Our Inheritance.

The mixture of conjecture about the causes of this week's riots reflects a general bewilderment. Poverty and unemployment did not explain why clothes with designer labels should have been such a prime target for the shopbreakers. They were seized to be worn, not just sold, to ensure the wearer a top place in the gang.
Was that why I had bought a pair of designer spectacles which looked no better than a cheap pair - just to ensure my place in the consumer society? The money would have kept a poor family going for weeks.
Then I remembered the words of the great Scottish writer, William McIlvanney, seven years into Thatcherism. They carried a warning.
"The effects of the present Conservative government will be felt for generations to come. It isn't merely the damage to the present that breaks the heart - the wasted years, the ejection of the aged, the demeaning of the young. It is the incalculable damage to the future - the loss of belief in society, the anti-social tendencies encouraged, the lesson branded on thousands of minds that you are alone and your society doesn't care. We will live with the effects of this for years to come. Government changes lives," he told a Scottish National Party conference (he was not an SNP member.)
"I say this particularly to those people who are understandably, at the present time, battening the hatches and looking to the protection of their families. I will do what has to be done, they say. Whatever the rules of the game, I'll play it. My kids are there and I want the best for them....To those people I would say: where will your children live? The planet Mars? They will live here. They will live in the society your blindfolded view of things has helped to create.....
"They will inherit the streets of the inner cities. They will inherit membership of a generation the largest part of which has been systematically deprived of its most basic rights: to work, to feel a sense of belonging, to try to live a fulfilling life. That will be some inheritance. If you care for your children, care for the society they will have to live in."
It turns out he was right. That was the message we were giving our children then - forget idealism, go for the money. New Labour carried on the message - loads of money was the important thing. His words hit home with his audience and many cried.
Now we have our inheritance.
ends.