AS Britain struggles to make sense of days of mindless mob rule in its poorest inner-city boroughs, 21st century leaders might wish to take a closer look at the lost generation that has torched, wrecked and looted its way into the world’s conscience.
An illiterate, innumerate army of excluded have-nots, the underclass of modern England, are bereft of anything meaningful in their pitiful lives.
Former federal election candidate for Wannon Judith McNamara is stretching the truth when she says a similar thing could happen in south-west Victoria, but other Western nations such as ours would be wise to learn the lesson from Britain’s misery.
Immune to shame and fed on a diet of handouts and politically correct dogma, England’s yobs are the product of a social welfare experiment that nurtured them before discarding them when things went pear-shaped.
Much like a useless father who absconds when the going gets tough.
Indeed, many of the feckless young outlaws rampaging through London, Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham this past week would be the product of broken homes, angry victims of a one-parent culture that scorns the traditional family unit as out-of-step with modern thinking.
They would know nothing of what it means to contribute to society, rather than steal from it; nothing about respecting a community instead of wrecking it and nothing about communication, other than through a hand-held electronic gadget.
Aspiration, values, work, honour or loyalty are alien concepts.
They have never been obliged to learn these qualities and they are not alone in this respect, with much of the West having seemingly lost the will to teach and uphold the values that are the fabric of basic decency.
The law is decried as too lenient, teachers in tough schools are afraid, the rights of the criminal often outweigh those of the victim and delinquency runs rampant because we let it.
Pumped up with a warped sense of entitlement, youths are allowed to bully, swear, brawl and treat society with utter disrespect, confident that institutional authority will treat them with kid gloves.
Yet we continue to indulge them, too timid to say enough is enough and too brow-beaten by their casual, unprincipled insolence.
We then search for answers when they take over the streets of capital cities and steal from those who choose to do the decent thing and work for a living no matter how meagre - the shopkeepers, the hairdressers, the pub landlords and the café owners.
This latest racially-mixed uprising of lawlessness is not political unrest in its purest sense, unlike the Brixton riots in the UK 30 years ago when disaffected black youths took on an undeniably racist police force after years of harassment.
However, the role of the political classes in this latest disturbance cannot be ignored. Successive governments on both sides of politics in Britain have sat idly by as welfare-dependent communities have come to believe that benefits are a right, expecting more and more for doing less and less.
This culture of unconditional giving has eroded the qualities of personal responsibility, discipline and self-respect and in their place given birth to a soulless parasite, one that sucks the life out of its own community and, as we have seen this week, ultimately destroys it.
Marginalised in the extreme, Britain’s underclass are the dregs of a system that has failed to communicate the difference between right and wrong.
It is a state of affairs that helps no one, least of all those on the receiving end of the handouts and certainly not those who genuinely need welfare assistance.
Magistrates are jailing the perpetrators and Prime Minister David Cameron’s conservative government is making a grand show of getting tough.
But it is too late and no lasting deterrent for people beyond the pale when it comes to respect for the institutions of law and order.
They are beyond caring and until Britain rids itself of the grotesque, social apparatus that propagates such selfishness, it can expect more of the same.
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