By Melanie Phillips, The Daily Mail
So now the chickens have well and truly come home terrifyingly to roost. The violent anarchy that has taken hold of British cities is the all-too-predictable outcome of a three-decade liberal experiment which tore up virtually every basic social value.
Under
The married two-parent family, educational meritocracy, punishment of criminals, national identity, enforcement of the drugs laws and many more fundamental conventions were all smashed by a liberal intelligentsia hell-bent on a revolutionary transformation of society.
Those of us who warned over the years that they were playing with fire were sneered at and smeared as Right-wing nutters who wanted to turn the clock back to some mythical golden age.
Looters in Peckham. The riots have been fuelled by moral collapse says Melanie Phillips
Now we can see what they have brought about in the unprecedented and horrific scenes of mob violence, with homes and businesses going up in flames, and epidemic looting.
The idea that they should not steal other people’s property, or beat up and rob passers-by, appears to be as weird and outlandish to them as the suggestion that they should fly to the moon.
These youths feel absolutely entitled to go ‘on the rob’ and steal whatever they want. Indeed, they are incredulous that anyone should suggest they might pass up such an opportunity.
What has been fuelling all this is not poverty, as has so predictably been claimed, but moral collapse. What we have been experiencing is a complete breakdown of civilised behaviour among children and young people straight out of William Golding’s seminal novel about childhood savagery, Lord Of The Flies.
Trouble in Manchester last night. Melanie Phillips says youths feel absolutely entitled to go ‘on the rob’ and steal whatever they want
There has been much bewildered talk about ‘feral’ children, and desperate calls upon their parents to keep them in at night and to ask them about any stolen goods they are bringing home.
As if there were responsible parents in such homes! We are not merely up against feral children, but feral parents.
Of course these parents know their children are out on the streets. Of course they see them staggering back with what they have looted. But either they are too drunk or drugged or otherwise out of it to care, or else they are helping themselves to the proceeds, too.
As David Cameron observed yesterday, there are clearly pockets of society that are not just broken, but sick.
Melanie Phillips said every problem was instituted or exacerbated by the Labour government under Tony Blair
The causes of this sickness are many and complex. But three things can be said with certainty: every one of them is the fault of the liberal intelligentsia; every one of them was instituted or exacerbated by the Labour government; and at the very heart of these problems lies the breakdown of the family.
For most of these children come from lone-mother households. And the single most crucial factor behind all this mayhem is the willed removal of the most important thing that socialises children and turns them from feral savages into civilised citizens: a father who is a fully committed member of the family unit.
Of course there are many lone parents who do a tremendous job. But we’re talking here about widespread social collapse. And there are whole areas of Britain, white as well as black, where committed fathers are a wholly unknown phenomenon.
In such areas, successive generations are being brought up only by mothers, through whose houses pass transitory males by whom these women have yet more children — and who inevitably repeat the pattern of lone and dysfunctional parenting.
The result is fatherless boys who are consumed by an existential rage and desperate emotional need, and who take out the damage done to them by lashing out from infancy at everyone around them. Such children inhabit what is effectively a different world from the rest of society. It’s a world without any boundaries or rules. A world of emotional and physical chaos.
A world where a child responds to the slightest setback or disagreement by resorting to violence. A world where the parent is unwilling or incapable of providing the loving and disciplined framework that a child needs in order to thrive.
Yet instead of lone parenthood being regarded as a tragedy for individuals, and a catastrophe for society, it has been redefined as a ‘right’.
When Labour came to power in 1997, it set about systematically destroying not just the traditional family but the very idea that married parents were better for children than any other arrangement.
Instead, it introduced the sexual free-for-all of ‘lifestyle choice’; claimed that the idea of the male breadwinner was a sexist anachronism; and told girls that they could, and should, go it alone as mothers.
This was the outcome of the shattering defeat of Tony Blair, in the two years or so after he came to power, at the hands of the ultra-feminists and apostles of non-judgmentalism in his Cabinet and party who were determined, above all, to destroy the traditional nuclear family.
Blair stood virtually alone against them, and lost.
One of these ultra-feminist wreckers was Harriet Harman. The other night, she was on TV preposterously suggesting that cuts in educational allowances or youth workers had something to do with young people torching and looting shops, robbing and leaving people for dead in the streets.
But Harman was one of the principal forces in the Labour government behind the promotion of lone parenthood and the marginalisation of fathers. If anyone should be blamed for bringing about the conditions which have led to these appalling scenes in our cities, it is surely Ms Harman.
And this breaking of the family was further condoned, rewarded and encouraged by the Welfare State, which conceives of need solely in terms of absence of money, and which accordingly subsidises lone parenthood and the destructive behaviour that fatherlessness brings in its train.
Welfare dependency further created the entitlement culture that the looters so egregiously display. It taught them that the world owed them a living. It taught them that their actions had no consequences. And it taught them that the world revolved around themselves.
The result of this toxic combination of welfare and non-judgmentalism was an explosion of elective lone parenthood and dysfunctional behaviour transmitted down through the generations at the very bottom of the social heap — creating, in effect, a class apart.
Phillips: If anyone should be blamed for bringing about the conditions which have led to these appalling scenes in our cities, it is surely Harriet Harman, pictured
Once, children would have been rescued from their disadvantaged backgrounds by schools which gave them not just an education but structure and purpose to their lives.
But the liberal intelligentsia destroyed that escape route, too. For its onslaught upon marriage — the bedrock institution of society — with a tax system that penalises married couples with a wife who doesn’t work, was replicated by an onslaught upon the understanding and very identity of that society. Instead of transmitting knowledge to children, teaching was deemed to be an attack upon a child’s autonomy and self-esteem.
Thus it was that teachers adopted the ‘child-centred’ approach, which expected children not only to learn for themselves but also to decide for themselves about behaviour such as sexual morality or drug-taking.
The outcome was that children were left illiterate and innumerate and unable to think. Abandoned to wander through the world without any guidance, they predictably ended up without any moral compass.
All of this was compounded still further by the disaster of multiculturalism — the doctrine which held that no culture could be considered superior to any other because that was ‘racist’.
That meant children were no longer taught about the nation in which they lived, and about its culture. So not only were they left in ignorance of their own society, but any attachment to a shared and over-arching culture was deliberately shattered.
Instead of forging social bonds, multiculturalism dissolved them — and introduced instead a primitive war of all against all, in which the strongest groups would destroy the weak.
Closely related to this was ‘victim culture’, in which all minority groups were regarded as victims of the majority. So any bad behaviour by them was excused and blamed on the majority.
In similar vein, all criminal wrongdoing was excused on the basis that the criminal couldn’t help himself, as he was the victim of circumstances such as poverty, unemployment, or as yet illusory cuts in public spending. The human rights of the criminal became seen as more important than the safety and security of his victims. Punishment became a dirty word. So the entire criminal justice system turned into a sick joke, with young hoodlums walking off with community sentences or Asbos which they held in total contempt.
Mr Cameron has declared that all those convicted of violent disorder in these riots will go to prison.
Really? Isn’t it more likely that they will end up on some community penalty which will see them taken on trips to Alton Towers to make up for their disadvantaged upbringing? This is the normal response of our sentimentalised and addle-brained criminal justice officials.
In short, what we have seen unfolding before our horrified gaze over the past four days in Britain is the true legacy of the Labour years.
The social and moral breakdown behind the riots was deliberately willed upon Britain by Left-wing politicians and other middle-class ideologues who wrap their utter contempt for the poor in the mantle of ‘progressive’ non-judgmentalism.
These are the people who — against the evidence of a mountain of empirical research — hurl execrations at anyone who suggests that lone parenthood is, in general, a catastrophe for children (and a disaster for women); who promote drug liberalisation, oppose selective education (while paying for private tutors for their own children) and call those who oppose unlimited immigration and multiculturalism ‘racists’.
And the real victims of these people ‘who know best’ are always those at the bottom of the social heap, who possess neither the money nor the social or intellectual resources to cushion them against the most catastrophic effects of such nonsense.
Britain was once an ordered society that was the envy of the world — the most civilised, the most gentle and law-abiding.
Can Broken Britain be put together again? David Cameron is commendably talking tough: but will he have the stomach for tough action?
Will he, for example, remove the incentives to girls and women to have babies outside marriage? Will he dismantle the concept of entitlement from the Welfare State? Will he vigorously enforce the drug laws? Will he end the kid-glove treatment of ‘victim groups’, and hold them to account for their behaviour in exactly the same way as everyone else?
Repairing this terrible damage also means, dare I say it, a return to the energetic transmission of Biblical morality.
Anyone heard from the Archbishop of Canterbury about the riots? Anyone care to guess what he will eventually say about them? Quite.
When church leaders stop prattling like soft-headed social workers and start preaching, once again, the moral concepts that underlie our civilisation, and when our political leaders decide to oppose the culture war that has been waged against that civilisation rather than supinely acquiescing in its destruction, then — and only then — will we start to get to grips with this terrible problem.
Until then, within the smouldering embers of our smashed and burned-out cities, we can only look upon the ruins of the Britain we have so dearly loved; the Britain that once led the world towards civilisation, but is now so tragically leading the way out.
Over the past millenia, Jews have come with ideas which have been regurgitated by others (including Jews) and then later on were or are used to destroy Jews.
I.E.: Liberalism, socialism, communism, capitalism, atomic bomb (Iran)and the list goes on and on and on…
Yes, Quigley. We must all be like wild animals. And an economy based on service to others is evil. Sure.
The Dark Secret of the Left is exposed wherever it’s tried. The ghosts of humanity haunting Russia drink themselves to death. Killing any hapless babies they are sober enough to conceive. Living only to fulfill selfish pleasure. And then the Left condemns the poor wretches they have created. And they live in Hell together, master and slave.
I don’t like to quote the NT on this site, but this passage describes our situation spot on: “People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God”
@ steven L:
Oh give that class warfare nonsense a rest!
They deserve IT. Europe deserves it and the US is moving in the same direction thanks to the elites from all sides.
What is happening is also an indictment of blind capitalism.
Archpriest of HITA: Circa 1100’s, Spain or what is today Spain.
He was called to order by his Bishop after having severely beaten a would be assailant/robber that had ambushed him while trying to cross a meshift plank bridge over a small stream.
The Bishop informed his that his action needed explanation.
He responded:
“A D.os rogando
e con el palo dando”
Pray to G.d and used the heavy stick.
Case closed…
It is high time to severely set aside both the corrupters of values and destroyers of society before any more ado. Those elements hijacked words such as “peace”, etc. delivering exactly the opposite.
In Israel the foreign paid “protesting community leaders” are unmasked yet one has to accept that there are some taxation subjects that must be dealt with. Cartels are also subjects.
Otherwise there is a superbly designed and managed economic plan in place.
What is happening in the Arab world has little connection with the local scene.
In Europe and the US the value system has been intentionally and severely compromised by cadres bent on social warfare and destruction. Their industrial base has been decimated by financial pirates and unions.
It is up to the people to retake control.
The options are few and the time is running out
To paraphrase Pirkai Avot:
Pray for the welfare of the government, because if it wasn’t for fear of the government, every man would eat his neighbor alive.
I have been predicting this societal collapse for several years now as have been many other writers who have been able to look at what is REALLY happening in Europe in psychological terms rather than in simple economic terms. Claire Berlinski made note of it in her book. There is a MORAL existensial collapse of the principles that guided Europe for about two hundred years. We are seeing the inevitable results of years of indoctrination in the philosophical concept of Relativism. The scientific theories of Einstein has permeated the consciousness of the intelligentsia to the point where the moral standards of our Judeo-Christian heritage has vanished into oblivion. There is no such thing as right and wrong. There is no good and bad, There is no such thing as individual RESPONSIBILITY. What we have is individual ENTITLEMENT. I have rights. I have needs.I want this;I want that. And I deserve those rights whether I work for them or not.
This philosophical revolution has gone hand in hand with a deliberate political strategy brought about by the idea of the Collectivist state. Only the State can give you the security and prizes that you want. The State will be your father anf your mother. The State will be your liberator and your protector. The State will free you to be yourself. But there is one institution that has always stood in the way of the Collectivist ideal. That institution is the FAMILY. How can one be loyal and subservient to the Collective if he is bound by deeper ties to his small social unit with its own innate responsibilities. Thus the collectivists have over the last 100 years or so deliberately sought to destroy the family unit — and they have nearly succeeded. Melanie Phillips is absolutely right. We have brought about a nation of savages without any moral restraint. and these savages learn very quickly. Did not people realize that when they watched on TV last year the Islamic riots wherein the authorities did absolutely NOTHING but flee before the rioters like craven cowards that other groups would draw a quick conclusion. I can do whatever I want. Who is to stop me.
There is also one other factor working to destabilize European society at every intellectual level. This factor is beginning to show its head in the U.S.A. as well. Western society is losing its sense of PURPOSE. It is losing a sense of the feeling that there is something else in MAN’s existence that is worth striving for, worth sacrificing ones self for, other than merely eating, drinking and screwing (as Ann Coulter so elegantly phrased it). Europe’s moral purpose and justification died with the Holocaust. Obama, in the U.S. is attempting to erase the concept of American exceptualism. Witness, for all practical purposes, his cancellation of the space program. America, under his tutelage is to become one nation among many; no better, and perhaps a lot less. And when America goes the collectivists will have won and the world will become a free-fpr-all. The two main collectivist philosophies, one Theological (Islam)) and the other political (Socialism) will fight it out to inherit a world I don’t want my children to have to live in. The ironic part about this end is that we Jews will be used by both sides to further their ends and will suffer the greatest consequences.
Just as it is difficult to reform bad behavior, it is unlikely that any Western country will be able to return to the days of two parent, mother and father families, in which the mother is a female and the biologic parent, and the father is a male and the biologic parent as well. And given the way that the Judeo Christian Bible has been villified and consigned to the trash bin of history, it is equally unlikely that this book of moral and ethical behavior will ever be ressurected.
The remaining civilized people in the West will have to start using violence and harsh physical punishment to save themselves, if not, they might as well commit collective suicide, because the barbarians they have sired, nurtured, and rewarded will not be stopped otherwise.
As I remarked before to Yamit that sounds dammed good, compared to marriage as portrayed on our bourgeois tv screens
The thing that stands out for me, the more I learn about my dog and cat, is the supreme intelligence of the anim,al world in comparision to the depraved nature of greedy and profit (status) obsessed capitalism, as portrayed in the markets today, as portrayed in Hollywood, as portrayed in the continuation of evil antisemitism
Bourgeois society once had a moral code, it no longer has, or its morals are the morals of Fascism
How can you overlook that the morals of these lumpen youth, most likely directed by the British criminal caste, is very closely in communion and goes in tandem witht he British NATO and United Nations policy towards Israel, towards descendents of Nazis in the Palestinians, towards Islam in the Magreb as we speak British Tornadoes murder over a 100 in Libya just 2 nights ago, and we know what the British elite did in Yugoslavia…
Hi, Laura
Hopefully, these riots are bringing a reality home to the average Brit that the Leftist Elite can’t gainsay. I said “hopefully”; because in the US, similar riots in the 1960s have led to our current PC, topsy-turvy social atmosphere orchestrated by feminist lesbian pro-Palestinian dingbats. The riots of the 60s ultimately gave us Gay Marriage, and arresting parents for disciplining their children. Maybe the current riots will give us Marriage with Animals, and children disciplining their children. What will follow that? Marriage with corpses, and horses training cowboys? It seems there’s no end to the depravity of our leftist social engineers.
Liberals are incapable of recognizing that their own policies result in catastrophe. So their response to these situations is to claim they haven’t gone far enough in implementing welfare programs. Or do they purposely aim to destroy civilization?
That’s a good question. He’s up against antisocial thugs who plainly want to take down the country. This WOULD be a good time to make a stand; but that depends on how far gone the country is. Who’s going to take on the gangs? It seems as though the police are incapable. Who’s left to carry the torch? Rival white gangs? Is there such a thing? It seems that Europe is more spooked by the thought of patriotic brownshirts than it is by rampaging blacks. Maybe the UK can lease Assad or Qadaffi for a few weeks.
I’m talking pretty big right now. We’ll see if the US isn’t in the same situation in near future. Israel and the US have been experiencing middle-class protests, which are mild. England got a taste of genuine lower-class thuggery, as did France not too long ago. The “Arab Spring”, France, the UK, Tel Aviv… the bottom line seems to be a sour economy, and budget cuts. More is to come, to be sure.
Melanie, spot on as usual. As a child of the British empire … well, the barbarians aren’t at the gates, they have overrun the whole place.