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By Robert Taylor on the November 21st, 2011
As I wrote in a column for The American Spectator last week, Britain has been sleepwalking into these riots for many decades.
The riots are the logical conclusion to the decades-long disintegration of civilised behaviour that leads, in many town centres every weekend, to beer-swilling thugs urinating against people’s door steps and throwing up on street corners. Yet because this disintegration has happened gradually, we’ve failed to notice how bad it’s got.
Until last week.
Now, commentators, politicians, tweeters and pub conversationalists are asking the same question. Why did it happen? Right-wingers think it’s a lack of discipline and personal responsibility. Left-wingers say it’s the absence of opportunity and hope, made worse by cuts in public services.
These are interesting theories. But we’re debating it all 40 years too late. From soccer hooliganism in the 1970s and 1980s to the gradual decline of family life and our education system, our society has been disintegrating before our eyes, throughout our lives. Hardly surprising then that youths with an inclination to intimidate, loot and riot have got bolder and bolder – especially when they clearly get such a thrill from it.
Who is to blame for all this?
Just about every British person who is only now asking “why?” We are all to blame for turning a blind eye for so long.
