A few weeks later, Robinson was at a rather smart party and found himself in conversation with an elderly and grand female aristocrat who mentioned that she had seen the offending programme and Tynan’s s role in it. Robinson mumbled an apology, saying that no one was expecting anything like that, when the grand old dame interrupted. “Oh, there’s no need to apologise. In fact, I’d never actually heard that particular word before. But do you know what? Now I find myself using it all the time.”
Some words or phrases have that potency. Like fads among children, these linguistic deely-boppers or hula-hoops seem to come out of nowhere but spread like plague, until everyone’s using them for a brief season, and then they die away again. This summer, the buzzword has been “feral”. Now, obviously the Mayor of London, the Work and Pensions Secretary, the Justice Secretary and legions of right-wing hacks have all had the advantages of excellent educations, so you’d expect from them a certain care in the accurate use of language. But not, it seems, in this case. And while pedantry is annoying, it’s also, by definition, always right, so it’s worth saying that if these knee-jerking idiots think what they saw on England’s streets in August was “feral”, it’s about time they invested in a dictionary.
“Feral”, just for the record, means having returned to a state of wildness from a previous condition of domestication. Cats get feral; so do goats and horses and dogs. People, although as domesticated as their pets or pack animals, get feral extremely rarely, and using other, more brutal means than money to achieve the primary objective of consumer capitalism of acquiring more stuff is not feral. If anything, it compounds the rioters’ status of remaining firmly in captivity. Indeed, a truly feral sub or underclass would be quite a sight: a plasma screen telly or some trainers would be the last things these naked, grunting creatures would want or need, roosting at night in trees and occasionally making hunting forays to bring down a hapless Liberal Democrat, who they’d eat raw.
But although it may suit their morality and their politics, blaming this fictitious “feral underclass” does no one any favours, because it perpetuates the Government’s state of denial about Britain’s police who, while not exactly feral, are now almost completely out of control. I wrote after the student riots last December that the police were engaged in undeclared war against the Government over threats to their budgets, repeatedly offering up examples of what things would be like if their numbers were cut. Thus we had Tory Central Office sacked by students after the Metropolitan Police decided not to bother guarding it; the heir to the throne inadequately protected as violence raged in the streets he was being driven through; and then the riots, where the police tactic of watching and waiting was a straightforward invitation to the “criminal underclass” to help themselves.
In the orgy of condemnation in the recalled House of Commons from people who expected us to pay for their plasma tellies, rather than simply nicking them, only the Tory MP David Davis had the decency to describe the Met as the corrupt, incompetent, callous, jobsworth disgrace they are. So much so that the Government appears to have been forced to fall back on the magistracy to express the brutal vindictiveness typical of the British state.
If we are to bandy about words like “feral”, we’re looking in the wrong direction. That “criminal underclass” apes, if more roughly, the hierarchies, divisions, inequalities and other current social norms of so-called mainstream society, trickled down. Again, it’s like fads or fashions: what’s on a catwalk in Milan might eventually make it to TK Maxx in Manchester, just like last autumn’s middle-class riots have been followed by this summer’s working-class ones. Meanwhile, the true criminal classes straddle all social divisions, starting right at the top. I can’t think of any better examples of “the feral” than people whose behaviour and opinions place the primacy of their wealth and status over and above any, more recognisably human qualities, such as social solidarity, empathy, sympathy or, for that matter, the simple kind of patriotism most people feel for their homeland. Until it asks for some tax to help someone else.
Which brings us to a final example of the feral. The primacy of markets, however bogus or imaginary the things they deal in, is surely the apotheosis of rejecting domestication for savagery. What we’re currently witnessing is not so much a sovereign debt crisis as a crisis of sovereignty, whereby nation states and the pooled sovereignty of their citizens are deemed secondary to the engines of the feral elite’s wealth grab. Compared to what’s going on at the top, your average hoodie doesn’t know what looting is, and no words of Ken Tynan’s could begin to be potent enough to express how we should all be feeling. l
