David Cameron Loses It over UK Riots: Totalitarian Ideology and Collective Punishment

The riots in various cities of the UK during the last weeks are not easy to comment intelligently upon and, frankly, I have some sympathy for the panicky way that the UK government and police is responding. It has to be admitted that this came "from nowhere" (which is not to say that there aren't explanations, I'm talking about predictability here). And riots are exactly that: chaotic outbursts of collective and unsystematic violence where the worsts sides of human beings come to the surface; order, moderation, common sense and logic is simply not to be expected - on either side. However, society and the state bears a responsibility which the uncoordinated collective of rioters does not: It is one, organised institutional agent, committed to uphold certain basic standards and values. Among these are, of course, public order and peace, legal security, justice for victims of crime and – in the wider frame – a society where people are generally content to live (and thus not very prone to rioting). These are elementary building blocks of any well-functioning society that everyone should be able to agree on, whatever other political or ideological leanings you might entertain.

But the response of the UK government, in particular as expressed publicly by prime minister David Cameron these last few days are in this respect quite worrying. Rather than finding inspiration in the long and strong tradition of English liberal democracy, Cameron seems to turn to surprising sources for inspiration.

First, we have the notion of restricting access to internet and wireless communication – especially social media (here, here, here, here) for a rather ill-defined collective of people (those suspected of plotting riot activities). While not amounting to closing down mobile phone networks or the internet á la Syria or North Korea, it does come close to the thrawling of internet and wireless traffic in the hunt for potential dissidents and the barring off of substantial parts of the internet championed by the People's Republic of China. Now, I would not have had much complaint if all that Cameron wanted to do was to have the police use the analysis of mobile phone and internet traffic as a part of preparing arrests and prosecutions. After all, those people who have been causing mayhem during the riots are indeed criminals – and it has to be admitted that the criminal acts they have committed are made more serious due to the context of a riot. But Mr. Cameron obviously wants to go to greater lengths than that, creating a legal loophole (which some legal experts indeed claim is illegal, see the links above) for law enforcement to act proactively against a large mass of people, many of which are perfectly innocent.

Second, yesterday Cameron announced that he wants to see the entire families of (convicted?) rioters who are living in public housing estates to be evicted from their homes (see also here) as part of the punishment of the rioters. Now, here's a novel concept, to say the least, for a political conservative of a Western liberal democracy: collectively punish not only those convicted of crimes, but also their parents, their siblings and their children. This is a sort of tactics that we know from the most draconian of totalitarian societies: Stalin's Soviet Union, Mao's China and North Korea come to mind. What is more, even if the assault on freedom of information and speech involved in the measures against social media could, with some good will, be squeezed to fit into the frames of a minimally decent liberal democracy, to punish people who have done nothing against the law for the criminal actions undertaken by other people cannot. Period.

Neither will making large masses of people homeless help to secure that people in the future will not be very keen on rioting. Making people end up in a situation where they have nothing to loose is never a good recipe for upholding public order and peace. Causing such outcomes in a way that violates basic tenets of legal security and responsibility will hardly help either.

Now, parallel to this, Cameron is facing some harsh criticism for his (let's be honest) ranting in TV about how the police should have been acting tougher (see also here). Criticism, it should be noted, that comes from the police itself. Apparently, those that actually know anything about law enforcement also know that escalating spirals of collective violence is never an effective strategy in the long run for securing the standards and values of a decent society. Let's just hope that this spirit will prevail and that Mr. Cameron will revisit the basics of his political beliefs and come to his senses.

Two Related Articles on the Ethics and Politics of Person Centred Care and Shared Decision Making

Almost back from the summer holiday, I make an easy start by informing about two recent publications of mine, coming out of my involvement in projects at the Gothenburg Centre for Person Centred Care (GPCC). The two articles, one of which appeared at the beginning of summer, and the other in the middle of it, complement each other in analysing and problematising various ethical and political aspects of ideas about so-called person centred care and its related concept of shared decision making in medical and health counselling and decision making. The aspects analysed have implications for policy, economics, research and public health and the articles jointly deepen, problematise and contribute to a sounder theoretical basis of efforts to implement and ensure the quality of person centred care and shared decision making intiatives in health care.

Christian Munthe, Lars Sandman and Daniela Cutas (2011). Person Centred Care and Shared Decision Making: Implications for Ethics, Public Health and Research. Health Care Analysis, vol. 19, DOI: 10.1007/s10728-011-0183-y . Link to journal. Link to post-print at Academia.edu.

Lars Sandman, Bradi B. Granger, Inger Ekman and Christian Munthe (2011). Adherence, Shared Decision-making and Patient Autonomy. Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy, vol. 14, DOI: 10.1007/s11019-011-9336-x. Link to journal. Link to post-print at Academia.edu. Link to post-print at the University of Gothenburg publication database.

July 2010 - June 2011: One Year of Philosophical Comment Statistics

So, this is some trivia before I go on my summer holiday, but if you follow this blog, perhaps also of some interest. Although the blog started late December 2009, the statistics function wasn't activated until May 2010, and the following didn't start to reach measurable levels until June-July that year. Thus, the statistics here presented cover almost a 12 month period starting from that.

1. Number of readers/hits

Over 18.000 in total

Over 1500/month on average

Over 346/week on average

Over 49/day on average

However, the deviation from the mean with regard to especially the weekly and daily averages is pretty drastic. In particular, the means are weighted down by the rather low following the first few months, so the daily hit average nowadays normally varies between 50 and 80. To work out the general picture, here's the trend for the entire period, with figures for hits/month:

2. Most popular posts
Here, it may be interesting to see an overview for the whole period, as well as for the last month. Obviously (and perhaps not surprisingly) the post on Wikileaks continues to be the hit piece by far. On second place, I'm quite happy to see that my take on some bad signs of current bioethics research has been a popular item. A rather late coming hit scoring pretty close to that is some recent comments on the ID card folly of Finland. Behind these three, it's a tight race between several posts on rather different topics. Some of these have been starting to move up the list some time after they were posted – something I interpret as a sign of having been early on a topic of forthcoming interest to a larger crowd, such as in vitro meat or uterus transplantation.

One year

Most recent month

3. Country of readers
This is quite an interesting one for me personally. When I started, rather naturally, my readers were mostly Swedes, but pretty soon the US readership started catching on, while the UK has been a strong runner up to those two in the last 6 months or so. Otherwise, I have been pleased to find that Philosophical Comment attract readers from all over the globe. To provide some perspective, here are images displaying the proportions for the whole period as well as for the most recent month:

One year

Most recent month

So, since I'll soon be off the computer for some time (one of my tricks for achieving some real rest during the short time of a Swedish summer), I guess the only remaining thing to say is thank you. To all of you who read, link, comment, repost, and so on.

See you in six weeks or so!