Re: The force is not with us. I sent the below to the author;

“What explains it? It can't be blamed on poverty, as the bleeding hearts always insist: we are much richer now than we were then.”

But this ignores the important issue, relative wealth not absolute wealth is significant. This point was well made in Richard Layard’s recent speech the thrust of which is aptly summarized by your colleagues thus;

“Those executives earning gigantic salaries do not find happiness; instead, they make many more of us unhappy because of the sheer unfairness of the emerging pattern of rewards.

In study after study, Layard shows that it is not absolute wealth that we care about once we reach a threshold of income, but how we sit in relation to others. “

Will Hutton

“Money does matter in various ways. People earning under around £10,000 are measurably, permanently happier when paid more. It matters when people of any income feel a drop from what they have become used to. But above all, money makes people unhappy when they compare their own income with others'. Richer people are happier - but not because of the absolute size of their wealth, but because they have more than other people. But the wider the wealth gap, the worse it harms the rest. Rivalry in income makes those left behind more miserable that it confers extra happiness on the winners. In which case, he suggests, the winners deserve to be taxed more on the "polluter pays" principle: the rich are causing measurable unhappiness by getting out too far ahead of the rest, without doing themselves much good. “

Polly Toynbee

Toynbee’s last point grounds the point rather nicely within rational choice theory (the epistemic basis of economics). What applies to happiness here also applies to crime – after all happy, content people are not the sort of people who are likely to commit crimes. Most crime is property related, and much violent crime is in furtherance of property crime. The replacement of theology with materialistic fetishism has much to answer for in this regard. But the essence of our materialist fetishism in my opinion depends on the exclusivity of much of the objects of desire (Ferrari’s etc.) – in turn dependent on highly inequitable wealth distribution patterns.

I absolutely agree with your article that having highly authoritarian paramilitary commissars running round imposing order in virtue of their monopoly of legitimised violence this is hardly a satisfactory state of affairs in a supposed “liberal” state! But the mentality that demands more violent and oppressive policing (which of course has the effect of tyrannising the poor and ethnic groups and further alienating and dehumanising them) cannot be divorced from the mentality that “freedom” and “individual rights” entail the legitimacy of a massive disparity between rich and poor. That some people’s contribution to society, as calculated by the market In Its Infinite Wisdom, entitles them to many, many multiples of the earnings of others in that society is clearly ludicrous (consider the difference between the market value of nurses and footballers vis a vis their relative social value).

That extreme disparate wealth is allowed to exist and such advanced avarice is seen as praise worthy can only mean that those who are poor are equally considered as undeserving and unworthy of the respect that is lavished on their richer brothers. If economic value is portrayed as the measure of things and you score lowly you have of course nothing to lose by taking matters into your own hands.

Thus income distribution is at the route of crime. The failure to address this problem is a result of misinformation (along the lines of Thatcher’s “There Is No Alternative”) and sheer tyranny – police brutality such as in the coal miners’ strike as you mention and daily in the harassment of poor and ethnic citizens – is one way to ensure that these distribution patterns persist. In a properly functioning democracy why would the majority be prepared to accept a hard to live on average wage of £20k in order to support an undeserving and parasitic opulent class? A democracy would surely eliminate poverty; an opulent oligarchy would surely by concerned to preserve its position by eliminating democracy.

In other words the police have become paramilitary because they are needed to enforce increasingly unjust social relations. To make them less paramilitary we need to tackle these unjust social relations, and at the heart of this matter is income distribution.