A Million Reasons for Wanting to Carry on Living

The Bullingdon Club has been mentioned over the last few days, comparing Dave, Bozza and Gideon's antics to the rioters'. It got me to thinking about (i) teenage high jinks (ii) the temptation of getting away with it and (iii) Mum morality.

Many of the people arrested and already convicted and sentenced have been under 21 and if their tales are true, took things out of already smashed windows, i.e. they were literally looting, as opposed to what was called looting, which was actually burglary. The police seem to have found and arrested the "good kids", the ones that the press have pointed out are grade A students, chefs, ballet dancers etc. Presumably the hardened crims, the bike thief gangs, the arsonists, the murderers are harder to find, more used to evading detection.

Their defence of the looting was that they thought they wouldn't get caught. It made me wonder if I'd been walking down a rioted road and some nice stuff was lying on the ground, whether I'd pick it up. It's pretty hard to say that I wouldn't. I am a veteran liberator of cafe condiments, toiletries in hotels, envelopes in offices. When I was a tediously traditional teenager, I did bad things. The usual smoking and underage drinking, but I can also remember throwing glass bottles across suburban roads and petty shoplifting. Not because I wanted my parents to take more notice of me but because I thougth I could get away with it. The pilfering was usually peripheral, a bag of crisps from Boots, small bath things from the Body Shop. I didn't think it was wrong, just as if now if I found a £20 note in the street, I wouldn't hand it in to the police. If a restaurant forgets to charge me for the second drink, I don't usually point it out. The biggest thing I ever stole was a bottle of vodka, and that was done in the company of some bigger boys who ran away equally drunk friends. Not peer pressure, but the lure and hilarity of the crowd. Being bad is fun. I like to think I wouldn't have burned down a block of flats with people still in it, but I guess all of those people who did the Milgram experiment didn't think they'd ever hurt anyone either. I stopped shoplifting, not because I got caught, but because I found it embarrassing, in other words: I grew up.

So, I guess my point is that the people who smashed up restaurants and the people who stole voddy from corner shops should perhaps have a little more compassion for those who destroyed PC World and stole multipacks of crisps.

Unfortunately, on the other hand, I also think the opposite. It's tiring to be told that because MPs acted in pretty much the same way as the rioters (because they thought they could get away with house flipping and Bang & Olufsen TVs on the tax-payer), we should have sympathy with the rioters. If the lefties hate the rich for tax avoidance* and the MPs for their duck moats but applaud the rioters for taking stuff, it seems somewhat hypocritical. If someone steals my Oyster card on the bus, I don't nick someone else's wallet. If a man hits me in the face in the street (as once happened in Peckham), I don't track him down and blow his face off with an AK-47. This is where mum-morality comes in: Two wrongs don't make a right. If we, whoever we are, believe that we are better than gravy train MPs, tax-avoiding executives (and Irish pop stars), and the likes of Coulson, Brooks et al (and I certainly do think I am, despite past indiscretions and current love of Wetherspoon's tomato sauce sachets), then how can we say that it's OK for one section of society to do it, but not another? Because one section is poorer than the other? Isn't this just Victorian values, to expect the poor to have no morals?

I once read that it is better to hold two opposing views at once than to have no doubt at all about one's opinions. I hope this is true.

* In 2005, UK's billionaires paid £14.7m in tax. 9m of that came from James Dyson.