According to Max Hastings in the Daily Mail, the rioters “are essentially wild beasts. They respond only to instinctive animal impulses – to eat and drink, have sex, seize or destroy the accessible property of others. Their behaviour on the streets resembled that of the polar bear which attacked a Norwegian tourist camp last week. They were doing what came naturally and, unlike the bear, no-one even shot them for it… At the bottom of our society is a layer of young people with no skills, education, values or aspirations. They do not have what most of us would call ‘lives’. They simply exist. Nobody has ever dared suggest to them that they need feel any allegiance to anything least of all Britain or their community. They do not watch royal weddings or notice test matches or take pride in being Londoners or Scousers or Brummies. Not only do they know nothing of Britain’s past, they care nothing for its present. They have their being only in video games and street fights, casual drug use and crime, sometimes petty, sometimes serious. The notions of doing a nine to five job, marrying and sticking with a wife and kids, taking up DIY or learning to read properly, are beyond their imaginations.”
Mr Hastings has presumably no more direct personal acquaintance with any individuals in this class of “wild beasts” than I have with individuals in the privileged financial classes, and it does not occur to him that the latter could equally be said to “respond only to instinctive animal impulses – to eat and drink, have sex, seize or destroy the accessible property of others”, except that the latter do it on a grander and more ‘elegant’ scale. Or that the financial classes who have laid our economy low make an explicit bargaining point of the fact that they do not “feel any allegiance to anything least of all Britain” – and in their case it has often, but vainly, been suggested to them that they should, after receiving more public subvention than the rioters could dream of.
The idea of Mr Bob Diamond watching the royal wedding on his telly before pottering off to do a little DIY around his oh-so-affordable house is delightful in the extreme and will no doubt do much in coming weeks to re-cement our society.
People will notice that in his list of the deprivations endured by the rioters (“no skills, education, values or aspirations”) Max Hastings curiously omits “jobs” – only to refer to them later as something these people might take up if they only wished, like DIY or literacy lessons.
With Mr Hastings lamenting that the rioters cannot be shot, like polar bears who have, through no fault of their own, got into the wrong place, and with Melanie Phillips, in the same Daily Mail, telling us that it is all the result of a “three-decade liberal experiment which tore up virtually every basic social value. The married two-parent family, educational meritocracy, punishment of criminals, national identity, enforcement of drugs laws, and many other fundamental conventions were all smashed by a liberal intelligentsia hell bent on a revolutionary transformation of society” – with people like this bending the ears and understanding of middle England, hope is low indeed.
