A London editor on what's causing the riots

Max Hastings writes for the U.K. Daily Mail. Here's an edited version of his take on the cause of the riots there:

The people who wrecked scores of city blocks, burned vehicles and terrorised communities have no moral compass to make them susceptible to guilt or shame.

Most have no jobs to go to or exams they might pass, and live in single-mother homes, or one in which the father is unemployed.

They are illiterate and innumerate--essentially wild beasts, responding only to instinctive animal impulses — to eat and drink, have sex, and steal or destroy the property of others.

For the depressing truth is that at the bottom of our society is a layer of young people with no skills, education, values or aspirations. They have their being only in video games and street-fights, casual drug use and crime. The notions of doing a nine-to-five job, marrying and sticking with a wife and kids or learning to read properly are beyond their imaginations.

Every company manager knows that if he hires an East European worker he'll get an employee who will 1) show up; 2) work harder; and 3) be better-educated than his or her British counterpart.Who do we blame for this state of affairs?

Ken Livingstone, contemptible as ever, declares the riots to be caused by the Government’s spending cuts. But the rioters’ behaviour isn't due to deprived circumstances or police persecution.

Of course it is true that few have jobs, learn anything useful at school or feel loyalty to anything beyond their local gang. This is not, however, because they are victims of mistreatment or neglect, but because it is fantastically hard to help such people without imposing a measure of compulsion which modern society finds unacceptable.

These kids are what they are because nobody makes them be anything different or better.

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.

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. This has ultimately been sanctioned by Parliament, which refuses to accept, for instance, that children are more likely to prosper with two parents than with one, and that the dependency culture is a tragedy for those who receive something for nothing.

The judiciary colludes with social services and infinitely ingenious lawyers to assert the primacy of the rights of the criminal and aggressor over those of law-abiding citizens, especially if the offender is young.

The police, in recent years, have developed a reputation for ignoring yobbery and bullying, or even for taking the yobs’ side against complainants. The problem is that the law appears to be there to protect the rights of the criminal instead of the victim.

Police regularly arrest householders who have tried to protect themselves and their property from burglars or intruders. Thus it's hardly surprising that criminals have gotten the message that they have little to fear from the cops.

A century ago no child would have dared to use obscene language in class. Today it's commonplace. It symbolises their contempt for manners and decency, and is often a foretaste of delinquency. If a child lacks sufficient respect to address authority figures politely, and faces no penalty for failing to do so, then other forms of abuse — of property and person — come naturally.

So there we have it: a large, amoral sub-culture of young people who lack education because they have no will to learn, and skills which might make them employable. They are too idle to accept work waitressing or doing domestic labour, which is why almost all such jobs are filled by immigrants.

They have no code of values to dissuade them from behaving anti-socially or, indeed, criminally, and virtually no risk of being punished if they do so. They have no sense of responsibility, and look to no future beyond the next meal, sexual encounter or TV football game. They are an absolute deadweight upon society, because they contribute nothing yet cost the taxpayer billions.

Liberals consider them victims because society has supposedly failed to provide them with opportunities to develop their potential. Nonsense. Rather, they are victims of a perverted social ethos which pushes entitlement and denies the underclass the discipline — tough love — which alone might enable some of its members to escape from the swamp of dependency in which they live.

Unless and until those who run Britain introduce incentives for decency and impose penalties for thuggery, there will never be a shortage of young rioters and looters such as those of the past four nights.

Wow.