Scary nights in old Blighty
By Wesley Pruden
PrudenPolitics.com
LONDON.
The wolves have made their way into the parlor again
in England, and this time it looks like the
powers-that-be think it’s serious.
The government of the uneasy coalition of
Conservatives and Liberal Democrats is trying to
talk tough after several nights of murder and mayhem
in the bleak public-housing tracts of the poor and
unemployed in London, Birmingham, Manchester,
Liverpool and other cities.
But in a society nurtured for five decades on the
dole, tough talk is often regarded as all but
seditious. The cracks in Prime Minister David
Cameron’s coalition are wide, deep and enduring.
Mr. Cameron talks of a “moral breakdown” of British
society and warns that a revival of traditional
values is necessary for the survival of Britain as
we know it. Simon Hughes, deputy leader of the
Liberal Democrats, prescribes redistribution of the
wealth and good will, happy talk, and avoiding
“kneejerk” solutions. “This means we must not cut
taxes for the rich or take away public support for
the needy,” he says.
This is the prescription for class warfare that
Barack Obama—the onetime community organizer who
remains enormously popular on the wrong side of the
Atlantic—surely envies. Mr. Cameron, with his blunt
assessment of what inevitably goes wrong in a
society on the dole, not so much.
“This has been a wake-up call for our country,” the
prime minister said on Monday morning after a week
of violence in the street and uneasiness at the
hearth. “Social problems that have been festering
for decades have exploded in our face. Do we have
the determination to confront the slow-motion moral
collapse that has taken place in parts of our
country these past few generations?”
The prime minister’s remarks, dismissed by his
critics as merely a sermon that nobody needs,
followed a weekend rally for “peace and racial
unity” in Birmingham, the nation’s second-largest
city. It was near Birmingham that three Pakistani
men, guarding their shops from looters, were run
down and killed by a car that mowed them down as if
they were weeds on the roadside. The driver of the
car was charged with murder.
What terrorized everyone, even those far from the
madding mob, was the perception, if maybe not the
reality, of cops who can’t seem to get control of a
seething situation. What terrorizes the prime
minister, as well as many others, is the implication
in the footage taken from scores of security cameras
in looted stores: a ballerina in an electronics
store, an official of the 2012 Olympics next year in
London joining in the trashing of a shop, and the
sight the next day of a trainer of teachers showing
up in magistrates court, hiding his face in shame.
“The message was this,” said an editorial in The
Observer, a London Sunday newspaper, “these are not
the representatives of a deprived underclass. They
are individuals who . . . lost their moral compass.”
Some Englishmen take comfort in a theory of cyclical
slum violence, noting that similar riots wracked
Liverpool, Bristol and several London neighborhoods
in the early 1980s, and England is still standing.
This too shall pass, and all that. But this is not
the England of Mrs. Miniver, of roast beef and
Yorkshire pudding on Sunday and the stiff upper lip
always, as many Americans still imagine. An enormous
wave of immigration from South Asia, Africa and the
Caribbean has changed, probably irretrievably, the
character of Mrs. Miniver’s kind and gentle country.
And here, maybe, is a lesson for other countries
that are such a magnet for “huddles masses, yearning
to breathe free.” Or at least to own a car, a
television set or a washer-dryer. Many of these new
immigrants yearn for the better life, but are never
required to conform their lives to the customs,
traditions or even the language of their adopted
land.
“The depressing truth is that at the bottom of our
society is a layer of young people with no skills,
education, values or aspirations,” essayist Max
Hastings wrote the other day in the Daily Telegraph.
“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 to Britain or their
community. . . . 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 drugs and crime, sometimes petty,
sometimes serious.”
Tough stuff. But last week the crime was serious.
The powers-that-be are rattled.