into plastic chairs. For a moment I wasn’t entirely sure whether I was being arrested or coming in to make an inquiry about my tax status.

          ‘Sarge,’ my office said, as he led me toward the desk where a silver-haired bloke of about fifty stood behind a computer. The sarge glanced at me.

          ‘Charge?’ he asked bureaucratically, in a voice smeared in the east end.

          ´Shoplifting.’
           He looked me up and down. Then he clicked a button on his mouse and glanced at me with an astonishingly profound boredom.

          ‘Can you step forward to the desk, please.'

All the questions you’d expect: name, age, and so on. ‘Are you on any drugs?’ he asked me at the end of the interview. Don’t I wish... How did I feel? Scared, apprehensive... What if they did something to me? What defence did I have in here? They removed my handcuffs and I was led by a burly bloke to another area for the photo shoot and finger scans, which took place in a bare looking little booth with a lens and a computer screen: Snappy Snaps run by a creaking dictatorship. We did a few headshots of me, as I amused myself by providing imaginary replacement dialog in my head (‘Perfect, darling – now just one more to bring out my eyes’) and then he took hold of my hand and placed it down on a pressure pad.

          It wasn’t working properly.

          He swore under his breath as it buzzed an Error message, like we’d got the question wrong in a gameshow.

‘Do you want a solicitor?’

I blinked. I was back at the desk with the sarge, who was processing me with deep indifference, like a prompter reading lines of dialogue from a play.

          ‘But I haven’t done anything,’ I pointed out.

          ‘That’s not what I asked you. You just have to decide whether you want legal aid.’

          Legal aid?

          He sighed. ‘Don’t worry about the bloody films,’ he added, wearily. ‘It isn’t an admission of guilt.’

          More questions followed. It was like we were polite strangers trapped in some awful, surreal role-play, where they were compelled by convention to exchange a few pleasantries, chat to me for a while, then lock me in a windowless room and ruin my future visa applications. And then slip a glove on and force their fingers down my throat.

The smile on the sergeant’s face suddenly vanished.

          ‘At this stage,’ he said, ‘I’m obliged to inform you that we have the legal right to take your DNA.’

          ‘...What?’

One of the cops was slipping on a pair of disposable rubber gloves,

They wanted me on disc. They had my face and my fingers. They wanted my soul.  

          ‘... Really?’ I said. I felt a bit sick.

‘Uh huh.’

          The guy picked a cotton swab from a pack, and slipped it out of its cellophane.

          ‘Step forward, please.’

          ‘Open wide,’ he said, as if he was going to make aeroplane noises while he flew a spoon into my mouth.

Half wanting to throw up, and half wanting to cry, I opened up and the other cop inserted the cotton swab into my mouth. He scraped the swab around my tonsils for a few moments, took it out, and slipped off the gloves. I gazed into space. I felt, in some way, like I’d been assaulted. 

          It took them another three hours to get around to watching the CCTV tape.
          ‘I can’t believe they would do that,’ my student said later, when they got around to watching the CCTV and decided, in a relaxed kind of way, that they should probably let me go free immediately. ‘In my country that could just not happen.’

          ‘Really?’ I asked, with raised eyebrows.

          ‘In Colombia, the police cannot just lock you up just because you look like a criminal. We have rights.’

          After they'd watched the tape and realised that the iPhone thief in it looked nothing like me, to their credit, the police - without a hint of an apology - let me go. But not before I'd spent several hours in a cell with nothing but my own gloomy thoughts for company. Not without keeping my DNA on record. My student may have been right: perhaps it's not fair to lock people up on an idle suspicion, to enact invasive procedures on their bodies. But while I was having a cotton wool swab shoved into my mouth, I wasn’t thinking about rights or wrongs. I was thinking about the taste of it: bland, sceptic, laced by the plastic of his glove. Whatever liberals like me might say, it’s hard not to be at least a little bit impressed by authority when it’s got its fingers down your throat. 

After Armageddon only the spam will live on

Linked up and plugged in: the wonders of the networked society

Forget nuclear war, just let the inboxes battle it out

There’s a thought experiment philosophers have posed called the Free Speech Booth. The hypothesis is this: to quell international concerns that it’s suppressing the right to free expression, a fascist dictatorship establishes small, sound-proof cubicles where citizens can rant as much seditious material as they like – provided that nobody ever hears them. Screaming in a vacuum, if you like. 

            I don’t know the consequences of this particular thought experiment, but I do know that ‘screaming in a vacuum’ sounds remarkably similar to my experience of setting up this “blog” a few years ago to promote myself as a writer. My “blog” – a stunningly successful experiment in national secrecy – was located several thousand miles up a winding gorge in the outer reaches of the internet and had all the virtual footfall of a moon crater in low season. You could have quite happily kept a few nuclear weapons codes there if you’d liked. In fact I was surprised MI5 never asked me.

‘You have to leave it for a while,’ a friend recommended. ‘You’ve got to sort of work at building up traffic.’

I did. I held my breath and counted to fifty. Then I sneaked back to see if anybody had looked at it.

You know that bit in The Blair Witch Project where the helpless kids finally stagger upon a hellish concrete bunker, hidden in a hillside a million miles from anywhere? Well, my blog page felt a bit like that: virtual door hanging off by its hinges; broken windows creaking in the wind; the occasional hyena calling out across the darkening plain.

Number of new visitors: zero.

It doesn’t take a genius to point out that the web is prone to oversaturation, that the problem with a medium where anyone can broadcast their thoughts to the entire planet is that you get, effectively, an entire planet attempting to broadcast their thoughts to the entire planet. It doesn’t take a genius to point out that this effectively is a form of censorship. Once upon a time dissident thought was buried beneath political repression. Now it’s buried away beneath three thousand other search results. It’s not the Gulag Archipelago, it’s the Google Archipelago. As a political mouthpiece, my blog carried roughly the same weight of free expression as would be achieved if I’d stood on an upside-down bucket beside a motorway junction and performed expressive dance to truck drivers as they roared past.

And yet people still ask.

‘Have you got a blog?’ 

            ‘Sort of,’ I reply.

            ‘You need to have a blog, Dale,’ they’ll tell me, cheerfully, as if to suggest that Dostoyevsky might have made a half decent writer if only he’d had a blog.

The weird thing is that I actually do have one now, relaunching myself onto the ‘scene’ with www.thetravellingsarcastic.blogspot.co.uk, a cheery road trip around Britain with all the feel-good factor of a smack in the face and a nine hour wait at Watford services. And, yes, I've bragged about my blog. Or rather blogged about my blog. But at least I have the decency to loathe myself for it. Ultimately I'm just another creative-on-the-make striding around with a virtual megaphone broadcasting my output, lost in a relentless spew of glib self-promotion. But this is what the web does to us. Here, for example, is the latest email from a former friend of mine who despite requests to stop, repeatedly spams me about his astonishingly rubbish “comedy” projects:

Hi there    Dale!!!

            What are you doing tonight? Staying in? NO!!! Tonight I'm part of a superb improv team the Googly Gumdrops A “riotously dangerous improv comedy” when two mighty teams of warriors take to the stage to prove!!!!!!!!! Come along and let yourself in for a crazy night of Ticket £7  http://www.ticketweb.co.uk/user/ fun and hilarious chaos as £6 concessions ?region=gb_london&query=detail&...

I contemplated the email in fascination, trying to work out just how much lower I’d have to sink to want to pay six pounds to watch someone almost as unfunny as I am performing to silence and embarrassed coughs in front of a nearly empty audience. Kidney dialysis? Evening in intensive care with a stomach pump for company?
Still, maybe it's just a new way of life. Middle class creative wannabes don’t scam one another, they spam one another. Every time my friend organises another rubbish comedy night his automated server spams my automated server – which has been set to deliver his endless messages straight to my bin. Conversely, whenever I send out rubbish bits of writing such as this one, my automated server spams his automated server, which, I assume, has been set to deliver my message straight to his bin. It occurs to me that this is a bold new vision of communication in the future: no actual conversation, just spam chasing spam. Let the recycle bins sort it all out.  

So, to get back to the beginning, I know all about the Free Speech Booth. In fact these days I pretty much am the Free Speech Booth: a human sized quarantine zone. If political philosophers really want to establish a sound-proof bubble for people to scream out their thoughts while utterly ignored by everybody else, they don’t need to cast around for an underground Samizdat – they just need to start a blog on Wordpress. And then email a link to it to all their friends. There’s so much Free Speech around nobody’ll ever even notice they’re there. 

The Olympics from Half a Mile Away

The joys of the Olympic experience, Newham style

Go Home and Switch on BBC1

I’m no longer a resident of Newham, but I role-played at being one on Sunday night when I was lucky enough to watch the Olympics Closing ceremony from the ‘executive’ vantage point of a crap bit of road near the Bow flyover where a few people were squinting into the distance at the fireworks going off over the stadium. Why did I watch it from there? Well, strangely enough, because there wasn’t really anywhere else to watch it. Sure, there was a park nearby where if you turned up early you could watch it on a screen. Sure, there were several more places around the city where you could watch it on a screen. But if you were right there in Newham without a ticket and not famous at the close of the Olympics, the one thing they didn’t want you to do was watch the closing of the Olympics. Not even on a screen.

            ‘You will not be able to see the end of the Olympics on this screen,’ the steward in the redcoat boomed out to crowds, beneath the shadow of the giant M&S logo on the shopping mall. ‘Anyone wanting to watch the end of the Olympics has to go elsewhere.’

            Evidently the screen had better things to show the residents of Stratford the ceremonies taking place in the gigantic spaceship of a stadium just beyond the Yo! Sushi. Right now the screen was serving the viewing needs of the local community by depicting a spinning Powerade bottle.

‘Hydrating the Athletes!’ it boasted. 

Despite the fact that pretty much all you could do at the gates to the Olympic Park at Stratford was turn up in order to be told to go home again, a surprisingly large number of people had turned up in order to be told to go home again. Primary-coloured crowds swished around beneath the weird fifty foot steel tree sculptures, crashing against the human barriers. Servicemen in yellow coats chatted and cadged fags. An Islamic march, chaperoned by police, was protesting the evils of modern society. Beside them a Christian group, banging on drums, was protesting the evils of modern society. Everybody else seemed to be too busy getting on with enjoying the evils of modern society to listen.

‘Gillette!’ it beamed on the side of a nearby towerblock. ‘Nothing beats a great start.’

A millenarian feel was in the air: people were massing, shouting, protesting, chanting, advertising. I spotted a bunch of guys walking around with the words Is Life Just a Game? emblazoned on their yellow T-Shirts. I went over there expecting a Playstation promotion. It turned out to a Muslim community group from Tower Hamlets attempting to convert me to the Qu’ran.

‘Check out the website,’ he said.

‘Yeah, I’ll... Thanks.’

‘There’s a lot more information on the website.’

More and more people were massing at the gate. ‘Please go home,’ one of the stewards - a young Asian guy, east London to judge from his accent - boomed through his loudspeaker. ‘If you want to watch the closing ceremony, go home and switch on BBC1.’

He intoned the words wearily as if he thought his soul might actually collapse if he had to repeat it one more time. I felt a pang of sympathy for the wage-slave, as well as his colleagues forming a wobbly human wall behind him. They were actually a surprisingly slack bunch themselves: big bouncer-like Poles in security jackets, gum-chewing young women, crew-cuts in shades examining mobiles. Behind them a platoon of bored cops behind them standing around arms folded, checking texts, yawning into fists.

The guys attempting to convert people to the Qu’ran were now taking cameraphone snaps of each other.

‘What does God mean to you?’ someone kept saying. ‘What does he mean to you?’

‘Good people of Stratford,’ another steward was saying through the megaphone, trying to keep the boredom out of their voice, ‘it will be in your interests to disperse. You can watch the ceremony live on your TV.’ The loudspeakers of the religious converts were beginning to sound a lot like the loudspeakers of the security staff.

A couple of white uniformed soldiers were now posing for a picture with the Muslim community group. One of the guys held up a copy of the Qu’ran to make sure it made it into the photo.

I wandered into Stratford itself, the formerly run-down corner of Newham which, since the games came, had magically transformed itself into a run-down corner of Newham with a big stadium beside it. I’d heard a lot about the regeneration legacy – most of which seemed to involve building a huge motorway bordered by Tetris cubes with incredibly expensive flats inside them – and evidently it was paying off: even at 10pm the local Poundland was doing a roaring trade, and the Burger King, McDonald’s and kebab shops were packed to bursting. I tried to get into a park to watch the ceremony on the big TV screen, but was told it was already full of people trying to watch the ceremony on the big TV screen. Wandering down the street I gazed up at the glazed cliff wall of one of the new Tetris apartment blocks, the flats still furnitureless, empty. Giant TO LET signs glue pasted on to the side.

‘Thank you for visiting Newham London,’ a sign beamed. ‘A place where people choose to live, work and stay.’         

In the distance, floodlit orange and purple smoke drifted out through the laserlights. I took that to mean the ceremony had probably finished.

As I cut back towards the gates people were flooding out, the crowds swirled, and the stewards with the megaphones were looking relieved they no longer had to tell anyone to go home and watch it on BBC1. I had to admit there was something jubilant about the scene: drunks staggering around, stewards exchanging phone numbers, religious crazies proclaiming the end of society. I watched the LOCOG redcoats laughing and joking together. They looked more like a staff get-together at Carphone Warehouse than a security force. Say what you like about Group Four, it was sort of nice to know the people employed to keep you out of the biggest public project in recent British history were as unimportant as you.

As I headed towards the station I passed the Christian group banging on drums, still protesting the evils of modern society beneath the glow of the giant M&S logo. A couple of them had evidently got a bit tired and were sharing a fag. I noticed one of them take a swig of Diet Pepsi before picking up her Christ is Redeemed sign and joining in with the singing...

... Then I entered the seething tube terminus where a big mural showed happy, sporty people of all colours peacefully co-existing beside an advertisement for Lloyds TSB.

Call yourself a hypocrite? Rubbish. Real hypocrisy takes work and commitment

Call yourself a hypocrite? Rubbish. Real hypocrisy takes work and commitment

                   Perhaps you occasionally contradict yourself. Maybe you tell others not to do something and then find yourself doing the very same thing. Call yourself a hypocrite? Sorry, but you’re not even off the starting line. 

          I've worked long and hard at my hypocrisy. I’ll sit in Starbucks skimming through lefty opinion pieces about the evils of multinationals. I’ll wax lyrical about the ‘common person’ and grit my teeth when I have to share a bus with a load of them. I’ll go to trendy cafes and imagine machine-gunning the poseurs I see tapping out imaginary novels onto laptops, then get out my own laptop and turn it into a scene for my imaginary novel. I’ll get indignant about the ‘voice of the working class’ being ignored in modern society, and then get equally uncomfortable when the voice of the working class votes for the EDL.

Being a hypocrite isn't just about contradicting yourself. There's a richly creative art involved, a sort of theatricality to it. Why not undermine another person while you're doing it? It's easy, and I do it all the time. I’ll stumble on a new word (like ‘crepuscularity’, for example) and then immediately make sure I make anyone who doesn’t know it feel as stupid as I can.

‘It’s got a high level of crepuscularity, doesn’t it,’ I’ll say, casually slipping it in to conversation and then watching their eyes carefully for confusion.

‘Sorry?’

‘Oh…’ I’ll say, with a flash of astonished sympathy, ‘…You don’t know what crepuscularity means?’

At this stage I’ll give them a patronising look that’s calculated to suggest, in the nicest possible way, that anyone who doesn't know what crepuscularity means should probably think about going to live in a cave or having a part of their brain removed. It takes a lot of effort to become as big an arsehole as me.

People think hypocrisy is easy. It isn’t. You have to work at it. You’ve got to trust to the weakness of your own convictions, no flip flopping. It takes real mental strength to cling to a position you know to be utter fiction: it requires dexterity and ingenuity to argue your way out of pure bullshit, to eternally justify yourself, to assume you’re the one in the right.

Of course, my background has helped. I'm sort of middle class, I guess, and being middle class and British comes as a sort of training in contradiction. Historically speaking this is fairly new: go back to Empire and things were more straightforward. As far as I can glean from the literature of the period, all you had to do to be middle class a century ago was experience sexual confusion in an Eton plunge pool and then go and colonise India. There may possibly have been a bit more to it than that, and quite frankly I’m not sure I'm cut out for either activity, but that seems to be the gist. Being middle class really boiled down to reclining on a deckchair and massacring locals with a blunderbuss while someone dabbed your forehead with a lavender wipe.

Oh, the simplicity.

But things have changed. Liberal attitudes make the contemporary middle class liberal a walking paradox. You’re against people like you having all the money and advantages, and then you scan the upmarket jobs pages to acquire more money and advantages. You’re supposed to despise the gentrification of working class communities, and then find yourself craving for an upmarket deli the moment you move to one. You’re a class-dialectic in process. Give yourself a slap on the back for it.

The world teaches us to be ashamed of our contradictions, of the gaps in our outlook. I disagree. I think we should be proud of our contradictions. If modern society is a sort of fiction, then trying to be true to it turns you into a fiction too. Hypocrisy isn’t a moral cop out, it’s a legitimate response to the paradoxes of the modern world - a world that says you ought to want something and simultaneously makes you guilty for wanting it, a world that promises social democracy and then asks you to salivate over semi-detached lifestyles at sky-high prices. Take it from me. The real charlatans are the people who pretend to have a coherent personality. Be a hypocrite, and be a good one: it’s the only way to really be true to yourself. 

Instruments of Wind

‘There will be a festival here,’ the mother of my Madrid flat enunciated slowly in Spanish, as if she was teaching me to read. ‘Big festival. Here.’

          ‘Here?’ I said. ‘On this street?’    

            ‘Yes,’ she agreed, slowly, in a sing-song tone, as if congratulating a toddler on using the potty. ‘Lots of people…’

Part of the problem with learning another language is convincing the people who already speak it that you’re not – in the nicest kind of way – suffering from brain damage. I can forgive the Ecuadorian family I lived with in Madrid for thinking I did. I spoke Spanish like there were rocks in my mouth. I spluttered, gasped for words. I’d aim for a growly Castilian and end up delivering my words like I’d just had a testicle removed. My Spanish was a kind of linguistic version of the My Lai massacre: mangled verbs, subjunctives scrambling to get out of the way…

Needless to say, the entire family, none of whom spoke English, pretty much took me for the kind of gurgling fool who needed his own care-worker. The mother was a loud, generous woman with a voice that reminded me of road-drilling at 7am, and after working about ten hours a day cleaning up offices her reward was to curl up beneath a blanket on the sofa because she'd had to rent out all her rooms to foreigners. Our conversations went a bit like this.

DALE. Hello.

MOTHER. Hello.

DALE. Nice day!

MOTHER. Yes.  

DALE. Yes.

MOTHER. (Holding out a bowl to me). You want soup?

DALE. Hmm?

MOTHER. Soup.

Occasionally they were a little more involved – she might ask me if I wanted some bread to go with my soup, for example – but put it this way, we never quite got around to discussing the implications of austerity measures as a resolution for the debt crisis. The conversation about the festival was the most involved I ever had. 

I asked if it was a big festival.’

Dale gets his tongue around a tricky concept

       'Yes,' she replied. ‘Four days.'
       She held up four fingers, to help me understand the meaning of ‘four’.

‘Oh.’

I thought I’d push it. I could see what appeared to be a brass band setting up down on the street, so I thought I’d risk a question.

I took the plunge.

‘And will there also be, er…’

… I tailed off.

I had no idea what the word for ‘brass band’ was. I didn’t even know the word for ‘brass’, in fact. I wasn’t even particularly confident that I knew the right word for ‘band’. Could it be ‘bando’?

She was waiting expectantly.
‘…there will be, er…’ I cleared my throat. ‘Instruments of wind?’

       Blank, amiable incomprehension.

       ‘You know,’ I tried again, my confidence draining away. ‘Instruments of… wind?’

       My accent may have been a little wobbly. The words may well not have been in the right order. Whatever the problem, she was now looking at me as if she was silently debating whether she needed to fit safety bars on my windows.

      Then she took a deep breath.

‘Big festival,’ she repeated, slowly, with gestures. ‘Big.’

You… Don’t… Speak… Spanish.

She smiled encouragingly, as you might to an infant who’d completed their first fridge drawing, and left me to stand there in the rotten, roasting evening, pathetic and helpless, my immigrant words echoing mockingly around my head.  

          “Instruments of wind”?

          I slammed the balcony shut. 

Man Is Born Free, And Is Everywhere In Chain Stores

The propaganda hits you the minute you see the sky-high brand name hieroglyphs. Giant smiling families gazing down over the entrance to a Mothercare. ‘M&S’ hanging like a massive totem. Floating retail commandments in single words, Breathe, Eat, Relax, Play...

About a year ago I went out on the streets in the thick of one of the worst riots in Manchester’s history since Peterloo, tail-ending the spectacularly violent summer of 2011 when a chain of British cities erupted in flames and looting. Having observed the hooded kids kicking in the doors of sportswear and mobile phone chain stores, I made the observation that for a generation programmed for retail, the sight of them looting a Foot Locker or a Carphone Warehouse wasn’t so much a street protest as a very forceful method of going shopping.

Only a couple of months later Europe’s largest mall opened up in Stratford on the Olympic site, a high security glass compound overshadowing the old indoor market, where proprietors are presumably looking forward to an Olympian record of bankruptcies now they have to compete with Xanadu over the road. It's colossal. Step out of the station and the sheer size of it knocks the wind out of you. You're wafted up a hill by obliging escalator beneath ceilings thirty foot high and giant flagship brands. Gleaming concourses mopped by immigrant sponges. Bent metal rods sticking out of the ground posing as sculpture. Downstairs there’s a prefab pub calling itself a Microbrewery with all the atmosphere of an antiseptic wipe.

One of the first things you notice is how small you feel. That’s what monumental architecture does, with its curtain wall cliffs, its glass canyons. It shrinks the human being. Just to get from M&S to Accessorize takes about two and a half days.

So why? Why does it all have to make you feel so insignificant?

Westfield Stratford isn’t a mall, it’s a monument. It’s a Great Exhibition Crystal Palace reborn for the age of retail. Just as that 1851 glass-walled construction embodied British might and bullishness at the peak of empire, so does Westfield justify shopping as the beating heart of the consumer society. It’s not agit-prop, it’s agit-shop. Covered arcades wide enough to house the chariot for a triumphal emperor? Spurious justification by government with words like ‘empowerment’ and ‘community’? Check, check. It’s not architectural shock and awe. It’s shop and awe.

         Breathe.

Eat.

Relax.

Play.

Wandering around Westfield made me think back to those riots. Perhaps I was wrong, or perhaps I oversimplified things. I don’t think it’s incorrect to say unchecked materialism was one of the reasons people rioted, but it was only one of the reasons. There are lots of reasons why people riot. Because they’re angry. Because of peer pressure. I learnt a lot when I watched Manchester become a temporary minor war zone, and here’s one thing I learnt: that just like any other kind of social activity, a lot of the people involved are just sort of hanging round. No program, no target. As things got violent, some of them got violent. As things got nicked, some of them nicked things. It’s the way crowds work. Probably a good third of all the kids at the riots were little more than rubberneckers caught up in something they hardly comprehended. Throwing a stone at a luxury hotel, baiting a helmeted cop. Scooping up a discarded bottle of Evian or a bag of crisps, the way kids do. Some of them got prison sentences.

Eat.

Relax.

Play.

Breathe.

You look up at the Westfield Stratford complex and you know there could never be riots here. It’s a fortress protected by reinforced glass and CCTV. The ceilings stretch away from you. You’d never even reach.

I wandered out of the mall and onto the little bridge where an oily sun was descending over east London. Stretching away below me I could see late-stage preparations in the final push towards the Olympics: gates, watchtowers, electrified fencing, yellow coats, passes, wires, cameras. I watched it and I remembered back to that night. I recalled the broken glass and the flames and the sirens, and I thought about the other reason people riot. It’s one that I’ve never really come out and admitted, and yet it’s possibly the most powerful one of all, and it explains soccer hooligans, and pub fights, and the buildings burning in Athens, and lynchings, and just about any other descent into mob horror we see around us. I didn’t break the law once that night, and I don’t support looting or violence - but there was a moment when I stood watching the crowd surging and the glass breaking around me, and I can’t deny that I felt the thrill of it all. Perhaps that’s the final reason people riot. Because when you’re caught up in the whole thing, it’s just sort of fun.