The sanctification of public nuisance
Published in: Daily Mail
Extraordinarily, in St Paul’s Churchyard a public nuisance has been elevated into a political and spiritual milestone. In the Times (£) Ken Macdonald, the UK’s former Director of Public Prosecutions, believes that the cathedral
‘has become so suddenly a centre for moral England’
apparently because of the tented protest on its precincts against
‘the City’s blank morals and its tragically advanced greed... a broader resistance that hates the vulgarity and theft of a system of deregulation and licence that fails to understand the value of wealth or the meaning of debt, or a fair and just accommodation between these twin sins that will always be with us’.
Well yes, people who work in money-making are part of a general culture of greed and shallowness which bespeak a society mired in selfishness. You only have to listen to young people at school or university, whose goal is not to become doctors or teachers but to make as much money as fast as possible, to grasp this.
But the tented ‘Occupy’ protest is not targeting this wider breakdown of a culture of moral obligation. It does not acknowledge the part played in the economic meltdown by cynical and opportunistic politicians buying votes through irresponsible public spending or failing adequately to regulate the financial markets; nor the part played by the general public in spending what they didn’t have and thus building up ruinous debt.
No, the tented ones are instead singling out and scapegoating ‘greedy bankers' on the grounds that they make too much money. Well, just how much is too much? By whose standards? Why not on that basis set up tented encampments in the grounds of the mansions owned by football stars, rock music producers or Bill Gates and Sergey Brin?
Nevertheless, Macdonald is correct. The tented protest has struck a general chord. But it is a chord of moral incoherence. Today, St Paul’s produces its much-heralded report on ethics and the City of London, which according to the Times (£) reveals that finance professionals believe simultaneously that bankers, stockbrokers and senior FTSE staff are overpaid and that they themselves are mainly motivated by making money. In an introduction to the report Dr Giles Fraser, who resigned as Canon Chancellor over the threat to evict the campers, says:
‘But the real tug to do what is right comes from looking into the face of another and recognising an obligation to someone other than oneself.’
Amen to that. The supremacy of our obligation to others is fundamental to the morality of the Hebrew Bible from which Christianity is drawn. But when it comes to the tented encampment, moral obligation is being chucked down the drain along with some other rather important stuff.
The campers are being treated with something approaching veneration on the grounds that they are saying something very important and very moral. What is that something? Well, insofar as there is a coherent message it is that capitalism sucks and that bankers are greedy. Since a) the campers and their supporters all benefit themselves from the consumer society and b) capitalism is the guarantor of their political freedoms, this is no more than egregious hypocrisy laced with envy and spite.
Moreover, since capitalism is the governing creed of modernity, the ‘Occupy’ movement is yet another example of the headlong rush back to the brutal, impoverished, tyrannical pre-modern past (of which deep green environmentalism, incidentally, is the signature political motif) that has turned the phrase ‘left-wing progressive’ into an Orwellian travesty.
But more striking even than all that is the moral confusion over the encampment itself. Viewed entirely benevolently as a peaceful protest, it is thus considered sacrosanct. The cathedral backed off evicting the campers mainly because the clerics feared that violence would be used in the process – by which they seemed to mean any kind of physical act of removal. The City of London also backed off the eviction process at least until Christmas. The underlying assumption seemed to be that the campers had a right to protest anywhere, and that as long as their protest was peaceful any kind of forcible eviction was illegitimate.
But no-one has the moral right to do anything that is detrimental to others. As Dr Fraser says, doing the right thing means above all recognising an obligation to someone other than oneself. And although Dr Fraser may not agree with this, in forcibly occupying what is both church property and public space in this way the campers are simply riding roughshod over both the right of the church to its own property and the rights of everyone else to that public space.
The encampment may not be violent, but it is nevertheless a conspicuous example of passive aggression. The forcible occupation of private property/public space is an aggressive act towards everyone else – backed up, in this case, by some ripely sanctimonious but essentially left-wing bullying.
In other words, the real message of the St Paul’s encampment is that force wins. This message will unquestionably have consequences way beyond the cathedral precincts. Any half-sentient law enforcement official understands that control of the streets is the essence of public order. If the streets are surrendered to the lawless, the police can no longer protect the law-abiding.
This was the core understanding of Bill Bratton’s ‘broken windows’ theory which turned hitherto lawless New York into a safe city. The theory held that even the most apparently trivial nuisance or disorder on the streets – litter, graffiti, an abandoned car – sent out a powerful signal that people could behave antisocially in public spaces with no come-back. That in turn emboldened others to commit crimes of escalating degrees of seriousness. Only when the police were seen to reclaim control of the streets by dealing with the litter, graffiti, abandoned cars and any and every other antisocial activity was crime brought under control.
Protests against capitalism are posing an increasingly frequent problem for law enforcement. Exploiting the value correctly placed on freedom of expression and public protest, these wider demonstrators are intent on causing violence and mayhem in pursuit of the explicitly revolutionary goal of overturning capitalism and thus western society.
The St Paul’s encampment is the ‘broken window’ to that escalating willed mayhem. The demoralised response of a church which has so profoundly lost the plot that it cannot even recognise this as a contemptuous trashing of civic obligation, let alone respond to it appropriately, is selling the pass of public order for the rest of us too.
Nor do our political leaders seem to understand what is at stake here. One expects the Labour party to disdain capitalism but now the breast-beating Cameroons appear to be undergoing a dark night of the guilt-ridden western soul too. According to Rachel Sylvester in the Times (£) Conservative Cabinet ministers now talk about encouraging a ‘kinder, gentler capitalism’. Tomorrow, the Prime Minister is to make a speech which reportedly will stress the need for morality in markets. How pious. But arguably the most devastating solvent of morality in Britain has surely been the welfare state and the culture of rampant entitlement and selfishness it has spawned, which have all but destroyed personal responsibility and concern for others.
When the Archbishop of Canterbury backed the ‘Occupy’ campers and bashed the bankers for taking high bonuses while City practices remained unchanged, the Prime Minister said Dr Williams
‘speaks, frankly, for the whole country’.
Well, he does not speak for the many who understand that the encampment at St Paul’s signifies the descent of the nation into a culture of ideological bullying, an inability to think straight and the substitution of sentimentality for morality and law.
