Abdication of parental responsibility on a nation-wide scale is blighting Britain’s social landscape, according to one English commentator.

One of the results: A generation of amoral and violent youth who resemble the characters in “A Clockwork Orange,” filmmaker Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 movie about a dystopic future United Kingdom.

In an article entitled “Childhood’s End” in the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, British journalist and retired physician Theodore Dalrymple discussed the antisocial consequences of the U.K.‘s collective abandonment of parental responsibility.

The negative consequences include the skyrocketing numbers of violent youth in Britain, where children as young as eight are now arming themselves with knives, Dalrymple said in his article, which is reprinted here.

Said Dalrymple, “The British, never fond of children, have lost all knowledge or intuition about how to raise them; as a consequence, they now fear them, perhaps the most terrible augury possible for a society.”

— Tom McFeely