'They can't touch me, I'm still a kid . . . what is the worst they can do? Give me a caution or a curfew I won't obey.'
One 15-year-old looter quoted in yesterday's Mail
Liberals bask in the sobriquet ‘progressives’. They believe in a ‘progressive’ approach to the foetus, and leave it up to the mother to decide whether it should survive to birth or not; they believe in a ‘progressive’ approach to parenthood, which means being non-judgmental when it comes to single-parenthood - or any other domestic arrangement; they believe in a ‘progressive’ attitude toward the disciplining of children, which means that, physically, they are to be made untouchable, by either parent or teacher: they are ‘progressive’ when it comes to the criminal behavior of children, which means an age of criminal responsibly; ASBOs, fines that are never paid, and a whole army of social workers, as well as a whole milieu of other ‘professionals’ to help stem the dam.
Those riots earlier this week were never about government cuts or the slaying of any particular individual; but a reflection upon how our liberal culture has managed to screw things up over five decades; since, in fact, the ending of the Second World War.
You have to have been born, like myself, in the 1950s or before, to appreciate just how troublesome and disturbing it was for my father’s generation to witness the decade of free love and free everything else. My father (and there were thousands like him) found themselves removed from these shores to be unloaded in Burma in the 1940s to fight the Japanese. They had been brought up on a system of moral values that they instinctively knew were right, but by the 1960s had been mocked and scoffed at by the post war generations.
What had happened, was that all forms of ‘traditional’ morality, the kind that had served us since Queen Victoria’s reign, was now to be ridiculed and contemptuously referred to as ‘Victorian values’, by the up and coming ‘progressive’ elite: and as the decades evolved and the old moral compass, now trampled upon, was never replaced by the new establishment with any other alternative; there was no direction accept to give those who disrupted society what they demanded.
Morality became a dirty word, unless it fitted a liberal criteria. ‘Progressive politics’ became the future and what it said went. Our burgeoning liberal culture suffered somewhat of a setback in the late 1970s when a knew Restoration threatened. But even Margaret Thatcher could not have the same impact socially, that she undoubtedly managed to have industrially.
TODAY, LIBERAL PROGRESSIVENESS has advanced to such a degree that we are now immersed in Human Rights legislation from Europe (it’s a long story); but what it means is that the criminal has rights that effectively protects him or her at every level of their conviction, leading to and including their imprisonment and how they are treated while in prison.
The virus of liberal progressiveness knows of no political boundary; it has its home in all the political parties, as well as our civil service. While our academia has been the main supplier of its influence on our society at every level, particularly within the humanities.
If ever those rioters had an excuse for what they did it was provided by liberal Britain: and it will be provided yet again once the aftermath has escaped the memory of the majority who have been appalled by what has happened.
No doubt, that at such a time, Channel Four will do a programme to show the human side of the rioters. Even today, Sky News interviewed four of these reprobates who had run amuck earlier. Their faces were covered and it seemed that their fashion sense was a mark of earlier theft. But this did not stop Sky’s interviewer from allowing these degenerates to be interviewed while covering their faces; and no doubt promising them anonymity from police involvement.
THOSE WHO ENGAGED upon such a riot, knew their rights, and how helpless society was in punishing them. Their ‘rights’ were given them, and are the legacy of well intentioned middle class liberal idealism, which sought to salvage their conscience by being un-judgemental toward ‘less favoured beings’ than themselves.
Those who took part in the riotous events of this week deserve a punishment that will stand as a deterrent for such behaviour in the future. But as usual, despite David Cameron’s promise yesterday, very few of those who took part will receive a prison sentence, and if they do, it will be of a far shorter stretch than the term demanded by the court.
Our whole liberal justice system is out alignment with the times in which we live. Perhaps it has always been the case, but today it needs to take cognisance of the fact that if the law cannot fulfill its purpose then, as many members of the community have already shown themselves prepared to do; people will take the law into their own hands.
If the law cannot fulfill its purpose, then it is the right of every citizen to take matters into their own hands to protect themselves and their families and community.
Many of us on the centre Right have been left frustrated by, not only this week’s events, but by the whole panoply of liberal power in this country and its almost deferential response to this week’s happenings.
Being on the centre right, the idea that people should take the law into their own hands is anathema. But if such people are left without the full protection of the law, what then are they to do? Just lay down and take whatever their persecutors determine to be their fate? Or say to themselves; if the law can no longer give us protection then we must look to ourselves. Which is what many have chosen to do since these riots first erupted, and who can blame them?
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