Only the wilfully blind could have been surprised by the scale or ferocity of the riots that have engulfed Britain in the past week. Unfortunately, most of the country’s political and intellectual class have been wilfully blind for years, in a state of the most abject denial; a brief walk in any of our cities should have been enough to tell them all that they needed to know.
How anyone could have missed the aggressive malignity inscribed in the faces and manner of so many young men in Britain is a mystery to me. Perhaps, like Dr Watson, our political and intellectual class saw but did not observe; and they did not observe because they lacked the moral courage to attempt anything but appeasement.
The vulpine lope or swagger, the face that regards eye contact with a stranger as a challenge to be met, the adoption of fashions that are known to signify aggression and dangerousness, the grotesquely inflated self-esteem combined with a total incapacity for doing anything constructive: all could and should have sounded an alarm in our politicians. Not only is our population ageing, but a significant proportion of such young people as we have engendered are like this, which no doubt helps to explain why we have had to resort to the importation of foreign unskilled labour while maintaining high levels of domestic unemployment, especially among the young. It is as difficult to employ a hoodie as to hug him.
No one has paid serious attention to the mentality and culture of these young men (using the word culture in its broad, anthropological sense). The morality is that of Satan on his expulsion from heaven: evil, be thou my good. The aesthetics follow the morality.
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