British politicians are ill-placed to condemn such actions since they themselves were hugely compromised in the scandal over the expenses claimed by members of Parliament — often for items very much like those prized by the looters. Moreover, the British political class looks highly susceptible to vested and monopoly interests. News International, for example, has been shown to have manipulated both of the main political parties for insider advantage.

Thus the top and bottom of British society seem to exhibit quite similar values — both play the system, and both see no reason why they should not. They represent the final triumph of a value system that does not recognize any objective values at all.

On the left, libertarianism used state welfare to give autonomy to people it considered too dependent on each other and too defined by outmoded codes and values. In so doing, it rendered superfluous all the bottom-up organization and structures of British working- class life, making people and communities dependent on state welfare rather than on each other.

This has been most invidious in the case of the family. Cultural libertarians on the left have followed Engels in deeming marriage to be nothing more than the bourgeois subjugation of women. Since 1997, for example, a single mother of two has seen her benefits increase by 85 percent. At the same time, the tax burden placed on a one-earner family (two parents + two children) on an average wage is 39 percent higher in Britain than that in other O.E.C.D. countries.

The result is that children in Britain are now more than three times as likely to live in one-parent households than they were in 1972; a third to a half of all British children will at some point live in a one-parent family; and a third of all British children at any one time are living with just one parent. In 1971, less than 10 percent of all births in England and Wales were outside marriage; in 2008, 45 percent of all births were.