We Shall Not Look Upon Her Like Again

Ken Livingstone summed her up well, although he had a lot more negative things to say about her :

Ken Livingstone, Labour’s former London Mayor who clashed with Lady Thatcher during his time running the Greater London Council in the 1980s, said her personal “courage and drive” made her “the most admirable prime minister of modern times”.

“She didn’t worry about focus groups, she didn’t read the newspapers,” he said.

“There was real courage.”

However, Mr Livingstone said it had been “a tragedy for Britain” that her policies had been so badly flawed.

The Thatcher years were the start of the world we live in today. Her Premiership saw:

a) The start of the debt-fuelled culture which crashed in 2008 - remember "takes the waiting out of wanting" ?
b) The rise of the UK underclass, bastardy and drug use
c) The rise of the deregulated financial “economy” and decline of manufacturing
d) The rise in house prices
e) a collapse in the birth rate as
f) more women participated in the workforce (so they could afford a house!)
g) a dramatic rise in crime – linked to b)
h) the sell-off of vital infrastructure – power generation and distribution being the most important

While winning her economic wars, she was defeated in the culture wars – I’m not sure she even realised she was fighting one, let alone that she was losing. At any event, the Britain of 1990 was a lot further from Alderman Roberts’ Grantham than the Britain of 1979.

But the thing is – every government since has overseen the continuation and perhaps intensification of all the baleful trends above – with the one glorious exception of the Blessed Michael Howard’s noble reversal of the previous 50 years penal policy.

And, of course, Blair added a few more baleful trends all of his very own - including massive immigration and stopping all nuclear development in 1998.

We see in the Thatcher years yet again the contrast between the post-68 left's total dominance of the social agenda and their defeats on the economic agenda. A former girlfriend was a trainee social worker in 1980 - those girls hated Thatcher, more for her conservative social beliefs and her personal style than her economics. Such a straight !

Thatcher’s small-town conservative social values were almost redundant by the end of her reign, with rocketing rates of crime, bastardy, drug use, STIs.

The 80s were when the 60s went mainstream – I can still remember finding a bunch of lager-drinking ‘lads’ from my local picking magic mushrooms one September – their counterparts of ten or fifteen years before would have avoided such things like the plague.

So why did Mrs Thatcher’s social agenda fail so dismally while her economic agenda – at least as regards crippling union power – succeed?

Because individual capitalists – especially in the financial sector – found that none of that made much difference to their profits. Some things, like the influx of women into the labour market, and a move from manufacturing to services, were a positive boon as far as reducing militancy and strikes were concerned. The destruction of the existing cultural landscape was no problem to people who didn’t particularly identify with it – like Rupert Murdoch.

Bastardy, crime and the underclass were much more of a problem for working class people than the elite, who didn’t have to live with it or send their kids to school with it. Not much anti-social behaviour in Roy Jenkins’ Oxfordshire village – plenty in the Valleys where he was born.

Sure, taxes were quite high to pay the benefits bill – but they were coming down, and compared to the 1960s they were massively reduced. And North Sea oil paid the bills and enabled us to keep the balance of payments deficit getting too outrageous – while the City tax take climbed ever higher. You can only take one step at a time – IIRC Mrs Thatcher’s share of state spending was around the same when she left as when she arrived – remarkable when you think what the state no longer did – steel, coal, gas, water, power.

It's arguable (I tend to agnosticism) that Mrs Thatcher's curbing of the unions may have been a good thing in a relatively closed society. But when that was combined with immigration on the scale of the Blair years, it was an invitation to capitalists to fill their boots, then grind them in the faces of the poor. The toxic synergy of capitalist economic ideas (up to a point - would Adam Smith have bailed out the banks?) and post-68 left social ideas have between them created the Britain we see today - and it's not a pretty sight.    

Carina Saunders

Here.

She was murdered in the States, but it's another Mary-Anne Leneghan-style killing - they killed her in front of another girl as a demonstration of the penalties for disobedience.

Hitch Nails It ...

Say to David Cameron that naughty children should be smacked at home and caned in school, that the police (and responsible adults) should be free to wallop louts and vandals caught in the act, that the police should return to preventive foot patrols, that prisons should be austere places of hard work, plain food and discipline without TV sets or semi-licit drugs, and that wrongdoers should be sent to them when they first take to crime, not when they are already habitual crooks, and he will throw up his well-tailored arms in horror at your barbarity.

Say to him that divorce should be made very difficult and that the state should be energetically in favour of stable, married families with fathers (and cease forthwith to subsidise families without fathers) and he will smirk patronisingly and regard you as a pitiable lunatic.

Say to him that mass immigration should be stopped and reversed, and that those who refuse any of the huge number of jobs which are then available should be denied benefits of any kind, and he will gibber in shock.

Yet he is ready to authorise the use of water cannon and plastic bullets on our streets (quite useless, as it happens, against this sort of outbreak) as if we were a Third World despotism.

Water cannon and plastic bullets indeed. What an utter admission of failure, that after 50 years of the most lavish welfare state in the solar system, you cannot govern your country without soaking the citizenry in cold water and bombarding them with missiles from a safe distance.

Here is an example of how little Cameron knows about Britain. He says that the criminals of August will face the ‘full force of the law’. What ‘force’?

The great majority of the looters, smashers, burners and muggers have not been arrested and never will be. Our long-enfeebled police were so useless at the start that thousands of crimes were committed with total impunity.

Now we know why they don’t call themselves ‘police forces’ any more. But they aren’t ‘services’ either, for they certainly don’t serve us or do what we want them to do, preferring to arrest us for defending ourselves. The criminals, who are cunning without being intelligent, all know this. They will wait for the next chance.

The loping, smirking, shuffling creeps who eventually appeared before the courts were the ultimate losers – the ones who came late to the looting and who were too slow or too stupid to run before they were put in the bag.

A good point about the arrests. The vanguard of the working class movement aka the first guys to actually smash the shutters down at PC World or Carphone Warehouse, were doing their deeds when the police had lost control of many streets early on Monday evening. I'd imagine the vast majority of these 'early adopters' got away with it (although CCTV may well nail some). An awful lot of arrests seem to have been of stragglers, people late to the party. And Little Miss Perfect, allegedly driving the getaway car with two other persons of pallor, was a lot safer stop-n-search for a couple of lone officers than a car full of Man Dem Crew. Say what you like about grammar schools, but we were taught not to shank the Feds.

R.I.P. Richard Mannington Bowes

When Richard Mannington Bowes was born in 1943, the ethnic minority population of Britain was a few thousand people.

When he was eight years old, in 1951, Churchill's cabinet debated immigration into the UK.

David Maxwell-Fyfe, the home secretary, reported that the total of "coloured people" in Britain had risen from 7,000 before the second world war to 40,000 at the time of writing, with 3,666 of those unemployed, and 1,870 on national assistance, or benefits.

It's almost impossible for anyone growing up today to imagine what a peaceful and orderly (and staid) place post-war Britain was. The American anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer, in his 1955 "Exploring English Character", compared the post-war English with their early Victorian forebears of 120 years previously* :

"One of the most lawless populations in the world has turned into one of the most law-abiding; ...a fiercely and ruthlessly acquisitive society has turned into a mildly distributive society; general corruption in government has been replaced by an extraordinarily high level of honesty... in public life today the English are certainly among the most peaceful, gentle, courteous and orderly populations that the civilized world has ever seen. ... you hardly ever see a fight in a bar (a not uncommon spectacle in most of the rest of Europe or in the U.S.A.)... football crowds are as orderly as church meetings.."

If you had told Mr Mannington-Bowes' parents that, sixty years later, their child would be beaten to death, in Ealing, by a mob of strangers bent on looting and arson, they would have thought you were mad.

They'd have thought you were mad if you predicted that he'd be fined in the local magistrates court - "for confronting youths for urinating outside his home".

This was England. The law was on the side of the law-abiding, and people were killed in riots in far-away countries, not here.

UPDATE - I would be interested to see a report of his trial and conviction, and who the magistrate was. I trust it wasn't this one. I don't want to come over all Polly Toynbee, and the people who beat him to death ARE savages, but the wholesale criminality (mixed with plenty of assaults just for the fun of it) is a product of an assault on the principles of criminal justice that's been going on for fifty years. Fifty years of mass immigration may arguably have been a necessary condition for his murder, but certainly not a sufficient one - and as I've said many a time and oft, there are plenty of native youth who'll beat a man to death for being a good citizen.

As I argued here and here, something in the water of post-Cultural Revolution UK seems to turn the children and grandchildren of previously law-abiding people into bad boys and girls. What could it be ? This Polly Toynbee column - or a read of the Magistrate's blog - may hold an answer.

* to be fair, the peacefulness of the English puzzled him greatly, John Bull being traditionally a pugnacious sort of chap, always ready to scrap when offended by a foreigner of any description.

Auchinleck

I see that eight schoolchildren were shot at with a BB gun yesterday, in Church Street, Auchinleck.
















Photo - Michael McGurk/Daily Mail


Church Street is also where Labour MSP and Scottish Justice Minister Cathy Jamieson was given a traditional Ayrshire welcome (by this chap) on a visit to the local Co-Op.















UPDATE - via commenter dr cromarty, this :

"Police have been called to a junior football match in Ayrshire after reports that fans were fighting on the pitch. The violence flared at the game, between Cumnock Juniors and Auchinleck Talbot, which ended with a 3-0 victory for Achinleck.
Strathclyde Police confirmed that a disturbance had broken out at the game and that the incident was on going. The teams are playing a local derby game in the Emirates Junior Cup."

Oh Dear

"Tinishya, who lives at the family home in Bristol, with siblings Britney, ten, and Alfie, two, left school to give birth".

A world of ruin in a sentence (the family are from Southmead).

Torment In The Community

In the bleak chronicle of those with 'learning difficulties', tortured and killed in the UK by (mostly) feral underclass youth, I forgot to blog about David Aske, who died of a heart attack in March, bullied to death over a period of ten years or more.

To residents he was a gentle man, a kind neighbour and protective son, but to generations of unruly teenagers he was “Dopey Dave”, a vulnerable man they took pleasure in provoking into a fury.

He collapsed and died from a suspected heart attack on Wednesday evening after confronting several shadowy figures in the front garden who were shouting at him. Last night police arrested a 18-year-old man on suspicion of manslaughter.

One neighbour suggested that “kids” had indulged in “bear-baiting”, effectively tormenting their chosen victim to death and that the bullying had been going on for much of his life.

Over the years his tormentors, some as young as 8, had called at the modest pebble-dashed home he shared with his brother Brian, 63, and mother Rose, 88, throwing eggs and bricks at the walls, kicking in his front door, breaking windows and demanding cigarettes and money. Residents have complained that not enough was done to tackle antisocial behaviour but Greater Manchester Police insisted that officers had gone out of their way to develop a personal relationship with the family and to prosecute offenders where possible.

The police do seem to have done something :

Police insisted they had done everything possible to support Mr Askew, his wheelchair-bound mother, Rose, and brother Brian. They had been to the property in Hattersley, Greater Manchester, 10 times in the last year after reports of anti-social behaviour. One youth – currently in prison – has an ASBO for harassing the family.

10 years of harassment - one ASBO and no-one fined or imprisoned. Is that the police, Crown Prosecution Service, the kids' social workers, magistrates, or a toxic combination? You can see how that tough approach worked out :

It is thought Askew became agitated when two youths broke down a gate and entered his garden on Wednesday evening. Police were called at 9.40pm after the youths tampered with his mother's mobility scooter and a bin.

Officers arrived within nine minutes but discovered Askew collapsed in the garden.

His poor mother. One 'youth' has been arrested on suspicion of manslaughter. Possibility of a conviction - zero IMHO. They're just trying to be seen to do something about that open stable door and a missing horse.

Sunny Hundal "Two Great Truths" Shocker

Now that Labour are consigned to the privatised council dustcart (rubbish/recyclables alternate weeks) of history, its adherents seem able to speak a few previously un-nameable truths.

First of all, a little aside in a Lib Con piece by one Adam Ramsey :

"Tony Blair seemed to believe that if you sound like a Tory, you can sneak through some Labour policies. So he switched from “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” to announcing initiatives to march ‘hoodies’ to cash machines.

And while these statements were Daily Mail fodder which never actually happened, a whole generation of people began to believe that attacking those who commit crime is the appropriate response ..."

I've been pointing that out for five years at least.



And here's the Sunster himself telling it like it is - or was :

The war on social issues has broadly been won by the left.

Can't argue with that, can you ? Nor with this (other than the word 'great') :

" ... expanding the size of the welfare state and making it central to people’s lives, despite Thatcher’s best attempts to destroy it, was one of New Labour’s greatest achievements ..."

He's not too sound on his history - given that the Thatcher years saw the explosion of the British underclass and the fatherless family*, and some fairly hefty public spending. But his point about trying to create as many welfare recipients as possible is a valid one. This struck me when I realised that an income of 48K entitled one to Child Tax Credit. The Gord giveth and the Gord taketh away. Welcome to the Benefits Big Tent !





* as Charles Murray put it :

When I wrote (in 1989) in the Sunday Times Magazine that Britain did indeed have an underclass, small but growing, the news had no natural constituency. Conservative politicians were embarrassed that crime, unemployment, and illegitimacy had soared conspicuously on their watch, and would just as soon have ignored the whole thing. The Left, ordinarily delighted to blame anything on Margaret Thatcher, couldn’t admit that crime really was rising and large numbers of people were exploiting the dole without sounding like lower-case conservatives. As for unmarried women having babies, it was a good sign, not a bad one, that women were no longer forced into marriage just because they got pregnant. From Left and Right alike, the notion of a British underclass was generally dismissed as an attempt to impose an American paradigm on British problems that weren’t really so terrible anyway.

"There is no finer investment for any community than putting milk into babies"

The Japanese, admittedly a tad late, get natalist :

Several sectors of the Japanese economy are tipped to benefit from the Y2.2 trillion programme, through which families will receive payments of Y13,000 (£97) every month for each child if the new Government is able to push its much-vaunted programme through parliament.

Payments will rise to Y23,000 a month in the second year of the scheme as part of the Government’s effort to demonstrate that the State will permanently be on the side of families and childrearing.

The past two decades have witnessed relentless declines in the Japanese birth rate, prompting a range of demographic concerns, from a lack of elderly care provision to long-term fiscal catastrophe.

At getting on for £175 per month per child, presumably tax-free, it appears to this father of four, taxed as a single person, to be a pretty good deal. The previous deal was Y10,000 per child, increased from 5,000 for the first two and 10,000 for subsequent kids in 2007. So for four children you're talking an increase in 3 years from Y30,000 to Y92,000 - tripled, and at current exchange rates nearly £700 a month.

By contrast, the UK Child Benefit rate is £20 pw for the first, and £13.20 for subsequent - about £250 a month for four. I'm sure there are various tax credits in addition for those who can navigate them, but they're a fairly recent innovation. And of course, for non-earners, there are all those various welfare state goodies - free housing, council tax etc.

You have to wonder if such a policy will work for Japan, and whether one could work over here.



Of course a much less generous policy has worked already for some UK communities.

While most graduate girlies might not fancy a council flat and £100 a week, the assorted benefit package is quite enough to keep the Williams sisters or a Karen Matthews in their accustomed lifestyle.

And imagine thirty or forty years back, when early arrivals in Bradford or the Isle of Dogs brought the news back to Mirpur and Bangladesh that the UK taxpayer would pay you to have babies - the locals probably thought the deal too good to be true. When all the other goodies - free health care and education, money even if you didn't work - were added in, no wonder V.S. Naipaul's manpower export experts were busy.



I think it unlikely that our rulers will introduce such policies any time soon. Japan are doing it for a reason - they have minimal immigration and want more Japanese babies, not babies per se.

In the UK, we don't need to do that sort of thing. The current incentives are quite sufficient if you just want babies, as we reached the point of inflection back in 2001. Then it was that the increasing number of births to immigrant mothers started to more than compensate for the shortage of births among clever grads or ordinary Janes. Now we're on a roll - or somebody is :

The equivalent of more than 2,000 new primary schools will be needed within the next eight years to cope with a massive increase in pupil numbers, figures suggest. Places need to be found for almost 550,000 extra pupils by 2018, it was disclosed. The projected rise is believed to be down to a sharp increase in birthrates combined with an influx of immigrants in some areas...

Last year, MPs said that the extra pressure on primary places was a "direct result of mass immigration" into the UK. The Cross Party Group on Balanced Migration said the number of births to foreign mothers increased by 64 per cent in the last eight years. At the same time, birthrates among UK families increased by only six per cent. It accused the Government of being "in denial about the consequences of their losing control of our borders".

The quote which opens this post is apparently 1943 Churchill (I've never found a proper reference - anyone got one ?).

"There is no finer investment for any community than putting milk into babies"

In 1943 we knew who Churchill was talking about. For which community now will it be 'a fine investment' ?




UPDATE - Sho(t)gun weddings :

Everything, from the generously elasticated rental dress to the special anteroom for napping, is part of the “Double Happy” service — once a niche market for pregnant brides, but one that now represents nearly a third of the hugely lucrative Japanese wedding industry.

The shift reflects changing attitudes in Japan. The historic taboo of pregnancy outside marriage was largely abandoned during the 1990s but a strong tradition of being married by the time of the birth remained.

By 2004 the national average of ten months between marriage and the birth of a first child had fallen to six.

Equally important, social commentators say, is the psychological effect of Japan’s bigger demographic problem. For 28 consecutive years, the country’s population of children under the age of 15 has fallen to a new low. For the parents of young women, that relentless decline has had a profound effect — in a country where fewer and fewer women are choosing to have children, a daughter’s pregnancy and the prospect of grandchildren is hugely welcome.

All Liberal Life Is There ...

Cheesed off with a world where feral child-torturers get five years and anonymity on release ? From the comments on another Guardian "they're victims too " thread.

"It's Thatcher's Fault"

"It's the legacy of Thatcher and the Tories, their crusade against the primary industry has produced children who have grown up with parents who have never had a job"

"Society was brutalised through industrialization and the aftermath and the denial of "society" by Thatcher, and the complete social-moral disintigration she caused"

"Most torturing of small children takes place within the family"

I think in the media-fuelled moral panic about 'stranger danger', people have ignored the fact that the greatest damage done to children tends to be within their own homes at the hands of their own families.

"You're worse than they are"

"I feel that people who seem to want to inflict punishment on small children are themselves in need of treatment."

"The lynch-mob attitude of some of the comments and the call for throw- away-the- key justice reflects just what a brutal society Britain is"

"Who knew that the true sociopaths dwell in this thread"

The all-purpose Guardian editorial seems to have been a pretty good predictor on this occasion. I see the Indie borrowed from it too :

Laban :

The natural horror felt at (insert appalling crime here) should not blind us to the fact that (crime is actually falling/it is all Thatcher's fault/such crimes have always been with us).

If we surrender to (the tabloid agenda/the Daily Mail hysteria/knee-jerk populism/the politics of the soundbite) and take the easy option of (jailing more of our young people/bringing back the birch/bringing back hanging/walling off the cities then bombing them/demonising our young people) we run the very real risk of (actually achieving something/alienating a generation/an invasion of killer bees).

There is only one answer. An enormous increase in the funding of (Sure Start schemes/outreach workers/emotional intelligence mentors/youth projects/anti-racist 5-a-day smoking cessation co-ordinators).

Indie :

"No cause for moral panic"

In the ongoing dialogue of the deaf which recurs whenever feral youths or children commit dreadful crimes, there are only a few liberal arguments, picked up in criminology class and amplified by the Guardian/Indie/BBC, and they come out every time.

a) 'it's always been like this' - aka 'moral panic'.

b) "one case doesn't tell us anything about British society" (except the Stephen Lawrence murder)

c) "it's Thatcher's fault"

d) "crime is actually going down" (having risen by 1,000% since 1950, it started to decline when we locked more people up)

e) "anyway, most torturing of small children takes place within the family" - not the married one it don't.

f) "you're worse than they are" - if you call for evil criminals to be punished, you're even more evil yourself !


One commenter links to this piece, about a classic Guardianista - a woman with empathy for everyone except her neighbours. Kind of reverse-Christianity.

"Who is my neighbour ?"

"The outcast, the rapist, the criminal, the thug"

"And what about your ...er.. neighbours ?"

"Those straights ?"

I had been a foster carer for just over a year when James came to us, and had worked for the council's mental health service for 10 years before that. But I wanted to help the teenagers who had been in the care system for a long time and had suffered serious trauma.

I did every training course on offer. Central Bedfordshire council was brilliant: I studied attachment theory, behaviour management, the problems caused by drug and alcohol abuse, and how to work with sexually abused children. I even did a BTec in advanced fostering.

No problem, then - all boxes ticked.

I was realistic enough to recognise that he was a danger to himself and to everyone he came into contact with, and so I was nervous about the young children who lived around us, but because I knew what a hurt, vulnerable side James possessed I wanted to believe that, deep down, he was a good lad.

We soldiered on. I refused to reject James like everyone else in his life had done, but 10 months after he had come to live with us my neighbour of more than 20 years sold her house and moved away. She told me she couldn't live near him a day longer.

Then, last July, James was accused of raping an 11-year-old local girl and forcing her to perform a sexual act on him.

So a woman is forced from her home of 20 years and an innocent child is raped - and all because "I wanted to believe".

That's religion we're seeing.

Darwin Nominees

It's pretty much traditional now. Some young scallawags get killed doing things that are perhaps foolish, perhaps criminal, or perhaps both, and their friends who pop up to mourn the deceased are, to a man or woman, incapable of writing in English:

"at t end ov t day 2 young boyz av died , av u never wen u was young was daring n willing 2 do things tha no1 else wud do??"

Compare the comments - and the mourners, above, with the much poorer community Gwilym Rees Williams grew up in - and wonder what's happened to our culture - and our education system - in the last 50 years.

Underclass News

Last summer an Asian chappie cunningly disguised himself in "the paint-splattered overalls that were meant to make me look like a Pakistani immigrant doing odd jobs to survive in his new home" and went to hang out for a few months on the Southmead council estate in Bristol to make this BBC documentary about the hideous racism of the native inhabitants. I do hope he wasn't taking a flat away from a local ;-(

Now the point of it all was to show the dreadful racism etc etc. But this tremendous piece of reporting in fact reveals the young inhabitants to be dreadful full stop, despite the fact that the target appears to be (sigh) the Daily Mail.

The impulse to segregate was compounded by the messages that seemed to reinforce the idea that the treatment in Southmead reflected the mood and views of the rest of Britain. "Hundreds of thousands of migrants here for handouts, says senior judge". "Britain paying migrants £1,700 to return home BEFORE they've even got here" "The violent new breed of migrants who will let nothing stop them coming to Britain" These headlines were just three of many that were printed in the Mail, a right-wing daily during my time in Southmead. I don't usually take much notice of the headlines in the Sun and the Mail unless they are truly shocking, but in Southmead the headlines seemed to have an impact on the treatment we received. The level of low-level hostility from adults seemed to be directly linked to the content of the headlines. More outright hostility from younger adults and children followed a day or so later.

That's right. The Mail comes out, those adults who can read immediately start giving grief to incomers, and a day or two later, when the less literate natives picked up the message, they kick off as well. Puh-leese !

I wonder if they thought of going to the local paper shops and asking what the daily orders were ? Bet they didn't. I'll lay odds the Mail's not the Southmead paper of choice.

The whole thing is in fact a Daily Mail reader's underclass nightmare and could without much editing easily find a way into that mighty organ :

Hundreds of cans of high-strength cider littered the streets every Saturday and Sunday. I saw unemployed drunken youths accost shoppers in the mornings. The green spaces that looked inviting from afar were littered with used condoms, pregnancy test kits and the excrement of pitbull dogs that were popular pets amongst residents. In the daytime, teenage mothers pushed young children around the estate. I saw the partner of one young mother call a toddler a "****ing little ****" before smacking him hard enough on the back of the head to make the child drop to his knees and cover his head in the expectation of further violence. In the early evenings, young teenagers would sit at benches swigging from bottles of cheap alcohol...

A group of local girls, none older than 15, were talking to each other loudly. Amongst all the squealing, the only words I could make out were "****", "*******" and "****". Occasionally one of the girls would pull her skirt up at a passing car of boys and the others would cheer and hand her a bottle of brightly coloured liquor to swig from. Every now and again, one of the cars would stop and another girl might stand in front of the passenger window and pull down her top. The boys would try and persuade them to get in. Eventually, two of the girls got into a crowded little car with wide tyres and lowered suspension.

I had been absent mindedly watching the events in front of us. After the car drove away, the Sudanese father turned to his daughter and said; "That's what English girls are like. Never talk to people like that."

Roy Jenkins "civilising mission" is complete. The culture is FUBAR. Quite properly he don't want his daughter to be like a native. But what his son will make of the native girls may be different.

Just before they got on their bus, a group of teenagers outside the chip shop behind us proved the technicians' point by rounding on a passing elderly local.

"Look out, he's a perv," shouted one boy. Before another pushed the girl standing next to him in front of the old man and said, "I bet you wish you could **** her". They all then burst into laughter.

Poor chap. Old, white, male, straight, poor. Not a member of any designated victim group. No hate crime there. No help to be had. The BBC would never be so judgemental as to spend two months just to prove that Southmead has some very scummy youth therein. That would be picking on the most vulnerable in our society, after all (the chavs, not their victims).


Southmead is a locus classicus for the idea that you can make people better by throwing social workers at them. Remember the wise words of Charles Murray :

During the 1960s and 1970s, the Americans tried everything: pre-school socialisation programmes, enrichment programmes in elementary schools, programmes that provided guaranteed jobs for young people without skills, ones that provided on-the-job training, programmes that sent young people without skills to residential centres for extended skills training and psychological preparation for the world of work, programmes to prevent school dropout, and so on. These are just the efforts aimed at individuals. I won’t even try to list the varieties of programmes that went under the heading of “community development”. They were also the most notorious failures.

We know the programmes didn’t work because all of them were accompanied by evaluations. I was a programme evaluator from 1968 to 1981. The most eminent of America’s experts on programme evaluation — a liberal sociologist named Peter Rossi — distilled this vast experience into what he called the Iron Law of Evaluation: “The expected value of any net impact assessment of any large-scale social programme is zero.” The Iron Law has not been overturned by subsequent experience.

In fact these programmes go back before that. My hero Norman Dennis worked in Southmead in the 1950s :

He had lived on a notoriously bad housing estate in Bristol, Southmead, for more than a year in the 1950s. It was one of the two worst housing estates in the city. As part of his research, he had participated in local life, as well as interviewing people in their houses, often for hours at a time. He was the sociologist with the Bristol Social Project, which was designed to apply the techniques of improvement elaborated by the Chicago Social Area Projects of the previous 20 years or so...

Dennis' hindsight view was that 1950s Southmead 'by the standards of the early 1990s would have looked almost entirely civilized'.

The Bristol Social Project is also a bit of a locus classicus - run by a doubtless intelligent and competent public schoolboy (John Spencer, St Pauls and Balliol - his report is here) and a total failure :

The Bristol Social Project, which ran on the estate from 1953 to 1958 engaged in counselling, group work and community development on the estate and bequeathed a Community Centre and Adventure Playground, both of them still functioning. However Southmead’s fortunes did not improve significantly over the next 30 years and, by the end of the 1980s, social conditions had deteriorated to such an extent, that major disturbances were occurring in the streets of the old estate and Southmead was front page news.

UPDATE - not all of John Spencer's report on the Bristol Social Project is available via Google Books, but what you can read is pretty much 100% waffle (I liked the bit where they discovered that one of the local shopkeepers was also fencing stolen goods and running a moneylending operation. The locals on the Project wanted immediate action taken against him, whereas for John Spencer the discovery was 'an opportunity for learning and discussion on the variety of moral standards on the estate'. The locals were 'irritated' by this. I bet they were). No wonder he ended as Edinburgh's first Professor of Social Education.

The project was considered 'influential' - 'Bristol's experiments might well be followed elsewhere' said the Guardian, and Town and Country Planning noted the use of 'trained community workers, a relatively new shere of social work which is rapidly gaining recognition'. We're awash with the buggers now, and Southmead is still what it is (only worse) after 50 years of social work.


(via, of all places, Liberal Conspiracy)

Bestwood Update

Remember Bestwood, Notts - the former mining community which was run by a criminal gang and which had 200 arson attempts in a year in just three streets ?

It may just be a coincidence, but a young man from Raymede Drive, one of those three streets, is on trial charged with murder and arson :

A teenager has been charged with murder after the raging fire that destroyed a home in Bulwell. The fire claimed the life of grandmother and volunteer care worker Sue Southern (54), whose body was found in the charred wreckage of the home.

Now William Rowbotham (18), of Raymede Drive, Bestwood Estate, has been accused of starting the blaze. Rowbotham was arrested soon after the fire, which broke out on South Snape Close in the Snape Wood area of Bulwell in the early hours of last Thursday morning.

Trial continues. This is a public information post.

Senior Police Officer = Senior Social Worker

No matter what happens at street level, where the decisions get taken the sociology grads are totally in control :

Police try to avoid sending anti-social youths to prison because it increases the chances of them reoffending, an inquest into the deaths of a mother and her disabled daughter heard today.

Superintendent Steve Harrod, head of criminal justice at Leicestershire Police, was giving evidence at the hearing into the suicide of Fiona Pilkington, 38, who killed herself and and her disabled daughter two years ago. Ms Pilkington, 38, died after setting fire to her car while she and her daughter Francecca Hardwick, 18, were inside. An 11-year bullying campaign by local youths had made their lives intolerable. Months before, Ms Pilkington had written in her diary that she had given up trying to call the police for help, because they thought she was “overreacting”.

Earlier this week it emerged that Ms Pilkington had called police 33 times to complain about the abuse but none of the gang members, including the main problem family about whom police were informed, were prosecuted.

Mr Harrod was then asked by a juror: “If a youth above the age of criminal responsibility commits a crime, why is the criminalising of juveniles a consideration? If they commit a crime do they not bring the criminalisation upon themselves?”

He replied: “From a police point of view, what we want to do with any criminals is to prevent reoffending. From my personal experience, if a juvenile goes in to detention, they are likely to mix with like-minded people during their time there and they are more likely to reoffend. I think for new police officers this is all part of their training and for older officers there is a transition. But once you recognise that if you go to charge, and then the offenders come out of prison, you see them in the cells again and again.”

The badly burnt bodies of Ms Pilkington and her daughter, known as Frankie to her family, were discovered in October 2007 in the family’s blue Austin Maestro at the side of the A47 near their home. For more than a decade the family had been subjected to daily torment from local youths – some as young as 10 – who routinely shouted abuse and hurled objects at their house. At one point Ms Pilkington’s son Anthony, now 19, was threatened with an iron bar and locked in a shed at knifepoint. Earlier, the inquest was told social services were aware Ms Pilkington had been experiencing “suicidal thoughts”.

I blogged this case two years ago, and the reality turns out to be just as heartbreaking as I thought. Frances Crook and the Prison Reform Trust - and the BBC, of course - are doing a cracking job.

UPDATE - more from the spectacularly useless Steve Harrod :

At the inquest into the pair's deaths yesterday, Superintendent Steve Harrod, head of criminal justice at Leicestershire Police, acknowledged that the criminal justice system was set up to avoid sending juveniles to prison. He said police officers were only allowed to issue warnings to young troublemakers unless their behaviour was judged to be serious.

"I'm not sure if people know but low-level anti-social behaviour is mainly the responsibility of the council"

UPDATE - more torture in the community. If this had happened sixty years ago it would have been front page news. That's two rape/torture convictions in Greater London in the last three weeks that the BBC have failed to report. Is a pattern developing ?

The boys, two aged 17 and the other 16, approached the 14 year old victim and took her to a flat in Bromley on October 24 last year. While there the girl was raped and her hair was set on fire. An investigation was launched by Lewisham police and officers obtained mobile telephone footage of the suspects tormenting the victim with a cigarette lighter. Detective Constable Darren Sonnar said: “This was a particularly harrowing case".

Today's Early Release Murderer - Robert Tozer

A man who murdered his 85-year-old neighbour in a "merciless" attack in her home has been jailed for life. Robert Tozer pleaded guilty at Hull Crown Court to killing Joan Charlton in West Parade, Hull, in June. The judge recommended Tozer, 20, spend at least 22 years in jail before being considered for parole.

Humberside Police had described the attack on Mrs Charlton, in which every bone in her face was broken, as "sustained and brutal".

As chance would have it, the BBC report is somewhat light on the unpleasant detail.

He repeatedly assaulted her with a bottle in the living room before searching upstairs for cash. Tozer came back downstairs to discover the injured pensioner trying to reach the phone in the hall to call for help and launched a merciless attack. He stamped on her head, cut the phone line, deactivated the fire alarm and tried to set fire to her body despite knowing she was still alive.

All the reports, except the BBC, point out that Tozer had been released from prison just weeks before (for attacking someone with a pool cue). At that point you assume he was freed early - isn't everyone these days ?

Tozer, who was sentenced to life for Mrs Charlton's murder at Hull Crown Court yesterday, had been released from prison early after serving five months of a 15- month sentence for assault, one of two previous convictions for violence.

I see you only serve a third, rather than half - when did that happen ?

Chalk up yet another death to our Probation "Service".


UPDATE - expanded at Biased-BBC.

Read, Weep

While we're on the subject of abduction by thugs, this. Usual useless social workers, powerless police, waster parents.

There's always been an small underclass - lefties used to call them the lumpenproletariat. But it's been the toxic synergy between the cultural revolution ('if it feels good, do it') and the welfare state which has expanded it so spectacularly.

Who would have thunk it ?

'Twas more than four years ago that I noticed Cathy Jamieson's campaign against anti-social behaviour didn't seem to be bearing the right sort of fruit.



Now those wee neds are all grown up :

A man who became notorious for making a v-sign behind Scotland's former justice minister during a TV interview has been jailed for assault. Jamie Smith, 20, is the 25th person to be prosecuted for a gang attack on passers-by in Cumnock, Ayrshire. Smith from Auchinleck, was sentenced to six months in prison.

He was 16 when he was filmed making obscene gestures behind Labour's Cathy Jamieson as she launched a crackdown on anti-social behaviour.

Unlike Ms Jamieson's policies, our young "Superned" is bearing fruit :

The Record told in 2006 how Smith and his then girlfriend Lisa Wilson, both 16, were expecting their first child.

And slowly, inexorably, Nature's majestic benefit dependency cycle makes one more turn ...

Underclass News - Hebden Bridge

Who says they're not integrating in the West Riding ? Mr Patel seems to understand the native culture pretty well. Hebden Bridge has changed in the 30-odd years since it was the heartland of Northern hippiedom.

A judge has jailed the Hebden Bridge parents of a six-week-old baby who suffered "inexplicable, deplorable and indefensible" cruelty while on social services' at-risk register. Rizwan Patel and Alliah Bradshaw pleaded guilty at an earlier hearing at Bradford Crown Court to failing to get medical attention when their daughter suffered fractured legs and later contracted meningitis, leaving her with "catastrophic" health problems.

Patel, 27, also pleaded guilty to grievous bodily harm after admitting shaking the baby so hard "in a fit of temper" he broke nine of her ribs and her collar bone. Patel was sentenced to four-and-a-half years in jail, while drug addict Bradshaw, 29, was jailed for three years.

The court heard the baby, known only as Baby H for legal reasons, was placed on the Child Protection Register after Bradshaw, a drug addict, had two children in her care taken from her for neglect and ill-treatment.

Bradshaw. A fine Northern name. From 'memsahib' to 'white meat' in three generations. Pretty impressive.

Underclass News - Hull

The court heard how Kirsty Ashley and a large group of friends surrounded Stephen, who was 16 at the time of the attack and did not know them. Ashley accused him of assaulting his girlfriend. There was no evidence to suggest this was true. The gang backed Stephen up against a glass panel while Ashley slapped and punched him, before trying to set his hair on fire with a lighter.

Two days later she was arrested, searched and the earring (ripped from the victim's ear - LT) was found. She claimed to have found it on the floor.

So far, so everyday story of oxygen thief. She didn't get sent down - after all, she's only 16. And she's pregnant. Although to be fair, she lives in a council children's home, so statistically she's likely to end up inside sooner or later. I wonder how her baby will turn out ?

It's the comments which provide the only entertainment in the whole sorry tale.

Traditional East-End Villains (more torture in the community)

This lot - Adnan Kyani, Mohammed Nawaz, Douglas Poku, Benjamin Boakye, Andrew Boateng and Yaw Darko-Kwakye - got 34 years for kidnap and torture. Between six of them. Let me see, that's 34 halved is seventeen, divided by six - about 2 years 9 months each after you knock off the 18 days.

Yaw Darko-Kwakye ?

If you shouted his name at him in the street you'd be jailed for racist abuse.