UK riots: the Left and Right blame each other

„It’s the welfare state! It’s the cuts! It’s Labour subsidising single mothers! It’s Thatcher undermining society! It’s Left, it’s Right, it’s liberal intelligentsia, it’s conservative callousness, it’s Their Fault, it’s Their Fault, it’s Their Fault. Humanity is a tribal species, and it’s entirely natural that we lump ourselves into groups. Our brains are evolved organs, and it’s entirely natural that we are subject to confirmation bias and selective blindness. We love simplicity and order and pattern, and it’s entirely natural that we attempt to impose them onto complexity and chaos.

But »natural” does not mean »good«. And it certainly doesn’t mean »clever«.

We Lefties are at it. We repeatedly, accurately and slightly piously say that it’s not an either/or choice between condemning the riots and understanding their causes, but most of the time the causes we claim to understand are the usual Left-wing bugbears: the Tories, the bankers, the BNP, the EDL. My colleague James Delingpole points to a couple of especially egregious examples in The New York Times and The Guardian, blaming the cuts (which haven’t set in yet) or saying that the bankers behind the financial crisis are the real »looters«. Dorian Lynskey accurately describes that last as »a sixth-form debating-society quip«.

Meanwhile over on the Right, Melanie Phillips in the Mail - who, let us remember, warned against seeing the Norway killings through a political lens – is blaming the riots on »the liberal intelligentsia« and »a three-decade liberal experiment« which did away with »the married two-parent family, educational meritocracy, punishment of criminals, national identity, enforcement of the drugs laws and many more fundamental conventions«. Those are, of course, the same things for which she blames pretty much everything else. Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly, presumably speaking entirely on autopilot these days, blames »the liberal mindset«. Ann Coulter, meanwhile, lays it at the feet of our welfare system.”