Monthly Archive for April, 2007

Blair blames recent string of murders on black culture. "When are we going to start saying this is a problem amongst a section of the black community and not, for reasons of political correctness, pretend that this is nothing to do with it?" "We need to stop thinking of this as a society that has gone wrong - it has not - but of specific groups that for specific reasons have gone outside of the proper lines of respect and good conduct towards others and need by specific measures to be brought back into the fold." Mr. Blair is known to believe the tendency for many black boys to be raised in families without a father leads to a lack of appropriate role models. The Commission for Racial Equality broadly backed Mr Blair, saying people "shouldn't be afraid to talk about this issue for fear of sounding prejudiced".

But to listen to the chorus of criticism that followed, it is a start that should never be allowed to take place. Mr Blair was immediately condemned by "community leaders" for not proposing "more funding" to "community groups". They wanted him to tackle "deprivation and poverty". Well, he's tried doing that - it has been New Labour's central priority since 1997 - and it hasn't worked: by the Government's own measures, there are actually more children now living in poverty than there were in 1997, despite a plethora of tax breaks and additional welfare payments directed at getting resources to poor children. Furthermore, while there is some sort of link between poverty and criminality, most poor people aren't criminals. Whatever it is that turns you into a criminal, it is not simply being raised in a poor family. If it were, crime rates would be far, far higher than they are. As it is, poor people are far more often victims of crime than they are its perpetrators. . . . The Government provides incentives to bring up children without both parents. So much so that, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, there are 200,000 more people claiming the benefits and tax credits that are due to lone parents than there are actually lone parents in the UK. The consequences of making single-parenthood ever-more economically viable are completely predictable. One of them is that there will be more teenage killings, and not just in the black community.

The answer is to return real discipline and respect to schools, to police and to communities and to change the culture these youths live in, to raise them with very different values and ethics, and accept that these things come at a price of harder expectations than is currently fashionable. Immediately after both wars in the last century thousands of widows raised boys alone without them attacking each other with knives in the streets. Why? They wouldn't have dared and they would have thought it was wrong.