Het afgebeelde meisje dat in de boeien wordt geslagen - hoe komt de fotograaf er zo dicht bij, of hoe komt de krant aan die foto? - is ambassadrice van het Verenigd Koninkrijk voor de Olympische Spelen van 2012.
Zij vond het heerlijk, rellen, ruiten inbeuken en graaien.
Vast heerlijker dan "netgekleed" poseren tegen een wand met luide namen van Onze Sponsors - nota bene onder andere een "geprivatiseerde" telefoonmaatschappij. Onze Sponsors die Onze Sport hebben ingepikt. Dit achttienjarige meisje weet het verschil nog - zij genoot van het inkegelen van een ruit van een telefoonwinkel. Haar ouders zagen haar op televisie en hebben haar verlinkt - over "gebroken gezinnen" gesproken.
Hier een citaat van de Ierse dichter William Wall uit een stuk dat ik zelf zou hebben willen schrijven:
[C]apitalism is looting the public sphere. Services that citizens have for a hundred or more years considered to be public goods and not to be exploited for the profit of a few – health care, care of the elderly, education, unemployment benefit, old-age pensions, fresh water, sewers, waste disposal, roads and footpaths, urban and rural planning, the postal service, the telephone service, the police, and so on – are subject to systematic and sustained pressure aimed at breaking the link between the citizen and the service. No longer should we think of these things as ‘ours’, except in the sense that we can say a bank is ours. These things are provided to us as goods and services by companies which exercise their right to make a profit out of them – out of us really, out of our pain, our parent’s old age, our children’s childhood, our money troubles, our environment. Citizens are to be redefined as consumers of services. The sole function of the state is to regulate the activities of companies so that monopolies do not develop.
The police function as the guarantor of profit. The police are ‘ours’ only in the way the taxman is ours. The police thus find themselves increasingly (for it was ever thus) with their backs to the corporate wall facing a disinherited citizenry for whom the state is a hostile force. This makes the police political for it is a mistake to think that the looting of the public sphere by corporations and individuals is not political. Of course, nobody on the corporation side wants to call it that. They want it to be understood as common sense. The state is ‘broken’, they say, or it has ‘failed’. Only profit-making companies can do the job efficiently and give good value for money to the consumer. What they really mean is ‘We’re going to take the money and run’. When you’re down and out, feeling low, check your credit rating.
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