Happy Birthday to me...and then hordes of Vandals and Barbarians smash up my city,

Well that was a bit close for comfort.

I went  out for a meal on Monday night with husband dearest (to celebrate my birthday ...shh!)
and Dominic told us not to go too far, because it looked like the riots that had kicked off in Tottenham were now spreading across London.
We laughed. 
We mocked his foolish fretting.
Riot? Here? Unimaginable! Inconceivable! Hahahah! Lololol! And so on...
A few short hours later my friend Elizabeth emailed me to say that there was a car on fire at the end of her road.
And the news started coming in from Twitter that Ealing was in the thick of it.
Every single car on one nearby road had it's windscreen smashed. Our local Tesco Express had all it's windows smashed. The staff were locked up inside, the police were all elsewhere. It must have been scary. .

Our road was unscathed, but it was a closer call than I would ever have envisaged..
It's pretty surreal to see your own leafy neighbourhood on the news, still familar, but with the ghosts of burnt out cars and the road bestrewn with broken glass. 

One, as yet unidentified, man, is clinging to life after being beaten by a mob who had set fire to a bin.
This video, which is without sound, shows the floored victim lying still on the ground with burning rubbish on the road beside him.
The silence is eerie. That the victim looks like anyones dad: grey hair, checked shirt and completely out of place in this Mad Max scenario, makes it even more surreal.
It just hurts to watch.
Praying that he pulls through.

Melanie Phillips opines today about the root of the barbarism unleashed on England.

The causes of this sickness are many and complex. But three things can be said with certainty: every one of them is the fault of the liberal intelligentsia; every one of them was instituted or exacerbated by the Labour government; and at the very heart of these problems lies the breakdown of the family.
For most of these children come from lone-mother households. And the single most crucial factor behind all this mayhem is the willed removal of the most important thing that socialises children and turns them from feral savages into civilised citizens: a father who is a fully committed member of the family unit.
Of course there are many lone parents who do a tremendous job. But we’re talking here about widespread social collapse. And there are whole areas of Britain, white as well as black, where committed fathers are a wholly unknown phenomenon.
In such areas, successive generations are being brought up only by mothers, through whose houses pass transitory males by whom these women have yet more children — and who inevitably repeat the pattern of lone and dysfunctional parenting. 
The result is fatherless boys who are consumed by an existential rage and desperate emotional need, and who take out the damage done to them by lashing out from infancy at everyone around them. Such children inhabit what is effectively a different world from the rest of society. It’s a world without any boundaries or rules. A world of emotional and physical chaos.
A world where a child responds to the slightest setback or disagreement by resorting to violence. A world where the parent is unwilling or incapable of providing the loving and disciplined framework that a child needs in order to thrive.
Yet instead of lone parenthood being regarded as a tragedy for individuals, and a catastrophe for society, it has been redefined as a ‘right’...

The social and moral breakdown behind the riots was deliberately willed upon Britain by Left-wing politicians and other middle-class ideologues who wrap their utter contempt for the poor in the mantle of ‘progressive’ non-judgmentalism.
These are the people who — against the evidence of a mountain of empirical research — hurl execrations at anyone who suggests that lone parenthood is, in general, a catastrophe for children (and a disaster for women); who promote drug liberalisation, oppose selective education (while paying for private tutors for their own children) and call those who oppose unlimited immigration and multiculturalism ‘racists’.
And the real victims of these people ‘who know best’ are always those at the bottom of the social heap, who possess neither the money nor the social or intellectual resources to cushion them against the most catastrophic effects of such nonsense.

Read the rest here.

I share her opinion. 

I voted for those same left wing politicians whose policies she blames for this mess. Consistently, and faithfully, I voted for them.

Foolish, optimistic gull that I was. 

Never again.

Now I believe that behind much liberal left wing opining is, indeed, a contempt for the poor.

I find the language of the left, especially when they talk about social policies, to be patronising and infantilising.

The labour government have destroyed the working class in this country.

How bloody ironic  is that?

(images from here and here)