Overclass values created the underclass

That's Melanie Phillips' view - responding to a Sunday Times column from India Knight.

This is what Melanie blogged late last night:

"It was the champagne socialist intelligentsia which destroyed the traditional family, demonised men, incentivised mass fatherlessness and declared never-married motherhood an inalienable human right, emptied education of content and cut off the escape routes out of disadvantage by withering the grammar schools, declared morality to be a dirty word, paralysed the police through political correctness, enslaved the poor through dependency on the state and then finally destroyed their brains by telling them to eat cannabis cake while themselves showing the way by snorting cocaine on the Square Mile or in recording studios, or getting legless on Crackdaddy cocktails at Boujis nightclub."

Comments

[John W]

She rather over-eggs the pud at the end - but yes.

[Tony Makara]

It has always struck me as curious how the term 'Moralizing' has become a negative term. The smart-set have always tried to define morality as being subjective rather than something we share collectively.

[Alexander King]

Melanie Phillips's column is wonderfully astute.

What works in theory at a Hampstead dinner party rarely works in practice on a sink estate.

The Left has truly failed the most needy members of our society.

Enter Ray Lewis...

[woodentop]

I wish the Intelligensia - the So Called "Chattering Classes" would take some lessons from Melanie Phillips - but of course they won't. They will go on living in their patronising ivory tower, looking down on the rest of us in the real world! That of course is why they loathe Mrs Phillips so much. The rest of us know that she talks sound common sense.

[James Strachan]

Yes.

It was perhaps inevitable that a moral code designed to excuse adultery amongst rich people in Bloomsbury would not work so well in the wider world.

We do have a problem that Melanie Phillips, Janet Daley, Simon Heffer et al are so forceful and extreme in their comments that they actually put off possible converts by their force of language.

Perhaps IDS and Ray Lewis have a depth of argument, and a reasoned approach, that will carry wide conviction.

[Iain Murray]

This is, of course, the thesis of Myron Magnet's classic "The Dream and the Nightmare." If I had a required reading list for conservatives, that volume would be on it.

[Neil Wilson]

She's right...

Rather simplistic (the type of thing one comes out with after a few), but oh so undeniably true.

Phillips and Heffer are only capable of preaching to the converted though - IDS and Cameron have a way of making these things sound progressive.

[Matt Wright]

Largely true although into that mix we should include technologcal changes which made society more anonymous and transient - larger settlements with people living away from family etc.

[F T P Topcliff]

Shame. So much of this is fair comment but the off the wall elements make Melanie sound unhinged.

"Telling them to eat cannabis cake" is something of an ovestatement, don't you think? And it displays ignortance in conflating various differing types of social and political forces which are not necessarily compatible.

And what does "declared morality to be a dirty word" add to the other phenomenon listed? Does it imply compulsory church on Sundays? No sex before marriage? How primitivist do we need to be to be 'moral'?