On the 22nd August, a Volkswagen Passat travelling the wrong way on the A66 near Middlesbrough hit a Cleveland Police vehicle head-on, killing two police officers plus the five young men in the Passat. It appears that the five young men had been responding to an attack on one of their homes by a rival gang. The actual accident happened because the five young men were driving the wrong way down a busy road moments after another police car decided to call off the chase because it was "too dangerous" to enforce the law. The ploy of driving the wrong way down the A66 may have been suggested by an earlier experience in which one of the young men did the same stunt in a TikTok video.
The incident focused national attention on the endemic criminality and thrill-seeking anti-social behaviour that dominates many public housing estates in the former industrial parts of Britain. This is fuelled by welfare, boredom, and the leniency of the criminal system. The latter is very much a political hot potato at the moment as the UK government is being forced to release thousands of criminals early by a lack of prison places. Also, the UK legal system is dominated by an ideology that seeks to avoid "criminalising" offenders even when they commit crimes.
A few days after the not-so-tragic accident, a crowd of friends, family members, and supporters of the young men killed commemorated them by taking over a nearby farmer's field, letting off balloons, and burning a few cars into the bargain. Again the police stood back so as not to anger and criminalise the criminals.
In these and other incidents, including a case of fatal arson, UK politicians have told the British public that the behaviour of these young men and their supporters is "totally unacceptable" while showing every non-verbal sign that they are bending over backwards to totally accept it.
The problem is that these are "working-class," Labour-voting areas that have recently, in some cases, dabbled in supporting the Reform UK Party. Although most of the population is actually politically apathetic.
Britain's Labour government feels it has to tread delicately and try not to upset a population that their policies in the past helped to create, and which already feels half-alienated by their own dysfunction and their still lingering attachment to a social and economic model of Britain that no longer exists.
In other words, Labour are planning on doing fuck all in the fond hope that this will all blow over, the media will lose interest, and the dysfunction of post-industrial public housing estates will return to an "unnewsworthy" steady state.
Essentially the problem here is that these people, including the five young men who died in the head-on collision, are "obsolescent human factory equipment." I am here stealing an idea from American White supremacists who like to disparage post-slavery Blacks as "obsolete farm equipment," but the truth is that all sorts of social groups can become "useful" or "useless" depending on a wide range of changing circumstances.
The hope of earlier UK governments was that this problem population could be re-educated. One year before he became Prime Minister Tony Blair coined the phrase "Education! Education! Education!" at the 1996 Labour Party Conference as the solution for these blighted housing estates. But this was naïve nonsense, and of course nothing of substance happened; the problem remained the same.
The truth is this problem is much more intractable than politicians, economists, and sociologists realise. In fact, it is related to British economic history and the fundamental nature of the British industrial experience and the nature of the industrial working class from which Britain's post-industrial, often non-working class is descended.
As is well known, British industrial success was enormous, with the UK being the dominant industrial power for at least over a century (1760s-1880s) and then being an extremely important industrial power for perhaps a century after that.
This was built on several factors, which you probably know already—genius inventors, plentiful coal supplies, domination of the World's oceans, the Protestant work ethic, and plenty of excess capital—but the other very important factor, indeed probably the most important factor, was extremely cheap labour over an unnaturally prolonged period.
All undeveloped countries start off with cheap labour, but, as their economies grow, that soon changes and employers, with their factories booming, are forced to compete to hire workers, driving up wages. That didn't happen in the UK to the same extent, or else it happened at a much slower rate.
In other words, UK labour remained cheaper longer. Why was this?
You could point to the lack of organisation of labour, and there is something in that, as trade unions wee essentially invented in Britain but took some time to get going. But the real ace up the sleeve of British capitalism was that they were able to create a "self-impoverishing" working class that acquired the habits that constantly immersed it in poverty.
What I am talking about here is gambling, alcoholism, and prostitution, among other things.
During parliamentary debates in 1844, the Bishop of Exeter claimed there were up to 80,000 prostitutes in London. There is also a meme that "one out of every 60 houses functioned as a brothel." More conservative Metropolitan Police figures counted 7,000 to 8,000 sex workers in London at the time. Whatever the exact figures, there was a lot of it about, up and down the length and breadth of the country.
However, the assumption modern audiences make, perhaps influenced by cinematic portrayals of the period, is that most of this was upper class men taking advantage of lower class women. The epitome of this is the Jack the Ripper legend, where the implication is that Jack is upper class—at least a famous surgeon or even a member of the Royal Family—while the victims are all impoverished working-class women. The reality, however, is that the vast majority of the clientele of Victorian prostitution, as with alcoholics and gamblers, were members of Britain's self-impoverishing working class.
Those who avoided these traps, by being puritanical, tea-totalling, or straight-edged, could not fail to rise in a booming British economy. The paradox is that this booming British economy was firmly based on the poverty of the majority of the people it employed.
Being impoverished and in debt was essentially the main driver of low wages that kept Britain's "economic miracle" on track for much longer than other economic miracles we have seen like the Post-War Japanese economic miracle. This ran out of steam for various reasons in the 1990s, but one additional reason was because the inherently self-disciplining Japanese workforce overcame its condition of constant "virtual poverty" by losing the expensive habits that it picked up in the 1960s and 70s.
But the focus here is on the post-industrial British working class. In its Victorian heyday, swelled by Catholic Irish immigrants, this demographic served the useful function of being "human factory equipment," while, for the most part, maintaining the wasteful lifestyle habits that ensured its poverty.
It is this that then dictated the low wages of the proletariat, as workers who could fall back on savings would be able to demand higher wages from employers. But, thanks to the large number of the continually impoverished, more abstemious and prudent members of the working class were unable to force up wages to the degree that otherwise would have been possible. Indeed, they would either be priced out of the labour market by their more desperate fellow workers or have to upskill and become members of the middle class themselves. Another possibility is that by accruing capital they were also able to emigrate to America or various British colonies, something that was outside the range of the more drunk and disorderly elements of the working class.
A few days after the not-so-tragic accident, a crowd of friends, family members, and supporters of the young men killed commemorated them by taking over a nearby farmer's field, letting off balloons, and burning a few cars into the bargain. Again the police stood back so as not to anger and criminalise the criminals.
In these and other incidents, including a case of fatal arson, UK politicians have told the British public that the behaviour of these young men and their supporters is "totally unacceptable" while showing every non-verbal sign that they are bending over backwards to totally accept it.
The problem is that these are "working-class," Labour-voting areas that have recently, in some cases, dabbled in supporting the Reform UK Party. Although most of the population is actually politically apathetic.
Britain's Labour government feels it has to tread delicately and try not to upset a population that their policies in the past helped to create, and which already feels half-alienated by their own dysfunction and their still lingering attachment to a social and economic model of Britain that no longer exists.
In other words, Labour are planning on doing fuck all in the fond hope that this will all blow over, the media will lose interest, and the dysfunction of post-industrial public housing estates will return to an "unnewsworthy" steady state.
Essentially the problem here is that these people, including the five young men who died in the head-on collision, are "obsolescent human factory equipment." I am here stealing an idea from American White supremacists who like to disparage post-slavery Blacks as "obsolete farm equipment," but the truth is that all sorts of social groups can become "useful" or "useless" depending on a wide range of changing circumstances.
The hope of earlier UK governments was that this problem population could be re-educated. One year before he became Prime Minister Tony Blair coined the phrase "Education! Education! Education!" at the 1996 Labour Party Conference as the solution for these blighted housing estates. But this was naïve nonsense, and of course nothing of substance happened; the problem remained the same.
The truth is this problem is much more intractable than politicians, economists, and sociologists realise. In fact, it is related to British economic history and the fundamental nature of the British industrial experience and the nature of the industrial working class from which Britain's post-industrial, often non-working class is descended.
As is well known, British industrial success was enormous, with the UK being the dominant industrial power for at least over a century (1760s-1880s) and then being an extremely important industrial power for perhaps a century after that.
This was built on several factors, which you probably know already—genius inventors, plentiful coal supplies, domination of the World's oceans, the Protestant work ethic, and plenty of excess capital—but the other very important factor, indeed probably the most important factor, was extremely cheap labour over an unnaturally prolonged period.
All undeveloped countries start off with cheap labour, but, as their economies grow, that soon changes and employers, with their factories booming, are forced to compete to hire workers, driving up wages. That didn't happen in the UK to the same extent, or else it happened at a much slower rate.
In other words, UK labour remained cheaper longer. Why was this?
You could point to the lack of organisation of labour, and there is something in that, as trade unions wee essentially invented in Britain but took some time to get going. But the real ace up the sleeve of British capitalism was that they were able to create a "self-impoverishing" working class that acquired the habits that constantly immersed it in poverty.
What I am talking about here is gambling, alcoholism, and prostitution, among other things.
During parliamentary debates in 1844, the Bishop of Exeter claimed there were up to 80,000 prostitutes in London. There is also a meme that "one out of every 60 houses functioned as a brothel." More conservative Metropolitan Police figures counted 7,000 to 8,000 sex workers in London at the time. Whatever the exact figures, there was a lot of it about, up and down the length and breadth of the country.
However, the assumption modern audiences make, perhaps influenced by cinematic portrayals of the period, is that most of this was upper class men taking advantage of lower class women. The epitome of this is the Jack the Ripper legend, where the implication is that Jack is upper class—at least a famous surgeon or even a member of the Royal Family—while the victims are all impoverished working-class women. The reality, however, is that the vast majority of the clientele of Victorian prostitution, as with alcoholics and gamblers, were members of Britain's self-impoverishing working class.
Those who avoided these traps, by being puritanical, tea-totalling, or straight-edged, could not fail to rise in a booming British economy. The paradox is that this booming British economy was firmly based on the poverty of the majority of the people it employed.
Being impoverished and in debt was essentially the main driver of low wages that kept Britain's "economic miracle" on track for much longer than other economic miracles we have seen like the Post-War Japanese economic miracle. This ran out of steam for various reasons in the 1990s, but one additional reason was because the inherently self-disciplining Japanese workforce overcame its condition of constant "virtual poverty" by losing the expensive habits that it picked up in the 1960s and 70s.
But the focus here is on the post-industrial British working class. In its Victorian heyday, swelled by Catholic Irish immigrants, this demographic served the useful function of being "human factory equipment," while, for the most part, maintaining the wasteful lifestyle habits that ensured its poverty.
It is this that then dictated the low wages of the proletariat, as workers who could fall back on savings would be able to demand higher wages from employers. But, thanks to the large number of the continually impoverished, more abstemious and prudent members of the working class were unable to force up wages to the degree that otherwise would have been possible. Indeed, they would either be priced out of the labour market by their more desperate fellow workers or have to upskill and become members of the middle class themselves. Another possibility is that by accruing capital they were also able to emigrate to America or various British colonies, something that was outside the range of the more drunk and disorderly elements of the working class.
It is this aspect of the Victorian British working class that explains so much about the behaviour of their post-industrial, welfare dependent descendants, from the addiction, pointless thrill-seeking, anti-social behaviour, littering, vandalism, disrespect for authority, and crime.
What we have here is a problem not just of obsolescent—or in fact obsolete—human factory equipment, but of a population riddled with the DNA or culture of self-destructive, self-impoverishing behaviours that once suited the needs of Britain's industrial elites.
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