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The rioters and the social class to which they mainly belong thus have genuine reason to feel aggrieved, but that reason is not one that they often cite. In the name of equality and redistributionism, the state has provided them with an expensive education that is nearly useless, thanks to the implementation of pedagogical theories from whose practical effects the better-off and better-educated parents are, to some extent, able to protect their children; entrapped them in de facto prisons; and driven up the cost of their labor so far by means of welfare subsidy that it is worth no one’s while to employ it. At the same time, their minds have been filled with notions of entitlement that can only breed resentment.

The state has failed these Britons in one other respect, perhaps the most significant in helping to explain the riots: it has not repressed their propensity to crime. It has given criminally inclined Britons the (correct) impression of impunity. Consider that the British police catch the culprit of just one robbery in 12 and that just one in eight convicted robbers goes to prison in the U.K. Since the number of robberies is much greater than the number of robbers—each robber tends to commit many such crimes—failure to imprison robbers, and to do so for a long time, is in effect to grant the state’s imprimatur to robbery. When one bears in mind that leniency is shown toward criminals who have committed other serious offenses as well, it is no surprise that the young and criminally inclined should believe in their own impunity. They may not be able to do arithmetic, but they can certainly recognize long odds when they see them. They know, too, that they have respectable society on the run when successive lord chief justices have complained that too many Britons are sent to prison and that such sentences should not be administered to first-time burglars (meaning, of course, the first time that they get caught, not the first time that they burgle, a distinction that seems to have escaped their lordships). It would not be too much to say that recent lord chief justices of England are a major cause of the riots.

Crime, in short, has been normalized as a way of life.