<http://online.wsj.com/article_print/0,,SB110980295622868708,00.html>
The Wall Street Journal March 3, 2005 COMMENTARY Unruly Britannia By RUSSELL LEWIS March 3, 2005 Half a century ago George Orwell, like many others, was impressed by the gentleness, courtesy and orderliness of British life. It has been downhill ever since. This view rests not on nostalgia but on recorded fact. * * * Let's start with Britain's most popular game. In the 1930s, British football crowds were as orderly as church congregations. Today our soccer fans are a byword for aggressive violence. In the first-class matches in 1946-47 only 10 players were sent off. By the mid-'90s the total number of red cards issued in a season had reached 451. Hooliganism is not confined to our footballers and their supporters. In 2002, a survey by the travel company Expedia of tourist offices in 17 countries found that, for loutishness, British visitors were top of the league. At home the yobbism of the football crowds is only magnified in the incidence of violent crime, which rose from 4,221 in 1898 to 331,843 in 1998-99. Even adjusting for population growth, that amounts to a 47-fold increase. The situation is actually worse than the numbers suggest, for the laws and their enforcement were stricter a century ago. Indeed, as one eminent authority, Professor Jose Harris, put it, "If Edwardian standards were applied in the '90s, most of the youth of Britain would be in gaol." But at least we Brits still love our children, don't we? Well, not, it seems, in all cases. In recent times there has been a virtual epidemic of child abuse. Prosecutions for cruelty or neglect of children in England and Wales -- 228 in 1988 -- have since jumped more than threefold. Drug use, once remarkably well-contained in this country, is now rife among English teenagers. According to a 1999 European Union survey, 41% of English youngsters between 15 and 16 years of age had tried cannabis -- the highest rate in Europe. Alcohol abuse is also expanding merrily, and not only among the lager louts in and out of the stadiums. When it comes to tippling, British women are way ahead of their sisters on the European mainland. Dickens' Fagin would have found much to applaud in the activities of present-day English juveniles. According to a speech by then-Education Secretary Estelle Morris in April 2002, the proportion of all robberies committed by 10- to 16-year-olds during school hours was as follows: street robberies 40%; car thefts 33%; burglaries 25%; and criminal damage 20%. After reading that, it isn't surprising to learn that 9.9% of all schoolchildren skip class at least once a week. Of course the ultimate source of these troubles is poor upbringing, fueled in part by the rise of illegitimacy. Between 1900 and 1960 births outside marriage averaged 4%-5% in the U.K. Today they are 40% of the total. This flouting of societal norms appears to have stimulated a corrupt attitude toward society's institutions: The Benefit Agency reports that over a quarter of the people it serves were definitely or possibly guilty of false claims -- not a very inspiring example to the offspring. The reasons for this moral decline are as clear as the aforementioned statistics are bleak. As James Bartholomew argues in his recent book "The Welfare State We're In" (Politico's, 2004), the blame rests squarely on the growth of the welfare state, which has removed personal responsibility in large areas of people's lives and substituted dependency on the state and the rule of the bureaucrat. The state is complicit in the breakdown of the family; consider Mr. Bartholomew's example of how the state has promoted single-parent families by taxing married couples -- and abolishing the marriage allowance -- while giving increasing amounts of money to single parents. No wonder, then, that from 1972 to 1992 the proportion of children living with a lone parent tripled to 21% from 7%. The link with rising crime is reflected in one shaming statistic: One-third of the people in U.K. prisons spent time in an orphanage at some time in their childhood. One prison governor, on being asked how many of the inmates had formerly been taken into foster care, replied: "Nearly all of them." Indeed, the collapse of the traditional nuclear family has hit the poorest classes quite disproportionately, with nearly a quarter of girls whose fathers were unskilled workers becoming teenage mothers, mostly outside marriage. Divorces have risen sevenfold since 1960, and these also have been much more common among the poor. Of course there are many examples of children being well raised by a single parent, but these are statistically dwarfed by the evidence that two-parent families are more successful in teaching discipline and respect for morality. With one parent -- most often the father -- missing from the picture, it is not surprising that children are more apt to run wild. Free state education was intended to civilize the poor and improve their lot by fostering their intellectual and practical skills while also making them good citizens. The reality is that, rather than making up for the failures of a bad home background, schools in poor neighborhoods are generally the worst -- characterized by lack of discipline, high rates of bullying and crime, poor teaching, low grades and even unacceptably poor basic skills such as reading, writing and counting. * * * How depressing to watch the British people trampling upon their once-high reputation for civility and respect for law. Yet for this social breakdown -- for that is what it is -- they have only themselves, and the indulgent welfare society they demanded from the state, to blame. Mr. Lewis is a former general director of the Institute of Economic Affairs. -- ----------------- R. A. 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