Britain’s sick society

Watching the ferocious criminality displayed during the riots in British cities during the past weeks, one might be forgiven for thinking that this explosion of mob violence was taking place in some dilapidated god-forsaken Third World country.

For the first three days, the Metropolitan Police (MET) in Britain’s capital city appeared alarmingly powerless to stem the tide. The police have, unfortunately, had to function within a society paralyzed by the politics of victimhood, loudly defended by an increasingly misguided liberal intelligentsia.

This has also been the kneejerk response of the New York Times, pontificating about the alienation and resentments of Britain’s unemployed youth, as if they were the real victims. But as Max Hastings pointed out in the London Daily Mail, the British mayhem was not sparked by hunger or evidence of real want, let alone any social or political agenda. It reflects the emergence not just of an amorphous underclass but of an amoral, brutal subculture in which intellectually challenged youngsters claimed to be showing the rich and the fuzz that “we can do what we like.”

‘It’s about culture’

British Prime Minister David Cameron got it partly right when he responded to the chaos by stating: “This is not about poverty, it’s about culture” – a culture of rights and no responsibilities. But conservatives as much as liberals or leftists are to blame for their foolish support for a dependency culture in which recipients of the largesse of the welfare State have no incentive to be employed. Together with the dependency culture, came the disastrous assumption of entitlement to a high standard of living irrespective of any individual effort. As a result, the nanny-State has created a generation of morally crippled youths with no compunction about willfully smashing up their own communities.

During the last 40 years Britain has seen the breakdown of the family, households with absent fathers, high divorce rates in general, and the encouragement of a sexual free-for-all, embroidered by the dominant clichés of lifestyle choice. Liberal and leftist intellectuals have continued their relentless assault on British national identity in the name of multiculturalism and “anti-imperialism”; calls for drug liberalization became increasingly frequent; education has become more and more “child-centered,” leaving issues of sexual morality and drug-taking largely in the hands of teenagers themselves.

In the United Kingdom, long notorious for its uncouth soccer hooligans and yob culture, there had long been disturbing signs of the incipient breakdown of civilized behavior which were studiously ignored. The current collapse of the British welfare-state model into mindless thuggery is a warning to all countries of the fragile nature of supposedly stable Western democracies.