All this week, young British folk have been running rampant through the streets of London, looting and burning as they go. British law enforcement has struggled to contain it and news outlets have struggled to explain it. And really, there seems to be no coherent reason delivered by the mob. New sources have suggested that the rioters are simply mad at the rich. Prime Minister David Cameron has suggested that this is the result of gang war. But none of that explains why the rioting has lasted this long, why it involves almost exclusively unemployed 17-24-year-old’s, or why so many people are involved. Why are they rioting? These aren’t race riots. These aren’t political riots. There has been no leadership, no demands, and no organization at all. From all appearances the rioters are rioting because they want to.
This past fall I read a phenomenal book entitled “Life at the Bottom, the Worldview that Makes the Underclass”. In it Dr. Theodore Dalrymple draws from his experience as a doctor in the British slums. His observations are painful to read and indicators of where this uncontrolled behavior might stem from. Throughout the book Dalrymple pushes home the fact that the British welfare system has stripped the poor of their most basic requirements to function in a civilized society. Take this example from the beginning of chapter 2:
“Last week a 17-year-old girl was admitted to my ward with such acute alcohol poisoning that she could scarcely breath by her own unaided efforts…
She had abjured alcohol for four months before her admission, she told me, but had just returned to the bottle because of a crisis. Her boyfriend, aged 16, had just been sentenced to three years’ detention for a series of burglaries and assaults. He was what she called her “third long-term relationship”—the first two having lasted 4 and 6 weeks, respectively. But after four months of life with the young burglar, the prospect of separation from him was painful enough to drive her back to drink.It happens that I also knew her mother, a chronic alcoholic with a taste for violent boyfriends, the latest of whom had been stabbed in the heart a few weeks before in a pub brawl. The surgeons in my hospital saved his life; and to celebrate his recovery and discharge, he had gone straight to the pub. From there he went home, drunk, and beat up my patient’s mother.My patient was intelligent but badly educated, as only products of the British educational system can be after eleven years of compulsory school attendance. She thought the Second World War took place in the 1970’s and could not give me a singular correct historical date.”
Her story is hardly unique. Dalrymple notes many situations where a mother has had 5 or 6 lovers, all of whom have been abusive, and produced 7 children as a result of these relationships. Those children repeat the patterns of the mother and the fathers.
However the grand experience of the youth in Britain is Saturday night when everyone heads out “clubbing”.
“On Saturday night the center of the city has a quite distinct atmosphere… There is a festivity in the air, but also a menace. The smell of cheap perfume mingles with that of take-out food, stale alcohol, and vomit. The young men—especially those with shaved heads and ironmongery in their noses and eyebrows—squint angrily at the world, as if they expect to be attacked at any moment from any direction, or as if they have been deprived of something to which they were entitled.”
The point of welfare is to take care of the basic needs of the people who are on it and the British system is one of the most advanced. Welfare recipients in Britain are assured housing, food, and medical treatment. What is there to strive for? The British government is enabling the poor to stay poor. They have no reason to strive to find a job because they already have what they need. Thus all they look for is what they want; and what they want is to drink beer, go clubbing, and find a relationship that fits them.
This isn’t isolated to a few select cases. This is the reality of the British slums. Despite (or perhaps because) the British government securing all of the basic needs of those on welfare, all sense of personal responsibility is out the window. Any problems that occur in an individual’s life is blamed on the forces of the government, the people around them, genetics and fate; anything to prevent blame from falling directly on themselves.
Are you seeing how this connects to the riots?
The poor have reaped the fruits of the intellectual. All the aspersions of the intelligentsia: sexual liberation, total security of basic needs, and propagating the idea that all ills, social or otherwise, can be cured through medicine, as though they were the common cold, are all on display in the underclass of Britain in shining glory. They are not grateful; they are bored. There is nothing to stimulate them, nothing to motivate them. They live their lives for themselves, no concept of responsibility to family or society. Family gets in the way and society is built to ensure the handouts keep coming. These rioters saw an opening, I’m sure something sparked them and inspired them with an excuse, and they ran with it.
There is something to be said about the virtue of personal responsibility. Can we really say that the poor in Britain—with their “families” of 7 children fathered by 5 absent fathers, their constant mindless entertainment and clubbing, and lack of any interest to better themselves—are better off than the poor in other countries who daily struggle to provide the very basics for their families? I’m not saying that all the lower class in Britain are worthless slobs who set fire to buildings when they’re bored and I’m not saying that all poor people in countries without a welfare program are saints. I’m just questioning whether or not government intervention, as in the form of British welfare, has substantially improved the welfare of the people it serves.
Tyler Holmes
Proverbs 14:15
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