The prolonged rioting in England has evidently been the greatest fun to those participating. While they were smashing up shops and stealing whatever they could, the young rioters often found time to tell astonished reporters that they didn’t have any cares or worries about what they were doing, and they would carry on until caught. All the while they kept smiling because they knew they wouldn’t be caught.
Presumably from fear of being accused of overreacting, the police often stood by and took no action even when they could see the smashing and stealing in the street they were in. The rioters seem sure that they are in their rights to help themselves to whatever they want, to wreck shopkeepers, and set fires that burnt out homes and forced one woman to jump out of a blazing upper-floor window (she survived traumatised but miraculously unhurt).
After this party comes the hangover. Those caught looting are a cross-section of the population, they range in age from children to forty-year-olds; one is the daughter of a company director, another is a teaching assistant. What unites them is the sense that they were doing no wrong, and were entitled to take possession of desirable goods. The fact that the police didn’t or couldn’t prevent them but merely watched reinforced the sense of entitlement, as though they were tacitly being allowed to get on with it.
And that is the core of these events. Decades of misconceived social engineering by liberals has caught up with the country, and hit it in the face. Everything and anything that might have provided these rioters with grounds for respecting themselves and others has been systematically undermined by the they-must-be-free-to-express-themselves brigade of liberals. Post-1945 England has been remodeled to be rid of the values that made the country what it had been, and introduce new dogma. No family solidarity, no discipline, no culture, no education, no concept of law, no patriotism: Heavy-duty social engineering of the kind ends in a Hobbesian freedom that self-destructs. Politicians and intellectuals lost in ideological fantasies have made these rioters the pitiful mindless creatures that they are.