Archbishops are like naughty children: compliment them, and the next minute they’ll do something awful. No sooner had I praised Dr Williams for his Christmas message than he reverted to type in his new-year speech.
The good Archbishop chided us for ‘a national habit of being suspicious and hostile’ towards groups of young people. Admittedly, ‘quite a lot of the images we’re likely to remember from the footage of the riots in the summer will be of young people out of control in the streets, walking off with looted property from shops, noisily confronting police and so on.’ But that’s no reason to cross the street when a gaggle of hooded, feral-looking chaps block our path.
Presumably, what we should do instead is stop and show we care by hugging the hoodies, as prescribed by Dave ‘David’ Cameron. Now, when I hug my wife, she hugs back, unless I’ve been irredeemably beastly, in which case she tells me to leave her alone. Under no circumstances will she stick a knife in my belly or even punch me in the face. Nor is she ever likely to mug me, unless of course I ask for divorce. However, hard-earned experience suggests that any or all such outcomes would be likely if one tried to get tactile with our Mowgli urchins. That’s precisely why ‘we walk a bit more quickly and hope we can pass without some sort of confrontation,’ which in the Archdruid’s view is a wrong thing to do because not all young people are thugs. That’s undoubtedly true, and I’d even go so far as to suggest that relatively few are. However, just to be on the safe side, it’s best not to calculate the odds in favour of such an eventuality. They are high enough, especially since the gooduns and the baduns are often indistinguishable sartorially or facially. The same gangsta getup; the same enraged air; the same empty eyes.
The liberal assumption shared by Dr Williams and Mr Cameron (in the latter’s case, one suspects, mostly for PR purposes) is that it’s all society’s fault. The poor youngsters aren’t the ones who stab, punch or mug – society does that, using the lads as a mindless, soulless conduit. It almost pains me to remind our two dignitaries that individual responsibility for one’s own salvation, heavenly or earthly, lies at the heart of both the religion led by one and the party led by the other. The youths are free agents; when they maim, rob or abuse, they exercise their own free will and must be prepared to face the consequences. That’s basic.
But once we’ve got this ABC truth out of the way, do let’s acknowledge that society has indeed dealt our young a losing hand – by putting into practice precisely the kind of bien-pensant liberal twaddle in which our leaders like to indulge. Just like the jawbone, the neck bone and the backbone, society is propped up or else brought down by an intricate body of interconnected elements.
When the state makes the father redundant by assuming his provider role, children are brought up by single mothers and are thus exponentially more likely to go bad. When the state crams such truncated families into Soviet-style tower blocks, it creates an ideal test tube for cultivating anticulture. When it pays serial single mothers, it encourages the breeding of uncontrollable guttersnipes. When it herds children into schools where they are comprehensively educated how to use condoms but not how to read, write and add up, they’ll neither acquire any marketable skills nor, judging by the number of teenage pregnancies, even learn how to use condoms. When children are fed multi-culti rubbish, they regurgitate it into hatred of our native culture. When they aren’t taught that there’s a direct link between work and pay, they’ll want something for nothing. When told that there’s no God and they’re all nothing but advanced apes, they’ll feel justified in behaving according to simian morality. When trained by our legal system that crime doesn’t necessarily lead to punishment, they’ll feel free to let themselves go.
If you’re driving fast in the wrong direction, the only way to get where you’re going is to backtrack to the starting point. Applying this proven logic to Britain, that means returning, with appropriate tweaks, to the foundations of what historically is perhaps the most successful society ever. Abandoning the same half-baked ideas that are responsible for our social demise would be a good opening move. Empty logorrhoea is what got us in trouble, and only thoughtful, courageous action can get us out if it.
Oh well, tell it to the marines. Or else to Archbishops and Prime Ministers.