A Terrible Admission of Defeat

Peter Hitchens writes:

I know that many people will have visited this site in the past few days looking for my response to the so-called ‘riots’ which began in London on Saturday night. I am sorry to have disappointed them – though I hope that my thoughts on Hugh Walpole, written last Friday and Saturday, have given pleasure to some.

As it happens I’ve been busy (first on another project and on Wednesday in one of the courts, watching our ‘Criminal Justice’ system dealing with those arrested) and couldn’t have posted anything before now anyway.

But I also wish to concentrate my writing on this subject, as far as possible, on my Mail on Sunday column.

So rather than give a full response, I would make some very brief but fundamental points:

1. These were not ‘riots’. They had no political purpose and no origin in discontent or deprivation.

2.Those apprehended by the police appear to me for the most part to be stragglers and losers, the slow runners and dimwits who were still on the scene when the constabulary eventually arrived. They are not the main actors. I have no sympathy for them, but the idea that the law is about to take a severe revenge on the culprits is laughable. Most of the culprits got away with it.

3.This is an equal-opportunity crime wave. The lawbreakers are not from any distinct ethnic group, and attempts to explain this behaviour on these ground are baseless and poisonous.

4. Nothing of any substance has been or will be learned by our political class from these events. The ‘debate’ is already drivelling away into irrelevant discussions about police cuts or misleading confrontations between people who appear to be different but are in fact fundamentally the same. In these (for example) Michael Gove (whose government is in practice as feeble and politically correct as any in our history) is portrayed as a hero of debate because Harriet Harman is so immeasurably thick, and Michael Gove looks sensible by comparison.

5. My reluctant conclusion, that Britain is finished as a civil and civilised society, is unaltered. I suspect quite a few more people may now grasp this point, but the majority of our ‘intelligentsia’ will continue to regard me as a ‘fascist’ and my solutions to these problems as unthinkable. They will even accuse me - falsely - of believing that the 1950s were a ‘Golden Age’ but I can promise them that they will soon look upon this decade as a ‘Golden Age’ compared with what is coming.

Yet they cheer on the introduction of plastic bullets and water cannon to our streets, a terrible admission of defeat and a further step down the dark staircase to the strong state and the end of liberty.