Solutions; not the language of war against our own country
IMHO, things we could do which could kick start our economy, revitalise our youth, re-enfranchise everyone, re-create communities and build civic pride.
1) The riots have taken precedence in people minds, so the first thing we could and should do is put a lot more money into youth services. I don't know the best things for them to do, but there are people on the ground who do. Give them power and money to do what they feel needs to be done right now to get us through the current crisis.
2) Houses. Houses. Houses.
We identify the skills we need to build lots and lots of houses, and not just houses but whole communities (including really re-vamping old ones - not just building shopping malls and calling it regeneration). Off the top of my head: we need builders, architects, planners, sanitation specialists, experts in energy efficiency, landscape designers, carpenters, electricians, plumbers. Thousands of jobs; big and small, intellectual and practical.
We don't just bring in cheap foreign workers. We train people. The incentive for doing the training? You complete the courses and start work, and your name goes to the top of the list for getting the completed houses. People could be involved in building their own house, in their own community. We publicize what we need in a major national campaign. Your country needs you. We sell a dream.
Yeah, we - the country - borrow money to pay for the training. Yes, it adds to the deficit in the short term. Or we tax the rich. Deal with it.
Now the houses wouldn't be free and they wouldn't be rented. You'd have to buy them, BUT we exploit the power of the bulk buyer and get good materials in bulk by making this huge. Then we sell the houses to people at or just above cost. They're for everyone who wants one, has at least one person in the household with a job and is born or naturalized as a British Citizen. We flood the market with cheap, good quality houses (we encourage different styles, use local stone, match the environment, etc.) all over the country, destroying all possibility of a house price bubble. We change the rules on buy to let, so people can't try and exploit this. Yeah, we fuck the housing market and some people who bought for buy to let may suffer a bit. But we're all in this together right?
People who can't keep up their payments on their current houses (or who bought houses which were wildly over priced) could have a choice of selling them to the state for a reasonable sum rather than default, they get to stay in their homes and can then they can gradually buy them back at the new cheaper market rates (or pay it off and have some money to spare). If our banks can be saved like this, then so can home owners. Nationalise their debt too. Our homeowners are too big to be allowed to fail. This would also give them a boost of cash in return for "selling" the house, which they can use to pay off their other debts, finance training, put into pensions or savings, or just spend it (which also boosts the economy in the short term).
That mass debt repayment and investment in pensions and savings will help the banks stabilize their money supply. This is how they need our money, not through taxpayer handouts done in vaguely shady deals. We need to be using them as banks, with money going in and out. Then we need them to start loaning out that money in a good way, as mortgages on all the cheap houses. Because we're tying to keep them cheap (£30-50k, is that reasonable?) the risks for the people taking the loan is less and so is the risk for the bank. These would be sound mortgages, not dodgy ones. And we get them to fix the interest rate at something reasonable for all or peg it to something sensible. Result: The banks get a steady flow of money over twenty years pretty much guaranteed. No more mortgage casino. No more housing bubbles to cause pointless instability in peoples lives and break up communities by encouraging people to keep moving instead of putting down roots.
This isn't an anti-capitalist plan. It's pro-responsible capitalism. Everyone becomes home owners if they're willing to work for it. You work, you actually get something. All those trained builders, they can team together and start company's. All the architects. All the plumbers. We can subcontract it to them, to hundreds of small specialist companies working together in their local areas to all do their bit. Build your own community and get paid to do it. You can make money, you can become a community leader, you can make enough to move somewhere else and somewhere bigger if you like. But you start off secure in your own home, and get to build whatever you want from there.
For all these new, expanded and revitalised (because we can't just start completely fresh) communities we need new ideas. We need innovators. We need local entrepreneurs with bright ideas for what to do to make things greener and healthier and more fun. If someone has a good idea, we need development banks to fund them. Screw investment banks; development banks. Sort of like angel investors, only not rich poseurs who laugh at you on television shows.
Weren't we once meant to be a nation of shopkeepers. We're gonna need new high streets in our new communities. Stuff looting Greggs! I've had stuff from Greggs, it's actually not that great but people seem mesmerized by it (people during the rioting were really upset that people had smashed up a branch of it). I don't understand it myself. We have a real bakery near me and the difference is incredible. More local bakers please, less chains. We could train people. Butchers too. Let's encourage all this basic stuff, that's the real trickle down. Butchers shops need farmers; which kick starts other industries. People are upset that the rioters attacked a lot of small businesses... we need to get those kids, and their kids, owning those businesses. A shop, especially with a trade, is a perfect small business to keep a whole family employed. That's how they'll come to understand the value of them. Why else should they? They've been brought up on anonymous mega corps selling them everything. Attacking those faceless boxes is a "victimless" crime, right? The big store on the corner, that must be just another box, not a store with a hundred year history. What does that matter either? It's just another shop.
Our town centres have become places filled with chain shops by day and bars by night. People shop, and they drink, that's it. I like a drink but I hate town centre bars. I think it went downhill when they started removing all the chairs of an evening. Standing up all night encourages binge drinking; shots and huge wine glasses are easier to hold than standing up with a pint. Let's have more sit down pubs again, with big comfy chairs. Let's relax and drink, obviously still a lot (we are English!), but more slowly and followed by less puking in the streets.
We need less shopping malls for our kids to hang out in and more playgrounds, playing fields and activity centres. We need things for kids to do during the holidays; fun things that don't cost a lot. They spend their youth hanging out in shopping malls almost exclusively (the middle class and the poor), then we wonder why they go on a nicking spree when the barrier of the law breaks down.
We need to move culture back into our towns. I'm an athiest but I know lots of people aren't, so let's have areas where there are beautiful churches (when did we stop building beautiful churches? why are the newer ones all so ugly and pathetic?) and gorgeous mosques and synagogues. These things can enhance the looks of our towns. On the TV last week I saw the moving canopy at the mosque (Masjid-E-Haram) in Medina, and OMG! (check it out). It looked so beautiful from above when dozens of them open and close like flowers.
Let's have these religious buildings next to museums and theaters and libraries, so people have choices. We need to build our culture, not just import it. It doesn't have to be backwards looking, here radical thinkers are needed... how do we incorporate online life with real life? Can't we have both in the same space more? If people are going to play video games, especially MMORPGS, can't we do it in real communal spaces instead of locked in our homes? It'd be fun! This could be what it means to be English, or to be British. Can't our phones have apps that are about more than consuming. How about treasure hunts? Or you start walking through a park and your phone picks up on something sent digitally and it asks if you want more information about the area's history and wildlife, not just the local shops and bars. They make a big deal about adverts that react as you walk past them, why adverts? Sod adverts, that tech could be so much fun for telling stories across a whole town! Let's think all a bit happy sci fi again.
Our new communities are going to need schools too. So we need teachers and let's pay them well, because they've got these kids futures in their hands. Since we're building them new, let's put kitchens back into them so we can feed our kids more than just reheated pizza for lunch. Let's also not have so many faith schools, not to have a go at faith, but because only learning about one faith is divisive (whichever one it is) and that's what we're trying to avoid. You want to teach kids about faith, then you do it and have your religious leaders do it in your newly revamped religious buildings. Let's have assemblies where every faith, and no faith, can also say a bit about themselves but why not let everyone have a go? Church attendance is down and a lot of people are apparently lying to get into faith schools... which isn't a great way to start down a religious path. You wanna make your pitch, groovy, but lets make the most important thing morality, not just winning numbers over by catching them young. Do you have faith in your religion to convince people or not? If you do, then you have nothing to lose.
Like I say, atheist here, but I appreciate smart people with innovative ideas. People like Jesus and Mohammad were men of their times and some of the things they said and did were compromises to their times, but a lot of it was basic morality that transcends time. You don't need to believe in their gods to see that. Don't steal (don't loot). Don't kill (don't send the army to kill your kids). People are so scared by Britain being invaded by Muslim hordes, but the reality is that Britain has been invaded many times by many people... and mostly they just ended up becoming British. Those looters on the streets were really rather ethnically diverse. They may have been looters but dammit they were all English looters! And the people standing up to them, both defending their homes and cleaning up afterwards, dammit they were all English too! This is our identity. We're shit and we're cool and we're all bloody well English.
Now we just need to pick our morality and make sure our kids all know it. Mohammad was a smart man, smart enough that he recognised that Jesus was also a smart man. He may not have wanted to worship him, but he understood that and he wrote that fact down. Sharia Law is an attempt to form a morality and a way of living together. There are some bits which are abhorrent to our British eyes, but lets look past them for a moment and see the bits that we share, because we do share those basic ideas of morality. Even my atheist morality is ultimately derived from Christianity, it can't help but be because I live here under the general influence. Muslim morality has it's roots alongside Judaism and Christianity. Over time people fuck up, do stupid things and make rituals and they find different paths to gods (or no path or god at all) but basic tenets of morality can remain universal. Mohammad created a marketplace of ideas by setting up a community centre as part of his mosque. He talked to everyone. If we build the mosques and the churches and synagogues together (right next to the libraries and the museums and the schools), then they're one community (not one religion or idea that has to agree) but one community. If you burn the church, it may literally burn the mosque next door and vice versa.
In the marketplace between the buildings is the place to try and talk people round to the idea that we don't think forced marriages and full veils are a good idea. I personally think translucent burkas could be a fun, very British compromise. Also, great for our weather conditions. You could make them waterproof. Then, in 500 years time when things are all less heated, you'll have people up and down this land of ours sticking their heads out the front door, seeing rainclouds and going "ooh looks like rain, better pop my burka on today..." (over their silver space age-type clothing obviously). You don't get more English than a little bit of practical cultural appropriation.
Oh and, whilst I'm on my soapbox, when we have people move into their new homes, I want street parties. I used to love street parties as a kid. When we first moved in to our new home after the council estate, we had a great big street party. It was awesome. We were all from various council estates and getting out was a dream come true. We kept it up for a few years but then house prices went up and a lot of people moved away. The new people were only there for the housing price boom apparently and there was definite churn rate, so there were no more street parties. Now mum's neighbours look at the elderly foreigners at the house on the corner (our lovely house) and sneer about foreigners living in such nice houses and that they don't deserve it. So, more street parties, with cups of tea and proper Victoria Sponge cake (I'd totally break my diet for a real Vicky Sponge with proper buttercream and raspberry jam). We don't need a Royal wedding to have street parties.
Of course all these ideas would get the newly extreme right wing (a bit of culture I wish we hadn't imported from America) and the free marketeers up in arms, but the thing to remember is that they're not actually conservatives. This land is chock full of "small c" conservatives that have come to love schemes like our NHS, despite it being an apparently odious socialist thing. "Small c" conservatives know how to compromise, just as a lot of lefties do, when it means we all get something good out of it. There are lots of battles to be fought between left and right moderates, but we're not so stuck in our ideologies that we can't find a middle way a lot of the time. It's a very English thing to do. Look at our parliament! We had a monarchy ruling exclusively and it turned out shit. So we chucked them out and had a parliament, and it was a bit shit and turned into a dictatorship. So then we compromised and went with having both instead. I feel it's time to compromise a bit more and turn the House of Lords into a chamber of the people selected by lottery, but that's a different post. *wink*
The point is that the free marketeers and vocal right wing are the extremists. They're the radicals. These suggestions of mine aren't that radical. Cutting the government down to nothing but the army, as the free marketeers that make up the current Conservative government ultimately would like to do, that's the really radical plan! They believe that the free market will magically sort everything out if they hand everything over to it. The Invisible Hand of the Market. Honestly, it's like some weird sacrificial thing they've got going on. Let's appease our golden idol by privatizing everything and things will magically work out when we achieve the perfect moment of deregulation. Labour weren't any better, they're free marketeers too these days. Neo-Liberal, Neo-Conservative, New Labour (all the same). For thirty years, the parties between them have been looting our family silver, selling it for their own profit, and telling us that it's for the best whilst it doesn't seem to ever actually work. My plan's not radical; we spend some money collectively because it's about bargaining power, and we get more stuff in return together than we could each individually manage, hopefully including a community spirit that means we get no more massive scale burning and looting.
In the paleo diet community, people will buy a whole good quality, grass-fed cow together and then divide it up between them. The small farmer gets well paid and everyone gets well fed. It's common sense practicality; a mixture of socialism and capitalism that benefits the many; which includes the individual.
Next time I see kids on the street I desperately want them holding placards, not petrol bombs. I want them smiling at the policemen as they pass them, and the policemen smiling back. What I really don't want is tanks on our streets. I watched the Romanian revolution on the TV with my family in 1989. I watched tanks on the streets attacking the nation's youth. One of my most prized possessions is a flag, with the communist emblem cut out, that flew over the TV station in Cluj whilst it was being attacked. It was handed to me by someone who was there, who wanted people outside the country to remember those terrible days just in case they were ever forgotten again by the Romanians themselves. I never want to see the army on our streets going up against our own people. We shouldn't forget how horrible a thought that really is, not even in the heat of the moment. We shouldn't declare war on ourselves.
PS - After we've built all our cheap, energy efficient, homes and trained up all our people, we send our builders around the world to teach the lessons we've learnt to other people. We become a nation sending builders into the world, rather than soldiers. :-)
1) The riots have taken precedence in people minds, so the first thing we could and should do is put a lot more money into youth services. I don't know the best things for them to do, but there are people on the ground who do. Give them power and money to do what they feel needs to be done right now to get us through the current crisis.
2) Houses. Houses. Houses.
We identify the skills we need to build lots and lots of houses, and not just houses but whole communities (including really re-vamping old ones - not just building shopping malls and calling it regeneration). Off the top of my head: we need builders, architects, planners, sanitation specialists, experts in energy efficiency, landscape designers, carpenters, electricians, plumbers. Thousands of jobs; big and small, intellectual and practical.
We don't just bring in cheap foreign workers. We train people. The incentive for doing the training? You complete the courses and start work, and your name goes to the top of the list for getting the completed houses. People could be involved in building their own house, in their own community. We publicize what we need in a major national campaign. Your country needs you. We sell a dream.
Yeah, we - the country - borrow money to pay for the training. Yes, it adds to the deficit in the short term. Or we tax the rich. Deal with it.
Now the houses wouldn't be free and they wouldn't be rented. You'd have to buy them, BUT we exploit the power of the bulk buyer and get good materials in bulk by making this huge. Then we sell the houses to people at or just above cost. They're for everyone who wants one, has at least one person in the household with a job and is born or naturalized as a British Citizen. We flood the market with cheap, good quality houses (we encourage different styles, use local stone, match the environment, etc.) all over the country, destroying all possibility of a house price bubble. We change the rules on buy to let, so people can't try and exploit this. Yeah, we fuck the housing market and some people who bought for buy to let may suffer a bit. But we're all in this together right?
People who can't keep up their payments on their current houses (or who bought houses which were wildly over priced) could have a choice of selling them to the state for a reasonable sum rather than default, they get to stay in their homes and can then they can gradually buy them back at the new cheaper market rates (or pay it off and have some money to spare). If our banks can be saved like this, then so can home owners. Nationalise their debt too. Our homeowners are too big to be allowed to fail. This would also give them a boost of cash in return for "selling" the house, which they can use to pay off their other debts, finance training, put into pensions or savings, or just spend it (which also boosts the economy in the short term).
That mass debt repayment and investment in pensions and savings will help the banks stabilize their money supply. This is how they need our money, not through taxpayer handouts done in vaguely shady deals. We need to be using them as banks, with money going in and out. Then we need them to start loaning out that money in a good way, as mortgages on all the cheap houses. Because we're tying to keep them cheap (£30-50k, is that reasonable?) the risks for the people taking the loan is less and so is the risk for the bank. These would be sound mortgages, not dodgy ones. And we get them to fix the interest rate at something reasonable for all or peg it to something sensible. Result: The banks get a steady flow of money over twenty years pretty much guaranteed. No more mortgage casino. No more housing bubbles to cause pointless instability in peoples lives and break up communities by encouraging people to keep moving instead of putting down roots.
This isn't an anti-capitalist plan. It's pro-responsible capitalism. Everyone becomes home owners if they're willing to work for it. You work, you actually get something. All those trained builders, they can team together and start company's. All the architects. All the plumbers. We can subcontract it to them, to hundreds of small specialist companies working together in their local areas to all do their bit. Build your own community and get paid to do it. You can make money, you can become a community leader, you can make enough to move somewhere else and somewhere bigger if you like. But you start off secure in your own home, and get to build whatever you want from there.
For all these new, expanded and revitalised (because we can't just start completely fresh) communities we need new ideas. We need innovators. We need local entrepreneurs with bright ideas for what to do to make things greener and healthier and more fun. If someone has a good idea, we need development banks to fund them. Screw investment banks; development banks. Sort of like angel investors, only not rich poseurs who laugh at you on television shows.
Weren't we once meant to be a nation of shopkeepers. We're gonna need new high streets in our new communities. Stuff looting Greggs! I've had stuff from Greggs, it's actually not that great but people seem mesmerized by it (people during the rioting were really upset that people had smashed up a branch of it). I don't understand it myself. We have a real bakery near me and the difference is incredible. More local bakers please, less chains. We could train people. Butchers too. Let's encourage all this basic stuff, that's the real trickle down. Butchers shops need farmers; which kick starts other industries. People are upset that the rioters attacked a lot of small businesses... we need to get those kids, and their kids, owning those businesses. A shop, especially with a trade, is a perfect small business to keep a whole family employed. That's how they'll come to understand the value of them. Why else should they? They've been brought up on anonymous mega corps selling them everything. Attacking those faceless boxes is a "victimless" crime, right? The big store on the corner, that must be just another box, not a store with a hundred year history. What does that matter either? It's just another shop.
Our town centres have become places filled with chain shops by day and bars by night. People shop, and they drink, that's it. I like a drink but I hate town centre bars. I think it went downhill when they started removing all the chairs of an evening. Standing up all night encourages binge drinking; shots and huge wine glasses are easier to hold than standing up with a pint. Let's have more sit down pubs again, with big comfy chairs. Let's relax and drink, obviously still a lot (we are English!), but more slowly and followed by less puking in the streets.
We need less shopping malls for our kids to hang out in and more playgrounds, playing fields and activity centres. We need things for kids to do during the holidays; fun things that don't cost a lot. They spend their youth hanging out in shopping malls almost exclusively (the middle class and the poor), then we wonder why they go on a nicking spree when the barrier of the law breaks down.
We need to move culture back into our towns. I'm an athiest but I know lots of people aren't, so let's have areas where there are beautiful churches (when did we stop building beautiful churches? why are the newer ones all so ugly and pathetic?) and gorgeous mosques and synagogues. These things can enhance the looks of our towns. On the TV last week I saw the moving canopy at the mosque (Masjid-E-Haram) in Medina, and OMG! (check it out). It looked so beautiful from above when dozens of them open and close like flowers.
Let's have these religious buildings next to museums and theaters and libraries, so people have choices. We need to build our culture, not just import it. It doesn't have to be backwards looking, here radical thinkers are needed... how do we incorporate online life with real life? Can't we have both in the same space more? If people are going to play video games, especially MMORPGS, can't we do it in real communal spaces instead of locked in our homes? It'd be fun! This could be what it means to be English, or to be British. Can't our phones have apps that are about more than consuming. How about treasure hunts? Or you start walking through a park and your phone picks up on something sent digitally and it asks if you want more information about the area's history and wildlife, not just the local shops and bars. They make a big deal about adverts that react as you walk past them, why adverts? Sod adverts, that tech could be so much fun for telling stories across a whole town! Let's think all a bit happy sci fi again.
Our new communities are going to need schools too. So we need teachers and let's pay them well, because they've got these kids futures in their hands. Since we're building them new, let's put kitchens back into them so we can feed our kids more than just reheated pizza for lunch. Let's also not have so many faith schools, not to have a go at faith, but because only learning about one faith is divisive (whichever one it is) and that's what we're trying to avoid. You want to teach kids about faith, then you do it and have your religious leaders do it in your newly revamped religious buildings. Let's have assemblies where every faith, and no faith, can also say a bit about themselves but why not let everyone have a go? Church attendance is down and a lot of people are apparently lying to get into faith schools... which isn't a great way to start down a religious path. You wanna make your pitch, groovy, but lets make the most important thing morality, not just winning numbers over by catching them young. Do you have faith in your religion to convince people or not? If you do, then you have nothing to lose.
Like I say, atheist here, but I appreciate smart people with innovative ideas. People like Jesus and Mohammad were men of their times and some of the things they said and did were compromises to their times, but a lot of it was basic morality that transcends time. You don't need to believe in their gods to see that. Don't steal (don't loot). Don't kill (don't send the army to kill your kids). People are so scared by Britain being invaded by Muslim hordes, but the reality is that Britain has been invaded many times by many people... and mostly they just ended up becoming British. Those looters on the streets were really rather ethnically diverse. They may have been looters but dammit they were all English looters! And the people standing up to them, both defending their homes and cleaning up afterwards, dammit they were all English too! This is our identity. We're shit and we're cool and we're all bloody well English.
Now we just need to pick our morality and make sure our kids all know it. Mohammad was a smart man, smart enough that he recognised that Jesus was also a smart man. He may not have wanted to worship him, but he understood that and he wrote that fact down. Sharia Law is an attempt to form a morality and a way of living together. There are some bits which are abhorrent to our British eyes, but lets look past them for a moment and see the bits that we share, because we do share those basic ideas of morality. Even my atheist morality is ultimately derived from Christianity, it can't help but be because I live here under the general influence. Muslim morality has it's roots alongside Judaism and Christianity. Over time people fuck up, do stupid things and make rituals and they find different paths to gods (or no path or god at all) but basic tenets of morality can remain universal. Mohammad created a marketplace of ideas by setting up a community centre as part of his mosque. He talked to everyone. If we build the mosques and the churches and synagogues together (right next to the libraries and the museums and the schools), then they're one community (not one religion or idea that has to agree) but one community. If you burn the church, it may literally burn the mosque next door and vice versa.
In the marketplace between the buildings is the place to try and talk people round to the idea that we don't think forced marriages and full veils are a good idea. I personally think translucent burkas could be a fun, very British compromise. Also, great for our weather conditions. You could make them waterproof. Then, in 500 years time when things are all less heated, you'll have people up and down this land of ours sticking their heads out the front door, seeing rainclouds and going "ooh looks like rain, better pop my burka on today..." (over their silver space age-type clothing obviously). You don't get more English than a little bit of practical cultural appropriation.
Oh and, whilst I'm on my soapbox, when we have people move into their new homes, I want street parties. I used to love street parties as a kid. When we first moved in to our new home after the council estate, we had a great big street party. It was awesome. We were all from various council estates and getting out was a dream come true. We kept it up for a few years but then house prices went up and a lot of people moved away. The new people were only there for the housing price boom apparently and there was definite churn rate, so there were no more street parties. Now mum's neighbours look at the elderly foreigners at the house on the corner (our lovely house) and sneer about foreigners living in such nice houses and that they don't deserve it. So, more street parties, with cups of tea and proper Victoria Sponge cake (I'd totally break my diet for a real Vicky Sponge with proper buttercream and raspberry jam). We don't need a Royal wedding to have street parties.
Of course all these ideas would get the newly extreme right wing (a bit of culture I wish we hadn't imported from America) and the free marketeers up in arms, but the thing to remember is that they're not actually conservatives. This land is chock full of "small c" conservatives that have come to love schemes like our NHS, despite it being an apparently odious socialist thing. "Small c" conservatives know how to compromise, just as a lot of lefties do, when it means we all get something good out of it. There are lots of battles to be fought between left and right moderates, but we're not so stuck in our ideologies that we can't find a middle way a lot of the time. It's a very English thing to do. Look at our parliament! We had a monarchy ruling exclusively and it turned out shit. So we chucked them out and had a parliament, and it was a bit shit and turned into a dictatorship. So then we compromised and went with having both instead. I feel it's time to compromise a bit more and turn the House of Lords into a chamber of the people selected by lottery, but that's a different post. *wink*
The point is that the free marketeers and vocal right wing are the extremists. They're the radicals. These suggestions of mine aren't that radical. Cutting the government down to nothing but the army, as the free marketeers that make up the current Conservative government ultimately would like to do, that's the really radical plan! They believe that the free market will magically sort everything out if they hand everything over to it. The Invisible Hand of the Market. Honestly, it's like some weird sacrificial thing they've got going on. Let's appease our golden idol by privatizing everything and things will magically work out when we achieve the perfect moment of deregulation. Labour weren't any better, they're free marketeers too these days. Neo-Liberal, Neo-Conservative, New Labour (all the same). For thirty years, the parties between them have been looting our family silver, selling it for their own profit, and telling us that it's for the best whilst it doesn't seem to ever actually work. My plan's not radical; we spend some money collectively because it's about bargaining power, and we get more stuff in return together than we could each individually manage, hopefully including a community spirit that means we get no more massive scale burning and looting.
In the paleo diet community, people will buy a whole good quality, grass-fed cow together and then divide it up between them. The small farmer gets well paid and everyone gets well fed. It's common sense practicality; a mixture of socialism and capitalism that benefits the many; which includes the individual.
Next time I see kids on the street I desperately want them holding placards, not petrol bombs. I want them smiling at the policemen as they pass them, and the policemen smiling back. What I really don't want is tanks on our streets. I watched the Romanian revolution on the TV with my family in 1989. I watched tanks on the streets attacking the nation's youth. One of my most prized possessions is a flag, with the communist emblem cut out, that flew over the TV station in Cluj whilst it was being attacked. It was handed to me by someone who was there, who wanted people outside the country to remember those terrible days just in case they were ever forgotten again by the Romanians themselves. I never want to see the army on our streets going up against our own people. We shouldn't forget how horrible a thought that really is, not even in the heat of the moment. We shouldn't declare war on ourselves.
PS - After we've built all our cheap, energy efficient, homes and trained up all our people, we send our builders around the world to teach the lessons we've learnt to other people. We become a nation sending builders into the world, rather than soldiers. :-)