Quote:
Originally Posted by mikey_the_redneck
This article articulates what I was trying to get at.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/ar...ial-value.html
It's about moral decay...
"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."
The article gets into the breakdown of the family, feminism, education, multi-culturalism, welfare/entitlement culture etc. |
While I do think a lot of what is said on that article is true, I think it's a gross oversimplification to lay this all on misguided liberals.
It's easy to pin the blame solely on those who tried and failed.
One should remember that many agreed that changes in the school system and the society in general needed to be done. The liberals offered their solutions, with admittedly many results that weren't what they were supposed to be. Still, to say that this would never had happened if it wasn't for the bloody liberals is just misguided political rhetorics. It's been 16 years since the last similar riot, which is quite normal for London.
The fact that it's bigger than normal is notable, and does tell something about failed policies, but those are not solely liberal policies that have failed.
(I'm not counting the 99-01 riots, as those were somewhat more political and I think had more to do with the times than the city itself.)
For some historical perspective, the shunning of values like the nuclear family, respect for authority and education date pretty far back in the British underclasses, especially in London. Certainly further than the existence of the labour party and before social liberalism was any kind of a factor.
Very similar descriptions of the low moral standards of the London "commoners" and "underclass" that we read today can easily be found dating back to at least the late 19th century. The images of the absent/transient, drinking and violent fathers and the self-absorded, drinking mothers neglecting a full litter of children with different fathers have been semi-iconic even then. The (propable urban legend) of the mother auctioning her daughter in a London bar to get money to drink is very old.
Also, ever since the industrial revolution, when the "police" (a term which needs to be used liberally if compared to todays standards) and the army were regurarly used to violently put down worker unrest in mines and factories, a tradition of distrust towards the authorities and the upper classes has existed among the British working classes. (And for a long time with good reason, one might argue.) One of the side-effects of this has been the shunning away from education, since that could lead to rising up in the class system, and who wants their child to grow up to be the enemy?
Also, statistically speaking, the chances of being caught is a much better stick against crime than tough punishments. So all those cuts to police funding which is all the rage these days regardless of who's in power, those play a big part in all of this.