What a wallop !!

The NewYorkTimes had it coming. Who better to deliver than Janet Daly

Never likely to be outdone when it comes to Left-liberal sententiousness, the New York Times has produced a corker of a leading article on our very own riots. With a mock-judicious bit of throat-clearing, it begins on a tone of apparently unimpeachable even-handedness: “nothing can justify or excuse the terrifying wave of lawlessness, etc, etc … the perpetrators must be punished, etc, etc.”

But it then lurches into an absurd compounding of the irrelevant and the ill-informed. David Cameron, the paper intones, is “a product of Britain’s upper classes and schools”. (This is scarcely intelligible English: does it mean upper-class schools?) And so, presumably as a consequence of his class-induced ignorance, “he has blamed the looting and burning on a compound of national moral decline, bad parenting and perverse inner-city subculture”.

Yes indeed he has, thus putting himself in agreement with about 90 per cent of the British population. But the New York Times in as uninterested in the overwhleming majority of British public opinion as it is in the great mass of American public opinion. It is as smugly and narrowly orthodox in its Left-liberal posturing as its counterparts in Britain. (If the BBC were to be reincarnated as an American newpaper, it would be the New York Times.) So it carries on in class war mode with accusations about Mr Cameron’s blithe imperiousness: “Would he find similar blame – this time in the culture of the well housed and well-off – for Britian’s recent tabloid phone hacking scandals or the egregious abuse of expense accounts by members of Parliament?”............