What will Ed say today ?

Party positions seem to be hardening ahead of today's parliamentary debate on the riots. The government - both coalition parties - seems to be focusing on punishment, including the nutty idea of making people homeless. The Labour Party is trying to blame the government's cuts whilst simultaneously condemning the rioters. This won't work as Harriet Harman found out on Newsnight. The media will simply headline Labour's party political point-scoring and ignore the ritual condemnation.

If Ed Miliband has any sense - and he has shown some in the past - he will of course condemn the rioters but he will add that the entire political class has lost touch with a section of society, the often-labelled underclass. He could quote J K Galbraith's "The Culture of Contentment" which contends that society is divided into two classes. One class has material goods and comfort and votes. The other has little or nothing and doesn't bother to vote. Of course, politicians compete for the voters and ignore the rest.

Parents, will you take your kids to the police ?

"When I get home nothing is going to happen to me. I might get shouted at", young looter on radio this morning.

I put this question to two law-abiding,sensible Guardian-reading friends. One hesitated and ducked the question. The other answered without pause that she would not. She stuck to this answer.

I don't understand the dilemma. You expect even demand that other people's kids are punished for theft. Why not your own ? I praise the parents of the boy who dropped the fire extinguisher off the roof of the Millbank Centre during the tuition fee demo. They took their son to the police. To my mind, that is good parenting and a lot more use than shouting.

It's not just the kids who have lost their moral compass, it's parents too.

Riots ramble - not, I hope, a rant.

I have been looking at Facebook, Twitter and LibDemBlogs and listening to Radio 4. Radio 5 and BBC News 24 and trying to avoid my own anger and fear deteriorating into calls for the army etc. Comments fall into two categories: (1) condemnation of the rioters and looters and (2) searches for deeper explanations, usually involving government policy. For now, I settle on two points of social psychology.

Firstly, the relative poverty hypothesis. The rioters and looters are neither starving nor homeless. They may be hopeless. Compared with teenagers of earlier generations they are well off. Above all, all around them they see people enjoying wealth and consumer goods, which they cannot obtain legally. Some are really poor. Many more see themselves as poor.

Secondly, the loss of respect for the law. It's an old chestnut for students whether law and order is maintained by consent or force. Certainly when there is no consent, force will follow. The young criminals of the last three nights number far more than the usual habitual thieves of any neighbourhood. How have thousands of young people come to lose all concern for law ? Last night was not just an attack on rich chain stores. Some burned cars and buses, some hit anyone who tried to stop them, some broke into houses. Of course, it's still a small minority of the population, but it's a group growing up seeing the rich and powerful casually breaking the law with great impunity - cheating MPs re-elected, amoral bankers wrecking people's lives and still getting their obscene bonuses, police on the take, rarely held to account when they kill people, journalists with no moral qualms about their methods. Useless to protest that these too are minorities, that most politicians, police and journalists don't do this (You'll note I do not exonerate bankers). Someone I know well, on a small income, has recently been ripped off by a landlord charging extra when nothing extra was given and an employer in the restaurant where he works stealing his tips. Both landlord and employer are very well off and do not seem to be breaking the law. His reaction has not been to riot, loot or burn but he begins to understand why people do.

We cannot and should not excuse any of the rioters and looters but nor should we be surprised at their greed, envy and sheer anger untrammelled by any moral perspective in a world that shows them the prizes but keeps them out of reach.

London's burning

We know it's not protest. We know it's crime, theft, arson and violence. What follows is not in any sense justification. In a society where MPs cheated on their expenses, where bankers remain immune even rewarded for their catastrophic mistakes with other people's money, where powerful and rich companies and individuals avoid tax, where the press hack into people's phones and are untouched by their clients the politicians and the police, where the burden of mismanaged public finance falls hardest on the poor, where education is becoming a private privilege, where schools fail and jobs disappear, can we be surprised that there are so many young people who clearly feel they have no interest or stake in a lawful society ?

This is not the Big Society. This is a very small, fearful, hopeless, selfish society.