Without in any way seeking to minimize the horror and tragedy of
the Norwegian gun massacre, the British riots in a way seem more
serious. The Norwegian killings were the work of a lone madman, who
at most was possibly encouraged by a very small group of
associates. The madman seems to have thought he was furthering some
kind of cause, even if it is impossible to say exactly what.
The British riots, however, had no cause. A suspected
drug-dealer was apparently shot by police in London, and cities all
over the country have gone up in smoke. It is as if the country has
been living on a ticking bomb that no one was aware
existed.
Picking one’s way through the often self-censored,
politically correct reportage, there appears to have been a racial
element in the riots. But many of the rioters filmed were white,
and some at least appear to be ordinary middle-class people.
Although there is obviously a class element, with some extreme
leftists calling for open class warfare, the main sufferers have
been, as always, small shopkeepers, householders, and workers whose
employment has been destroyed. These riots have caused deep,
life-damaging suffering. Nothing like this occurred in the gray,
straitened, austere Britain of the immediate post-war period, when
there was even greater economic hardship than today.
There have been riots in Britain before, but they
generally had at least some kind of identifiable cause.
Similarly, the riots in Europe (against the cutting of plainly
unsustainable government benefits) were in pursuit of
something. In the British riots thousands of people seem
to have been caught up in a frenzy of indiscriminate destruction
for its own sake. Even looting was secondary to destroying. And yet
it is only a few weeks since the Royal Wedding appeared to
bring the country together in a great outburst of patriotic pride
and rejoicing.
It is obvious that generations of policies of
self-destructive liberalism and a deep-seated social nihilism are
coming home to roost.
It may be dawning on some political leaders that the
education, family, immigration and criminal justice policies of
successive, but principally Labour, governments have created an
under-class not only lacking in the most basic skills necessary for
employment but also lacking in the most basic values of human
conduct. Discipline in many schools (except against expressions of
political incorrectness) has largely been abandoned, with
predictable results. The so-called “softly, softly” approach to
policing, which has enthralled many liberalistic police chiefs, may
also be consigned to the scrap-heap of bad ideas.
The rioters are not exclusively feral youths. Middle-aged
and apparently middle-class people have been seen looting and
wrecking shops where they have been customers for years and where
the shopkeepers whose lives they have destroyed looked on them as
friends. Not only the “capitalistic” icons of business premises
have been burnt but also family homes. It does not begin to make
even bad sense.
There may well be a connection between the massive
breakdown of morality and the recent revelations of widespread and
largely unpunished corruption in the political class, with blatant
theft from the public purse on both sides of Parliament. True, many
of the rioters are probably people who never read a newspaper, but
some idea of the appalling example British law-makers have set may
have filtered down to them.
It has been the Church of England’s function and duty to
provide the population with a moral education and compass, and over
several centuries its establishment was vaguely justified in these
terms. Lately, it has let the nation down. The Church of England,
though it may be to some extent the victim of sensationalist
journalism, and although it still contains some good people,
appears pre-occupied with homosexuality, the “sinfulness” of carbon
emissions, anti-Semitic boycotts of Israel, and, in the
pronouncements of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the possible
acceptability of Sharia law. A large part of a whole generation
literally does not know right from wrong, good from
evil.
Another element of toxicity in the social cocktail is a
culture that glorifies “badness” and ugliness, from the posthumous
near-canonization of Amy Winehouse and the honoring (even the
official honoring) of other icons of the drug culture to the
celebration of ugliness in the paintings of Lucian Freud and
Francis Bacon.
The British National Party is the most probable
beneficiary from the rioting. Already the BNP is putting out
leaflets demanding the presence of the Army on the streets. Many
people, traumatized by the last few days, are likely to
agree.
