Here’s a comment which I have just posted over at Anna Raccoon’s place, responding to various people who kindly offered their thoughts on an edited version of my longer Commentator piece about the riots.

Thus my added points:

As the diverse comments above and the wider tsunami of media ‘analysis’ go to show, it’s impossible in practice – and perhaps also in theory – (a) easily to identify any especially strong and immediate ’cause’ of these disturbances, let alone (b) then proceed to work out some policy responses which might actually make a positive difference.

My view of all this draws on my life in the Diplomatic Service in late apartheid S Africa, post-communist Russia, post-conflict Bosnia, post-Milosevic Serbia and finally EU-joining Poland.

In each of these countries there were large numbers of people who in one way or the other were poor, alienated, disaffected, angry and so on. Yet none of them produced the smirking gleeful destruction seen in England this week. Read this brutal piece by Theodore Dalrymple to see what I am getting at: https://www.spectator.co.uk/essays/all/7157308/its-fun-to-smash-things.thtml – especially this brilliant paragraph:

Terms such as ‘unrest’ and ‘disaffection’, which trip so lightly off the tongue of those who do not want to face a far more disturbing reality, do not explain the behaviour of the rioters. It is obvious, for instance, that if there were any justice in the world — at least if justice is the right return for voluntary effort and conduct — the young rioters would be much worse off than they are. Their problem is not that they have been given too little, but that they have deserved nothing

Where do we find the ‘root cause’ for such perniciously bad and mainly banal, ignorant attitudes amongst these rioters? Hopeless parenting? Weak schools? Corrupt politicians? Greedy capitalists? All the above and more? Yes.

But where did the hopeless parenting and weak schools and the rest themselves come from? Tempting as it is to blame the Welfare State (what a creepy term that is, when you think about it!), other countries have extended ‘social’ provisions yet do not end up with the trashy sub-literate urban yoof that we have spawned.

My conclusion is that the sheer size and reach of the modern state in our modern lives has usurped for many people basic understanding of self-respect and self-restraint. And that this is creating compounding conditions for all sorts of incredibly bad ideas and instincts and habits to proliferate. The more so when you add in all the sneering, and in many parts of public life a refusal to be ‘judgemental’ about anything.

NB That last one is then reinforced by a ‘human rights’ culture which allows almost any form of tackling poor performance to be denounced as ‘bullying’; this in turn leads to a collapse in any organisation’s staff appraisal systems and so allows incompetence free rein (see schools, passim).

But so what?

The very fact that the state is so big and bloated and corrupt and incompetent means that reforming it is now in fact impossible. Maybe radical change on a scale likely to affect these now embedded nihilistic attitudes can come only with a shared sense of national focus brought about by a far greater and much worse upheaval – a new World War, or failing that the abrupt departure of the UK from the EU, an event which would force us to look at many policy issues from first principles once again…