Has Britain reached its turning point?

Views from across the Pond: Peter Hitchens says that the degeneracy of British society is now irreversible; it is a "polluted flood ... not a tide." Britain, he says, is "The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain," and no longer is it great. The political class has been devotedly destroying what used to be called "civilized society" since the end of World War II while energetically isolating themselves from what they wrought.

Here is an example of how little he [PM David Cameron] knows about Britain. He says that the criminals of August will face the ‘full force of the law’. What ‘force’?

The great majority of the looters, smashers, burners and muggers have not been arrested and never will be. Our long-enfeebled police were so useless at the start that thousands of crimes were committed with total impunity.

Now we know why they don’t call themselves ‘police forces’ any more. But they aren’t ‘services’ either, for they certainly don’t serve us or do what we want them to do, preferring to arrest us for defending ourselves. The criminals, who are cunning without being intelligent, all know this. They will wait for the next chance. ...

They have all learned what most British politicians somehow cannot grasp – that the more encounters you have with our justice system, the less you fear it. A few ‘exemplary’ sentences – none of which will be served in full, or anything near it – will only help to spread the word that arson, robbery, violence, spite and selfishness are not punished here any more. Indeed these are the things we are now famous for around a world that once respected us.

But maybe not. Charles Moore write in The Telegraph that the dysfunctions that Hitchens describes are neither very old not deeply rooted, and that in fact a consensus is already in place both socially and politically to bring literal discipline back to law enforcement and social order - "How to recover Britain’s streets for civilisation."

As someone who was a young journalist the last time a wave of disorder swept through the country, I am struck by a great change that has taken place. Contrary to what you may have read, this change is not that violence has increased. It was in 1981 that horrible things like attacking fire engines, trying to kill policemen and using riot as a cover for mass looting first showed themselves in mainland Britain. Although the technology is different today, allowing the criminals to bring trouble to more places, the ferocity of violence has been, if anything, slightly less bad than in Brixton or Toxteth 30 years ago.

No, the difference lies in public attitudes to what has happened. This time, the attitudes are much better. Then as now, of course, most ordinary citizens were unequivocal in their disgust at rioting. But in 1981, the prevailing culture among our ruling elites was different. The weight of the BBC, local government, trade unions, officialdom, came down on the police for being too harsh, and, needless to say, on the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, for the same crime. The chairman of the Merseyside Police Authority supported the rioters, saying: “They would be apathetic fools if they didn’t protest.” In Parliament, Michael Foot, the Labour leader, hurled anathemas at the evil Thatcher. In the capital, a young man called Ken Livingstone took over the Greater London Council in a post-election coup, and began attacking the police.

The resuly has been that British police have been thoroughly tamed, subjected to harsh sanctions and even dismissal or actual arrest themselves for enforcing the law too vigorously, which means very much at all. So,

We all saw the police hanging back from making arrests during this week’s troubles. The reason is that, under current rules, arrests are a bureaucratic and legal nightmare. They require at least two officers and inordinate processing time. If there is “insufficient evidence”, the police can be sued for false imprisonment. The scenes all over England this week were uniquely appalling in their scale, but in the character of the police response they were very like what happens in hundreds of towns every Saturday night. Young people tip out of the pubs behaving badly, and the police, worried by what they might be accused of, just watch them.

Yet Moore says that this is n ot in the slightest the atttitude among the political class any more, and that from the prime minister on down, on all sides of the aisles, so that,

In 1981, an MP saying that he supported the police was making a controversial political statement. This week, he was uttering a commonplace.

There is a resolute recognition that the need for civil peace must come first. Mr. Moore does not discuss how all this will find its way into actual law and policy, which is of course the key question.

For us colonials on this side of the Pond the key question is simply: "Is Britain's 2011 August an avoidable portent of America's future?"

In my conversations with people this month and readings I have been struck by how many people here believe that what have seen in Britain is looming in America, not today, not even imminently, but certainly nonetheless. Even Peggy Noonan writes (link may be perisable),

What does this have to do with America? What we're seeing on the streets in Britain right now is something we may be starting to see here. It hasn't come together in a conflagration, but it is out there, and I think it's growing. And as in Britain, it doesn't have anything to do with political grievances per se.

Philadelphia right now is under curfew because of "flash mobs." Young people send out the word on social media, and suddenly dozens or hundreds of them hit a targeted store, steal everything on the shelves, and run, knowing no one will stop them or catch them. It's happened in other cities, too. Sometimes the mobs beat people up on the street and take their money. There are the beat-downs in McDonald's, where the young lose all control and the old fear to intervene. There were the fights and attacks last weekend at the Wisconsin State Fair. You've seen the YouTubes of fights on the subways. You often see links to these stories on Drudge: He headlines them "Les Miserables."

Whether Charles Moore is right that the flood there can be reversed is not predictable yet. There is a vast chasm between politicians knowing what must be done and summoning the will to do it. One thing is for sure: the cancer has not yet metastasized in America so much that it can't be reversed. But the question of political will here is just as pressing. Fortunately, so far the signs are encouraging.

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The film industry is often ahead of the game in understanding (and taking commercial advantage of) the mood of the people. Last year Michael Caine starred in the British film release, "Harry Brown."



Hollywood went down that trail many years ago, of course, with the "Death Wish" series starring Charles Bronson in 1974.



And what, after all, is Batman but the precursor to both of these?