The breakdown of morality

Many people have offered a cause of the recent riots and most including our own writers and this author have been almost spot on, but without asking one of the rioters themselves maybe we shall never have the exact answer.

There are those on the extreme of British politics who used the mayhem to further their racist ideals by placing the blame solely on black people, not seeing the obvious that there were also black people who did not riot and white people who did riot.

David Starkey, an eminent historian caused a bit of a stir on the BBC’s Newsnight programme when he put the cause down to the whites becoming black, because they speak black as in “yer kna what I mean Mon”. He then went on to accuse a black MP of sounding white. David Starkey obviously doesn’t know that many black people because actually black people do not speak that way, not the ones I know. It is a new language of the street or street talk whether they are black or white.

It is a new class of people we as a nation have produced. Britain has always been ridden with class status and now we see a new class emerging that cannot or will not fit in to the upper, middle or working categories. They are a class all to themselves, an underclass who do not wish to conform to normal practices of behaviour such as respect for other people and property. They have no respect for the law but expect that same law to protect them when they become victims.

“I don’t like being told what to do” is a common complaint from them because they have never been told what to do by a parent, liberal minded school teacher or social worker. In a way they are victims of neglect, neglected by a society that refused to put rules and boundaries before them. Instead they have been brought up over a decade or more of liberalism that tells them if it feels good just do it. Now we are reaping what we have sown.

One writer who is probably spot on is The Daily Mail’s Melanie Phillips who in her article Britain's liberal intelligentsia has smashed virtually every social value sums up the moral collapse we are facing. She blames the breakup of the traditional two parent family where the father is now missing. From this point it would be easy to go on and blame the single mother but let’s bear in mind that the majority of single mothers are not single by choice. Some may be widowed or divorced; others may well have had children thinking that their male partner would stay for the long term only to find he has gone at the first sign of any required commitment. They may try again with another male partner and again so they have three or more children by three or more fathers, and if these children don’t know who their father is they could end up breeding with a half brother or sister not knowing that they share the same father.

It is important to note that Ms Phillips does not tar all lone parent families with the same brush admitting Of course there are many lone parents who do a tremendous job. But we’re talking here about widespread social collapse. And there are whole areas of Britain, white as well as black, where committed fathers are a wholly unknown phenomenon.

We are seeing the results of New Labour’s liberal socialism where it was sexist to suggest that a woman could not bring up children without the help of a man. It was anti feminist to suggest that a woman could not have children on her own and went on to be rewarded by the welfare state.

If we are to mend society we first have to mend the institutions that caused the break up. That includes the Church that was once the bastion of morality. Our education system, welfare system, justice system and social services are all in need of reform. We need to get fathers back into families and may have to teach them how to be fathers again. We must reward families so that they can have one parent at home when the children are at home. We will teach our children that they will do what they are told, because that is the way it always has been. We all have to do what we are told at some point because that is how a moral society works best.