Peter Hitchens, the conservative brother of Christopher Hitchens, has written a magnificent polemic in the Daily Mail laying the blame for the British insurrection at the feet of the liberals, whose policies have produced the social decay underlying the pillage and destruction. After lamenting the innocent victims, he notes:

I am not really very sorry for the elite liberal Londoners who have suddenly discovered what millions of others have lived with for decades. 

The mass criminality in the big cities is merely a speeded-up and concentrated version of life on most large estates - fear, intimidation, cruelty, injustice, savagery towards the vulnerable and the  different, a cold sneer turned towards any plea for pity, the awful realisation that when you call for help from the authorities, none  will come. (snip)

No doubt they will find ways to save themselves. But they will not save the country. Because even now they will not admit that all their ideas are wrong, and that the policies of the past 50 years - the policies they love - have been a terrible mistake. I have heard them in the past few days clinging to their old excuses of non-existent 'poverty' and 'exclusion'.

He is highly critical of Conservative PM David Cameron, who does not have the stomach to repudiate the rot, and who is unwilling to take the forceful countermeasures necessary to ensure the rioters think twice. The criminal justice system in Britain is deconstructed, and ridiculed.

Water cannon and plastic bullets indeed. What an utter admission of failure, that after 50 years of the most lavish welfare state in the solar system, you cannot govern your country without soaking the citizenry in cold water and bombarding them with missiles from a safe distance. Except, of course, that it is because of the welfare system that this is so. (snip)

All this piffle enshrines the official (and hopelessly wrong) view that crime is caused by circumstances and background, not by unleashed human evil. It is precisely because of this windy falsehood that the cells are crammed with young men who broke the law because they felt like it

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip: Lucianne.com

Update.

Don't miss these before-and-after pictures of riot damage, collected by the BBC.