London Riots: Liberals to blame?

Here a few aticles which might be useful as basis for future discussions on the impact of the London Riots - some with an ideological twist.

1. In the Mail Max Hastings has an excellent, and well substuntiated, rant which is well worth a read: Years of liberal dogma have spawned a generation of amoral, uneducated, welfare dependent, brutalised youngsters A few choice quotes are: A key factor in delinquency is lack of effective sanctions to deter it. From an early stage, feral children discover that they can bully fellow pupils at school, shout abuse at people in the streets, urinate outside pubs, hurl litter from car windows, play car radios at deafening volumes, and, indeed, commit casual assaults with only a negligible prospect of facing rebuke, far less retribution.

John Stuart Mill wrote in his great 1859 essay On Liberty: ‘The liberty of the individual must be thus far limited; he must not make himself a nuisance to other people.’ Yet every day up and down the land, this vital principle of civilised societies is breached with impunity. Anyone who reproaches a child, far less an adult, for discarding rubbish, making a racket, committing vandalism or driving unsociably will receive in return a torrent of obscenities, if not violence. So who is to blame? The breakdown of families, the pernicious promotion of single motherhood as a desirable state, the decline of domestic life so that even shared meals are a rarity, have all contributed importantly to the condition of the young underclass. The social engineering industry unites to claim that the conventional template of family life is no longer valid.

1. On Dale and Co. - London Riots: The Day When Consensual Politics Failed Us All - Gareth Knight asserts that politicians wanting to be all things to all people has resulted in weakness and ineffective handling of the riots.

2. London riots: A flashpoint in broken British society - Tony Parsons, Daily Mirror “You do not make this country a better place by terrorising ordinary men, women and children, or by setting fire to their streets, or by destroying businesses that have served communities and provided jobs for over a hundred years. The riots have no moral authority”

3. ‘Looting opportunists’ and hyper youths do not a revolution make - Amol Rajan, The Independent “Revolutions are not born of hooliganism. These young people are not an organised movement with clear aims. They have no obvious leader, no head office, no command structure and no hierarchy. Far from storming Britain’s Bastille, they are thieving trainers and LCD screens to flog on eBay.”

Just a sample. Might be worth refering to Peter Hitchens’ book ‘The Broken Compass’