From Jonah Goldberg at National Review.

It’s a knock-out! She tries to defend the rioters as victims, and justifies their rioting.

Here is my previous post on Harriet Harman and the riots. She is opposed to marriage, fathers, shared-parenting and law and order. She just doesn’t like men parenting their own children. She wants to treat everyone as victims, and coddle them when they act irresponsibly. She favors subsidizing women who have children out of wedlock with taxpayer money.

And here’s another article from Life Site News about the riots.

Excerpt:

In fact, all of these are valid observations, but some factors are more fundamental than others. Social order in some communities – and unfortunately more often in the most vulnerable communities – is breaking down. And it is being driven by an unprecedented breakdown of the family, which in turn is causing a vicious cycle of poverty, lack of education, lawlessness and further erosion of the basic values people need to keep society in order.

It is difficult to say this without being accused of targeting single mothers or attacking absent fathers. I know many single mothers who are doing an amazing job, in difficult circumstances, and who have raised the best of kids. And there certainly are other pressing issues which need to be tackled, such as the fact that there are huge inequalities of income and opportunity in British society.

But some facts are so startling, and some effects so obvious, that even the most liberal newspaper of the British press, the Guardian, is now acknowledging that lack of family structure is creating a huge problem. On Wednesday, the paper interviewed a youth worker from Tottenham who has spent 30 years working with disadvantaged communities. He said that parental authority had now been eroded to the point where the parents of rioting children would be afraid to discipline them.

His views were echoed by the local MP David Lammy who commented, “There is none of the basic starting presumption of two adults who want to start a family, raise children together, love them, nourish them and lead them to full independence. The parents are not married and the child has come, frankly, out of casual sex; the father is not present, and is not expected to be. There are not the networks of extended families to make up for it. We are seeing huge consequences of the lack of male role models in young men’s lives.”

There are 3.5 million children from broken homes in Britain. Their growing numbers, and the effect on of family breakdown on children, caused a leading family law court judge, Sir Paul Coleridge, to recently describe the scale of the problem as “social anarchy” and to urge the government to work to promote marriage.

The decline of marriage has left a significant proportion of children with a confused understanding of stability and of boundaries. And the lack of a male role model means that young men in particular seek out the toughest in the gang for an authority figure rather than their father. That means just one bad apple can influence a whole community of young teens.

I was recently talking with someone online who was a fiscal conservative, but a social liberal. I think that view is mistaken. It turns out that government will expand to deal with the problems caused by people being irresponsible and reckless in their private lives. That will have an impact on tax rates and the free market, but it will also impact the very liberty that the social liberals want to protect. The more government grows to restrain these riots, the less liberty we will have. Being too permissive on social issues is bad for liberty, in the long run.