Jay Kuten: Resentment grows over social gaps

THIS week, the Libyans are ending the 42-year regime of Muammar Gaddafi. On the surface there seems little to connect that revolution and the others in Tunisia and Egypt - the "Arab Spring" - with the peaceful protests by the middle class in Israel - the "Israeli Summer" - and with the riots in England; a Guy Fawkes week brought forward in time. After all, those repressive Arab regimes were ruthless despotic dictatorships, able and willing to crush dissent by any means possible. Despotic regimes bear little in common with democracies. But the citizens of all of these countries, Arabs, Israelis, Britons have in common their dissatisfaction with government and with perceptions of unfair treatment.

The tinder that inflamed the entire Arabic crescent was the result of rising food prices and the act of self-immolation by a street vendor, Muhammad Al Bouazizi, whose goods were abruptly confiscated from his unlicensed cart by an officious mocking police officer. Al Bouazizi was a poor 26-year-old Tunisian who could not find a job after finishing college. Refusing to join the army of the unemployed, his pride led him to become a street vendor. The rest is history.

The death of a poor, educated young man started a series of revolutions whose outcome remains undetermined.

In Israel, a relatively better-off middle class has taken to the streets in unprecedented numbers to protest their government's failures to rein in monopolistic practices of a small group of crony capitalists - an oligarchy - whose actions keep prices higher than in Europe. The protests call attention to the unfair distribution of government funds to settlers in the territories and to the ultra-orthodox while the middle class citizens, whose taxes support that government, are facing declining standards of living.

What Israeli protesters are incensed about is the growing perception that government doesn't represent their interests and they're questioning the communal foundations of the state of Israel, itself.

The British behaviour is thoroughly unacceptable. There is no excuse for the criminality we saw on TV. The guilty should face the law. That said, the response of the Prime Minister, David Cameron in blaming the looting and burning on a compound of national moral decline, bad parenting and perverse inner-city cultures, reeks of political opportunism and hypocrisy.

The knee-jerk appeal to the Jacobin instinct for punishment as the answer to all social ills deflects from the serious questions raised by the phone hacking scandal, with its tentacles that encompass bribery of the police and which reach into 10 Downing Street itself.

While there may be decay in the moral fibre of British society, it is certainly not only at the bottom. The spectacle of parliamentarians helping themselves to overly generous expense accounts from the public trough is still sharp in memory.

And while justice for rioters is sure, swift, and perhaps draconian, the rich bankers who helped bring down the world economy have yet to face any consequence at all. The US has also seen a deterioration of noblesse oblige. Bankers happily accepted government bailouts for their own misdeeds and no one even faces prosecution. Meanwhile, Republicans in their refusal to raise taxes on the upper 2 per cent, practise class warfare by demanding that the poor pay for the excesses of the rich. And resentment mounts.

New Zealand is not free of social inequity. The current Government continues down the road to resentment, having financed tax cuts for the better off by increasing GST on everyone and cutting benefits. I would like to say that unfairness may well be punished at the ballot.

Unfortunately, while the National hedgehog has one idea - cutting taxes - the Labour opposition is insufficiently foxy. It wants to cut GST on fruits and vegetables. What's revolutionary about that? To paraphrase an old advert, where's the beef?