Crime, and its causes

Those kind of statistics have been reported over here for years, and there are more single-parent families amongst the black communities. Our current Labour (leftwing – allegedly) government has been forced to do a grudging U-turn in admitting that their funded research in the area has proven that assertion, but their policies are set up so that single-parent families get £5k/year more in state benefits than if the parents stay together. People are actually advised in benefits offices to split up and live separately so they get more money. They loathe traditional families and are going out of their way to promote alternative lifestyles in the name of ‘diversity.’ Nowadays if you’re a single mother, you’ll jump the queue and get given a house and money to live on, and if you’re an illegal asylum seeker all the better. If you’re an ordinary person who’s worked (gasp) and paid taxes (gasp), you’re bottom of the queue and will get nothing. My sister found that as a pregnant single student who also worked; she didn’t fit into any of their boxes so got no help with her mortgage or living expenses.

11 years in power, and Labour have done more to dismantle society than I would’ve ever thought possible, but they’ve trodden on the shoulders of the previous Conservative governments under Thatcher and her cronies, who idolised money and private ownership at the expense of the poor – selling off council houses in order to buy votes, privatising national industries so the wealthy could benefit from stocks and shares etc.

I’m aware this post may lay me open to the charges of racism – that simply isn’t true. I’m not racist, I abhor Far Right politics, and have no problem with genuine asylum seekers and economic migrants who are prepared to work (got a lot of respect for Poles who have a deservedly high reputation as hard workers), just those scroungers who’ve heard rightly that Britain is a soft touch. Yesterday there was a report of a Pakistani woman who has sought asylum here because she’s 7 feet 2 inches and the boys threw stones at her in her village. Her own family in Pakistan have said she’s a celebrity there who sends them money, and she wouldn’t be in any danger if she returned. But there’s no reason for her to leave the UK; everything’s been handed to her on a plate:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1106082/Pakistani-woman-given-asylum-shes-7ft-2in-tall.html

I’m just sick at heart at what this government are doing. The Conservatives under David Cameron will get in in 2010 in the next general election, but I doubt they’ll have the backbone to make many changes. They’ll talk the talk about supporting families but won’t put their money where it counts. Labour abolished the married person’s tax allowance in 2000/2001 except where one person was born before 1935; itd take a government with a spine to bring it back.

I’ll get off my soapbox now I’ve gone completely off-topic.

Here are the ‘official’ national figures:

http://www.crimereduction.homeoffice.gov.uk/sta_index.htm

However two out of three criminals no longer even get as far as court, which will skew those figures.

On 23rd October, the government admitted that because of inaccuracies in the way crime is recorded, serious violent crimes rose 22% instead of the claimed fall.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7685908.stm

In the summer they proposed a crime reduction initiative by supporting families:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7506618.stm

Police are now being placed in some schools:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/west_yorkshire/7815281.stm

Two senior MPs have suggested a cross-party initiative to focus on children from deprived backgrounds and prevent a slide into criminal behaviour:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7615509.stm

A senior family court judge has come to the same conclusion as Kathi’s original article:

“I am not saying every broken family produces dysfunctional children but I am saying that almost every dysfunctional child is the product of a broken family.”

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7331882.stm

Here’s an interesting report from Civitas, an independent think tank, which gives a lot of statistics as of 2002:

http://www.civitas.org.uk/pubs/experiments.php

They produced a bleak picture of crime in March 2006:

http://www.civitas.org.uk/pdf/crimeBriefingMarch06.pdf

Thanks, Jules!

I’m a wee bit skeptical of Civitas–they look a bit conservative for me–but the crime stats are really interesting. I’d heard of ASBOs and stuff (via Doctor Who), but I didn’t realize that crime was soaring in that way. It looks like something big is going on in Britain specifically, because I remember checking Euro crime stats a few years ago and being positively shocked at how low they were, lower than even Canada’s.

“You’re going to hell, dirtbag!” !

Yes I think it has got worse in the past 50 years or so. Part of the problem is the cult of the individual – I have my rights and will live how I like because no-one can tell me what to do, and what’s more I’ll use the Human Rights Act for my own benefit and compensation even if I’m in the wrong. What they fail to realise is that with rights come responsibilities. One problem is that our prisons are pretty much full so the courts can’t jail people; so if that was ever a deterrent, it’s not there now. Court magistrates and judges frequently bemoan the fact that their hands are tied from handing out appropriate sentences. So they have to resort to community orders like Asbos which are essentially meaningless and even seen as a badge of honour by the young.

There’s also less of a feeling of ‘this is my community and we will work together.’ Growing up as I did in the Sixties, neighbours were neighbourly. We try to continue that in our own street. That all changed when the Conservatives came to power; then it was every man for himself and if you failed ot make it big and successful, that was your problem. What we’ve seen since then is an increase in despair in the lower economic classes, leading to the highest drinking rates in Europe, highest teen pregnancies etc. It’s become endemic under New Labour with the expansion of the welfare state, because those classes are traditionally where Labour voters come from. Now we have families where three generations have NEVER worked. Hope has been leeched from these families. Add in the problem of uncontrolled immigration with an actual preference for recent immigrants over native Brits, and you have a huge swell to the Far Right amongst people previously very much middle-of-the-road or even to the left. That’s a direct result of New Labour’s policy of multiculturalism instead of integration; it’s not working because it’s created ghettoes and mistrust.

My fear at the next general election is that people will vote for the British National Party because they feel let down by the New Labour who no longer represent socialism, and by the Conservatives because ‘my family has never voted for the ‘posh’ Conservative thanks to Thatcher.’ There’s even a BNP member in the Greater London Assembly, which is utterly abhorrent to me. It’s telling that the candidate gained his seat in Barking and Dagenham, which had always traditionally been socialist under old Labour. The BNP gained 16.9% of the vote in Dagenham in the 2005 general election, although the constituency was eventually won by New Labour, albeit with a reduced result of 13% compared to the previous election. The Conservatives saw a reduce in support there as well,and the BNP gained 10% compared to their previous support.

It’s possible of course that fewer crimes would have been reported then, but also we had bobbies (policemen) who were assigned to neighbourhoods and patrolled the streets. I remember being told off by a policeman for swinging on a school fence in the mid-Seventies, and I was petrified he would tell my parents. Now such a man would get a mouthful of abuse and possibly worse. We’re starting to see a small return to police presence in the last couple of years, at least in our area. But not enough to stop 5 stabbings in one street near us last year.

I think we may be talking cultural differences in what makes ‘traditional conservatism.’ Over here classical liberalism is seen as essentially libertarianism; I agree on the non-interventionist element, having studied Voltaire and Montesquieu. So I am much more in the strand of the French tradition than the British one, because of my studies.

As such, classical liberalism has little in common with what a Brit would recognize as conservatism or socialism. Its obvious opposition here would be New Labour which is very much for the welfare state and state control of pretty much everything, but it is equally at odds with British political Conservatism, which used to emphasise controlling the Bank of England. Conservatism under Thatcher opposed the devolution of Wales and Scotland and ploughed huge resources into propping up the pound before we dropped out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. In truth historic political positions have become much more fluid in the past 20 years or so, and our New Labour and our modern Conservatives now are pretty close in policy, although currently divided on how to deal with the current recession, specifically on bailing-out the banks. The big campaigning emphasis for the modern Conservatives is anti-Europe, which is ironic when you consider that it was the Conservative Prime Minister Ted Heath who took us in in the first place. They’ll win the next general election because the majority of people over here see the EU as a bad thing, primarily because we now have too much immigration for a tiny island to cope with.

Civitas also doesn’t align with our third major political party, the Liberal Democrats, who think our ‘salvation’ lies within the EU and have little to say on anything else. As such, I believe they are indeed independent of our three political parties under their current incarnations, and not even aligned with the old political Conservatives or Labour. It’s difficult to be precise because New Labour and the Conservatives are now broadly-speaking both centre-right, and not much to choose between them. I’m not aware of a British political party anywhere on the spectrum which comes close to the views of Civitas.