Over the past week we have witnessed the culmination of the liberal experiment. The experiment attested that two parents don’t matter; that welfare, rather than work, cures poverty; you tolerate “minor crime”; you turn a blind eye to celebrity drug use; you allow children to leave school without worthwhile skills; you say there’s no difference between right and wrong. Well now we’ve seen the results.

The modern Labour Party’s answer to every social question is to open the taxpayers’ cheque books. We’ve tested that world view to the point of destruction. The welfare state has never been bigger but nor have our social problems. Today’s historically high tax burden has forced parents to spend more and more hours outside the home, just to make ends meet.

The Left is always ready to attack hyper-capitalism for the ways in which it can erode community bonds, but it looks the other way when it comes to thinking about the ways in which the hyper-state can devour social capital. Labour has become the most materialist and consumerist of Britain’s two largest parties. Whereas Big Society Conservatives are immersed in the importance of relationship-building, within families and within communities, it is the Left that constantly emphasises the right to personal fulfilment.

It reveres “lifestyle choices” as though the kind of home in which a child is raised is somehow equivalent to whether you get your weekly groceries from Morrisons or Asda. Any political movement that is relaxed about the structure of the family will produce the amoral youths that rioted last week.