Is this article’s facing a grammar crisis? Yes

“That these morals and ethics aren’t in place” – so does that mean that Britain IS broken?

I am with Sunny on this. Of course, it shows that crime isn’t caused by poverty. Rich criminals just engage in different types of crime. The banking crisis wasn’t just about gross errors, it did include plenty of fraud too and in that sense, it represented a breakdown in law and order.

The problem is that the banking system is a fraud that the state benefits from (through taxation and borrowing). So part of the economic and moral recovery is going to involve both institutions slimming down.

I’m doing a copy and paste job here, but as I said yesterday in Plato’s Republic, on the subject of the Ring of Gyges, Socrates discusses whether a typical person would be moral if he did not have to fear the consequences of his actions. A common example used today is whether one would hand back money if the cash machine they were using pumped out double that was being requested, in full knowledge that they could take the money and run and not be caught.

Many have been very quick to blame the riots on something called ‘pure criminality’, but there is a wider worry at play here – namely we live in a society that doesn’t offer enough to be respected in itself, we live in a society which only tries to disincentivise crime by making us fear the consequences. What stops a larger proportion of society than we’d care to admit from looting constantly in hard times is not full appreciation of right and wrong, but fear of getting caught. And that to me is not a happy society.

In a way society is ill, but not in a way David Cameron fully understands – and to be sure, this notion of pure criminality is a trivial sideshow.

The majority of the British people deserve the right-wing nightmare fascist dystopia that they are helping to usher in, because of their complicity with right-wing extremism and because of their evident sadism. The only shame is, is that I’m going to have to suffer the consequences too, along with the few others who are opposed to the direction in which we are headed.

@5

A right wing nightmare fascist dystopia??

Here I am unhappy with big Government Socialist Britain.

Still I expect neither of us is sufficiently upset with the country to emmigrate.

If you want good conduct at the bottom of society the example should be set by the top. Crooked businessmen, sleazy bankers, bent police, criminal journalists, cheating overpaid sportsmen, vacuous celebs without a shred of talent, and overprivileged, tax dodging, expenses fiddling, millionaire MPs who lie every time they open their mouths without even having the good grace to try to make it sound convincing anymore. This is the standard of ethical and moral behaviour the public are shown all day, every day. The public showed they were desperate for a straight talking, honest politician before the election when Clegg made himself the most popular party leader. Unfortunately he turned out to be the biggest bullshitter of the lot.

Here’s an example of tory personal responsibility. It made me laugh, shame there’s no video.
http://thebrokenofbritain.blogspot.com/2011/08/personal-responsibility-ids-way-someone.html

I think we are looking at this the wrong way round – surely we should be amazed that 60 million citizens occupying such a small space manage, by and large, to live together co-operatively rather than in antisocial way?

In my everyday experience acts of kindness far outweigh acts of violence.

Is there another country in the world with comparable cultural diversity that somehow, against the odds even, manages to peacefully coexist?

My personal problem with all these claims about Broken Britain and our Moral Crisis is trying to remember just when was it that something wasn’t seriously wrong about the way things were going?

The squandering of Marshall Aid? Company take-over bids and asset stripping? Peter Rachman, who gave private landlords a worse name? Bombing the Mau Mau in Kenya? The Suez debacle? The Profumo Affair with Christine Keeler? Inflation hitting 25% pa and and having to call in the IMF? The winter of discontent 1978/9? Ungovernable Britain? Monetarism? Greenham Common? Being forced out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism and negative housing equity? An epidemic of Satanic Abuse – followed by an epidemic of Münchausen’s syndrome by proxy? Family values with adultery on the side? Brown envelopes for PQs? The house-price bubble? MPs’ expenses? Phone hacking?

@ 9:

“There have always been problems” =/= “The problems the country faces now aren’t significantly more serious than they were in the past”.

An epidemic of Satanic Abuse

Really? Please name one instance, let alone an epidemic.

There was a scandal in the 80s when a US wingnut persuaded social services to take the kids away from some perfectly innocent Wiccans. it was in part driven by the periodic witch-hunts the Sun & Mail used to launch, which again involved harrassing passing Wiccans until everyone got bored.

Britain being much less susceptible to this crap (back then, anyways… ) than the USA, this was quickly noticed, investigated, he was firmly asked to leave the country and several people lost their jobs.

There has, to date, been not one single recorded instance of SRA in the USA or in the UK.

Satanic abuse never happened, Private Eye demolished the claims in exhaustive detail.

Profumo is an excellent example of how things are worse now. Profumo resigned after being caught lying to the House. Lying to the House is now standard procedure for all politicians, Prime Ministers included and when caught out they just carry on lying. After resigning Profumo worked the rest of his life for a charity, beginning there by cleaning the toilets. A modern politician has to be nailed doing something he can’t squirm out of before he’ll resign and then its just a temporary step to an even better paid job

[11] moral crisis can arise from threats real or imagined – somehow it was easier back then to talk about mad sects abusing kids rather than everyday folk who perpetrated most crimes, not least because the abuser in our midst was harder to distinguish unless he/she was wearing a special cloak.

Bob’s point holds though – was there ever a time when we were not been on the brink of one sort of moral catastrophe, or another – except back then it was characters like Runcie who tended to issue regular warnings, rather than liberal bloggers?
http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/canterbury/data/files/media/imagelibrary/56/1980-Robert-Alexander-Kennedy-Runcie.jpg

Oh lord, not ‘broken Britain’ again. What all these things show is that even now, when social order, wealth, and security are more developed than at any time in history, small groups of naughty people will still do naughty things from time to time. If you buy this second hand Spenglerianism from Cameron you are doing the Tories’ work for them. Britain really isn’t broken, but we will always have social problems to deal with and criminals to pursue. History will not end. Marx (and all the others) was wrong.

What would be nice, though, would be if commentators stopped letting sons of wealth and privilege like Cameron, Milliband,and Clegg mouth on about the ‘culture of entitlement’ quite so much. It is getting annoying.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pAC0YSmK0g

‘There was a scandal in the 80s when a US wingnut persuaded social services to take the kids away from some perfectly innocent Wiccans. it was in part driven by the periodic witch-hunts the Sun & Mail used to launch, which again involved harrassing passing Wiccans until everyone got bored.’

It wasn’t just the right-wing press or Christian fundies from the US, it was feminists like Bea Campbell in the UK.

Quod est inferius est sicut quod est superius, et quod est superius est sicut quod est inferius.

@15 I did wonder what the UKIP voting, EDL supporting Pat Condell had to say about the riots. Now I know.

So essentially in this article you demonstrate that the evidence runs contrary to your assertions, yet you persist in believing your assertions in any case.

And therein lies the real problem in our country. It’s not a “moral crisis”, there’s a wave of irrationality and hypotheses based on “truthiness” and no evidence – on both sides of the political spectrum.

Instead of pontificating, people should be researching.

@18 – Yes that discredits everything he just said making it a none truth.

@20 Nonsense, you can always trust angry rants from failed comedians that might as well have been lifted from the Daily Mail’s opinion pages, as being well founded gospel truths.

‘There was a scandal in the 80s when a US wingnut persuaded social services to take the kids away from some perfectly innocent Wiccans. it was in part driven by the periodic witch-hunts the Sun & Mail used to launch, which again involved harrassing passing Wiccans until everyone got bored.’

However, there must be some amusement in the fact that, for once, a witch hunt was directed against self-professed witches.This may have been the first witch hunt in history to actually target real witches.

Yes Cylux how dare someone for ONCE in this politically correct fake cringe worthy cuntry just say how it is, especially someone who holds different political views to you how dare!

These children need counselling hugs and love then maybe they will kick less people to death for mobile phones tintit! xXx

@12 Schmidt

Your allegation of routine dishonesty needs further examination. Similar allegations are made about all levels of government. This attitude can largely be traced back to the tabloids, who happily make allegations or imply low motives to almost everyone in public life except the queen. Any retractions are rare and low profile.

If you are a career politician who is exposed to this corrosive climate continuously, along with all the spin doctor and focus group bullshit designed to squeeze any little action you may want to take into a package acceptable to Fleet Street’s finest unaccountable bullies, I can see how at some point you might just say, “Fuck it!” and cheat your exes, especially when senior Commons officers give the nod and wink to do so. Remember, the expenses cheating goes back to the Thatcher government’s hair-shirt posturing to justify low pay in the public sector.

Just how much of our cynical, unhappy attitude can be traced back to our media, especially the tabloids?

@11. John Q. Publican: “There has, to date, been not one single recorded instance of SRA in the USA or in the UK.”

I agree with your contribution overall, but there is one recorded case.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/mobile/uk-wales-12703785

@11: No epidemic of Satanic Abuse?

C’mon. A quick Google yielded this alarming news report from the Indy on 30 April 2000:

A specially commissioned government report will this week conclude that satanic abuse does take place in Britain. It will say that its victims have suffered actual abuse and are not suffering from “false memory syndrome”.

The report, ordered by the Department of Health, focuses on the experiences of 50 “survivors”. Compiled by Dr John Hale, director of the Portman Clinic in London, and psychotherapist Valerie Sinason, it will reopen the debate which started a decade ago with testimonies from children in Nottingham, Rochdale and Orkney.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/satanic-abuse-no-myth-say-experts-721359.html

Clearly, things were even worse than I had imagined. With that and this astonishing revelation from Father Amorth last year, the situation looks increasingly diabolical:

Father Gabriele Amorth, 85, who has been the Vatican’s chief exorcist for 25 years and says he has dealt with 70,000 cases of demonic possession, said that the consequences of satanic infiltration included power struggles at the Vatican as well as “cardinals who do not believe in Jesus, and bishops who are linked to the Demon”.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article7056689.ece

With Satan at large in the Vatican, our Mr Schmidt’s apt diagnosis here @12 of flourishing political chicanery in Britain seems pretty mild.

@11: No epidemic of Satanic Abuse?

C’mon. A quick Google yielded this alarming news report from the Indy on 30 April 2000:

A specially commissioned government report will this week conclude that satanic abuse does take place in Britain. It will say that its victims have suffered actual abuse and are not suffering from “false memory syndrome”.

The report, ordered by the Department of Health, focuses on the experiences of 50 “survivors”. Compiled by Dr John Hale, director of the Portman Clinic in London, and psychotherapist Valerie Sinason, it will reopen the debate which started a decade ago with testimonies from children in Nottingham, Rochdale and Orkney.
Clearly, things were even worse than I had imagined. With that and this amazing revelation from Father Amorth last year, the situation looks increasingly diabolical:

Father Gabriele Amorth, 85, who has been the Vatican’s chief exorcist for 25 years and says he has dealt with 70,000 cases of demonic possession, said that the consequences of satanic infiltration included power struggles at the Vatican as well as “cardinals who do not believe in Jesus, and bishops who are linked to the Demon”. [The Times, 11 March 2010]

With Satan at large in the Vatican, our Mr Schmidt’s apt diagnosis here @12 of flourishing political chicanery in Britain seems pretty mild.

I am absolutely delighted that David Cameron has sought to play the role of the “moral crusader – because it is so clearly going to come back and bite him sharply on the arse, just as it did with Major before him with his disastrous ‘back to basics’.

There was a delightful example of this last week when he came on BBC North West TV droning on about selfishness, sense of entitlement et al, and when the straight-laced presenter Gordon Burns – (former Krypton Factor presenter to you Southerners, and no-one’s idea of a firebrand radical) put it rather angrily to him that this sounded rather like the attitude of the bankers, Cameron was utterly flustered and floundering. This will happen again and again, just as the image of the yob gang he and Boris were a part of will be flung back in his face. Most people may hate the rioters, but they hate the bankers too, they know moral inconsistency when they see it, and this “moral regeneration” simpy isn’t a goer.

From the tanking economy, through disastrously handled riots, to incestuous association with Newscorp’s criminal enterprise, this government is dying on its arse. I just wish Labour would make more of its clear advantage. Milliband was playing it very well during the inital Coulson affair, its now time to see it through. Now it’s proven beyond reasonable doubt that Cameron hired an active criminal as one of his closest associates while being warned about what he was doing its time to press that home very hard indeed. “Parts of our society are just sick” – too fucking right mate.

Over the past thirty years it has been Race and the Police and drugs which has caused the major riots.

And again it’s a police shooting which has caused problem, and again these riots have worked well for the police not having to explain again what went wrong.

But go back to the 1980 it’s been police stop and search, the police using powers to stop blacks, then again shootings of innocent people.

I suspect people feel angry as another shooting by the police although they have said little, then tell us it will take six months before we can say anything. The media goes wild with he had a gun he pointed at an officer, it was not him it was the taxi driver, it was drugs. The sad fact is people do not trust the police to tell us the truth anymore.

Do we have a broken Briton not yet but it’s dam close because now these riots have taken the heat off the police over the shooting they can now sit back and in six month people will not even remember this person.

Real riots have not really occurred since the 1910 and 1911 in the UK, the Tonypandy Riots, and the Llanelli railways strike with the loss of two people shot by the army these were about a decent wage for a decent life, now it’s about who shot who, or how many people are black or white in an area.

“And again it’s a police shooting which has caused problem, and again these riots have worked well for the police not having to explain again what went wrong.”

333 people have died in police custody since 1998. Not one person has stood trial. Why should anyone possibly have a beef with them?

And it’s not just black folk who are jolly well cross with them either. Remember the raoul moat fanclub?

Excellent post. Successful liberal societies are based on virtuous citizens and an ethic of civic responsibility, not on rights alone. The liberal left has not paid nearly enough attention to this in recent decades, too often confusing freedom with an ‘anything goes’ hedonism. Just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should. The boundaries of restraint and self-discipline have broken down and the bankers and looters are a two ends of the same spectrum of narcissistic individualism. The political battleground of the next decade is how to remoralise British society from top to bottom. We need to have better answers than the right or we will lose.

@29: “Real riots have not really occurred since the 1910 and 1911 in the UK, the Tonypandy Riots, and the Llanelli railways strike with the loss of two people shot by the army ”

Quote: “The Notting Hill race riots were a series of racially-motivated riots that took place in London, England over several nights in late August and early September 1958.”
Source: Wikipedia

@ 28. Arthur Seaton

Ass biting: “Things got out of hand & we’d had a few drinks. We smashed the place up and Boris set fire to the toilets.”
David Cameron, 1986.

This is a good post actually. A good clarification.

I take the point about Cameron’s sickening hypocrisy but as David Lammy, the MP for Tottenham, reminded us the other day, as the result of the riots, 45 people were made homeless in Tottenham. In Croydon, a young man was murdered. His four children now have no father.