Before a feeding frenzy starts on this horrific case it is important to remember that such cases are – fortunately – extremely rare. The case also needs to be seen in the context of the latest crime figures. I was expecting a slight rise in crime but I was pleasantly surprised to find there has been an 8% drop in the figures for England and Wales. Burglary,violence,robbery and theft are all down and importantly murder is at a 20 year low.
We already know that the two children who tortured the others in Edlington came from an extremely disturbed family and that’s the really difficult problem we have yet to solve.
Crime figures are absolute tosh. More crime goes unreported than ever, people just don`t bother especially as it can take days to get a policeman to arrive to just hand you a crime number.
The Police are so far stretched they are unable to handle all crime, most offences now involve a telling off whereas when I was younger they would have been pursued vigourously. Why should Police waste their time, spending hours on paperwork only to find the villain back on the streets with a paltry fine within a short time.
http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs10/hosb0210.pdf
Reading the whole report leads you to believe that the whole picture is not being shown. Unrecorded crime, volence between youths etc.,goes mostly unrecorded as do a lot of others. Most crime is undiscovered because of a lack of Police resources, what is being labelled anti-social behaviour and minimalised by politicians and police alike is far more, as was seen in the recent suicide of the Mother, Fiona Pilkington who killed her own daughter rather than go on facing the intimidation and threats where NO RECORDED crime was committed.
My sympathies to the families of the two boys who were tortured, however as my wife states the two culprits will be treated with special care, as the Jamie Bulger murderers. They will receive new lives on completion of apparently short sentence and all the help victims never get.
More crime goes unreported than ever, people just don`t bother
I’d love to know what the basis for making those claims is. Do you have any evidence for it, or is it a gut instinct you have from talking to your friends down the pub and reading the Daily Express?
I can make any amount of claims I want about things being absolute tosh that I don’t agree with, but unless I can actually present some evidence that’s reasonably compelling I don’t expect that anybody would have cause to listen to me. Why should we listen to you?
Incidentally, what should the correct punishment for the Bulger killers have been? Tortured to death, eye for an eye style? Solitary confinement forever? Locked up with hardened adult criminals? If you complain about the soft touch, I presume you have some theories as to what a proportionate punishment would have been. Care to expand?
“I’d love to know what the basis for making those claims is.”
Personal experience of all those that I am in contact with, including Police Officers. I shall expand when I have more time. I don`t drink nor do I read the Daily Express.
“Why should we listen to you?”
Why should you listen to anyone?
I agree with you, Lord Soley, that we shouldn’t extrapolate too much from one case. And the figures on serious violent crime show a decrease.
But I was reading ‘Wasting Police Time’ by ‘PC David Copperfield’ [I forget his real name, he has now left these shores to join the Mounties in Canada]. His point was that the police do spend most of their time with low level social disorder and anti-social behaviour.
These children are the very top of the pyramid which is the visible part of an iceberg of which 90% is never seen and reported by the media.
For every one of these cases, there are a hundred ‘assault’ cases and for every one of those there may be a hundred people whose lives are affected by threatening behaviour and general loutishness.
It is easy for me – I don’t live in a ‘rough area’, and I am more and more coming round to the view that liberals like me have been part of the problem because we don’t live in the tough neighbourhoods which are a problem.
I don’t fall into the liberal trap of thinking that education should focus on ‘child-centred learning’ and the wishy-washy lack of discipline and ‘the kids are alright’. But I have fallen prey to the argument that it is simply about ‘the causes of crime’ and that if we only throw lots of money at the problem and ‘solve child poverty’ the problem will go away.
That ignores the fact that teachers need a lot more power. They need to be able to stand up to parents who don’t give a hoot and expect the teachers to act as social workers which is NOT their role.
I would love to think that a change of the Government might achieve this, but this is a super-tanker of a problem which will not be turned around easily.
“More crime goes unreported than ever, people just don`t bother especially ”
As Lord Woolf remarked last year that, if you don’t want the number of prison inmates to increase, then you have to accept a more lawless society. This was when the prison numbers touched 80,000 and govt was trying to decide how to deal with the overcrowding.
In the case that the noble Clive mentions, I am constantly amazed at the lowness of most people’s sexual morals, which is bound to wear off on Children.
I am optimistic for the future of any child taken from such a family and placed in local authority care. Whilst a good many local authority services are perfectly ghastly, they will certainly do well for these children. At age 18 they will be ready for the world.
It is always a pleasure to meet well brought up children. Those are red letter days!
“if you don’t want the number of prison inmates to increase, then you have to accept a more lawless society.”
I am not so sure at all that this holds true. As a counterexample I offer the United States of America, which as a nation incarcerates a higher percentage of its population than nearly anywhere else in the world that doesn’t have an explicitly authoritarian regime, yet has not yet noticeably turned into a crime-free utopia. Quite the opposite, in fact, when it comes to violent crimes.
I appreciate Lord Woolf’s comments make a kind of intuitive common sense, if we assume that there is a fixed subclass of human beings known as “criminals” and that these can either be stored in prison safely or allowed to wander and wreak havoc. But, unfortunately for people who crave simple answers to complex problems, the evidence so far suggests that people are not binary and that sociological issues aren’t modellable with simple arithmetic.
OK, Bedd, you’ve got to help me out here because I’m not sure I know what you’re trying to say.
“These children are the very top of the pyramid which is the visible part of an iceberg of which 90% is never seen and reported by the media.
For every one of these cases, there are a hundred ‘assault’ cases and for every one of those there may be a hundred people whose lives are affected by threatening behaviour and general loutishness.”
Now a straight up reading of this makes it look as if you’re saying that every case of “anti-social behaviour” obscures behind it a hundred assaults, and every one of those obscures… something else, which isn’t anti-social behaviour but is instead “threatening” and “loutish”.
Que?
I’m not entirely following what’s supposed to be going on behind the scenes? Is it more dangerous than we’re led to believe, or less dangerous? Are there really 100 assaults for every teenager smashing a car window? I can’t see that being the case, since it would indicate that crime got more serious as well as more frequent “beneath the surface,” and I don’t see that happening. Unless you’re talking about domestic violence, when I could sort of see that, but don’t see how it really ties into the overall theme of getting tough on kids or whatever.
And, in fact, what is it that you’re actually proposing here? We’re too liberal and not generically tough enough because we live in posh areas? Well, I don’t live in a posh area – I’ve lived in some right scummy joints in my time, and the places that haven’t been “rough” have been within spitting distance of the rough parts, which is what happens when you live in cities like Salford or Middlesbrough. I’m unabashedly working class and don’t make nearly enough to move far away from all these ruffians and criminals. And yet, I’m still pretty liberal. So don’t go believing that you have your beliefs because you’re sheltered – even if you’re not, you can still catch liberalism like the flu.
Partly, I reckon, because the alternatives are either rubbish or unforthcoming.
Mind you Dizzy [Phil Hendren] is on the case..
http://dizzythinks.net/2010/01/how-politics-works-and-why-people-hate.html
So when you can’t sleep because of the Chinese Torture of noisy neighbours and hoodies in the hood, just think of the flowchart..
http://thinbluelineuk.blogspot.com/2010/01/top-cops-are-still-fiddling-crime.html
The problem we have to solve? That, no matter how hard it tries, government cannot prevent all bad things happening in the world?
Can’t we just accept that 100% pure safety from harm is a physical impossibility and stop looking for ever more intrusive government intervention in the wake of every tragedy?
“no matter how hard it tries, government cannot prevent all bad things happening in the world”
And that the more initiative is removed from the power of the individual, the more likely such bad things are, to happen.
“I mean, you know,the council will look after them, innit?
I tend to have as much sympathy for the “governments cause terrible tragedies by doing too much and robbing us of our autonomy” argument as I do for the “governments cause terrible tragedies by being useless and not doing enough” argument. I prefer “governments don’t cause terrible tragedies, and they can’t really do much to prevent them either” argument. Unless the government in question is, y’know, the German Reich circa 1942, it pretty much holds true and prevents overreaction.
““governments don’t cause terrible tragedies, and they can’t really do much to prevent them either””
In the case of Haiti, you may say that the govt of Haiti was powerless to prevent people living where they did/do, so they can not be the cause of the tragedy.
However the authorities of Alma Aty in Khazakstan recognizing the wrongness of the location of the city, have deserted it in favor of Astana, , new city 1000 miles north and out of the ‘Quake zone.
This surely disproves the contention above and probably with many other examples too.
I am reading a Tv docu on the enthusiasm of humans to live right on top of fault lines.
Well, when you put it that way, I guess we can blame the government for the behaviour of every disturbed individual in the country. That’s a very helpful comparison, thanks Gareth!
I was told that each of the offenders would cost £300,000 per year to incarcerate… to which I replied that it’d be better–and more cost-efficient–to assign a police officer to each 24 hours a day. Of course, I hadn’t factored in the cost of psycho- and behavioural therapy.
As easy as it is to daemonise the offenders, it is a very sad state of affairs for both–the conditions in which this type of disordered personality develops are truly torturous.
Let us hope that both victims and offenders are able to recover fully …and spare a thought for all people who are growing up in such disturbing environments.
“we can blame the government for the behaviour of every disturbed individual in the country.”
The lure of benefit payments for different classes/groups of people certainly gives great encouragement to such people as the disturbed to be so.
The monopoly of the NHS and the General Practicioner is a huge inducement to the disturbed individual not to take their decisions in to their own hands and NOT be disturbed, so there is some accuracy in what
McDuff says.
Goodness, can you middle class tories change the bloody record? We get it, you don’t think there’s such a thing as society, people on benefits are lazy scroungers, a little bit of poverty is good for people, the poor/mentally ill/jobless should just pull their socks up and get on with it, neverdidmeanyharm.
Here’s why you’re wrong: your suggestions are really easy – which is often why they are the first port of call of tedious simpletons – and if they worked we’d know about it. Liberia and Haiti would be crime free and fully employed. The much more onerous requirements for access to healthcare in the USA would have resulted in the sudden outbreak of hard-work and indulgent prosperity. The Victorians would have been right after all!
And they weren’t, you know that? None of these things have happened. Turns out that fnarring from the sidelines of relative privilege is a really easy and simplistic attitude to the problem of lawlessness, and it is in fact so simplistic that it can’t cope with the actual complex problems of human interaction in society! Imagine that!
So shush, unless you have anything that addresses the concept of capability deprivation, or isn’t pointlessly and callously insulting to those who deal with mental illness as an actual illness and not a lack of British fortitude or whatever. Your ponderous dullardisms are not original, they are not clever, and they are not correct. Stop boring us with your cliches and try and imagine that there are more things in heaven and earth than you can dream of in your tiresomely petty little philosophistry, why don’t you?
“ Crime figures are tosh.” Well, yes and no. The link Carl provides is using data from the The British Crime Survey, conducted by the commercial company BMRB, in conjunction with the Home Office. Its shtick is to interview a large number of people (currently 20,000, with a c.75% response rate) about actual crimes or perception of crime rather than recorded crime figures.
Specifically, Carl’s comment about youths is correct toa point, assuming by youths he meant those aged under 16, but only up to January 2009 when, after a review, crimes involving 10-15yos became automatically eligible for survey analysis. This means that the Edlington case will appear in this particular series of surveys, but not for eg Jamie Bulger.
The BCS attempts to deliver better stats since it asks about unreported crime and whether we ‘feel’ safer or not, a particular issue for many though the argument against is that it is not evidence-based. In addition, a respondent may not record more than six incidents in any one period.
Thoughts ?
http://www.people.co.uk/news/tm_headline=myleene-klass-i-d-defend-my-family-with-a-machete&method=full&objectid=21991350&siteid=93463-name_page.html
Thoughts? In this order:
“Goodness, the People still exists?”
“I am not sure Klass is actually saying she would literally go out and buy a machete here.”
“Drive her out of her home? Who’s ever moved home because of one break in?”
“God, this must be why I thought the People didn’t exist. It’s like a substandard Daily Star.”
“Given the way the reportage has been flowing from Haiti, I wonder what the reaction would be in our deadbeat press if a black lady talked about using a machete to defend her home?”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article6885415.ece
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/nov/25/rape-police-payne-victims
http://www.newsoftheworld.co.uk/news/598046/Police-ignore-9-out-of-10-thefts-from-vehicles.html
http://dailyexpress.co.uk/posts/view/76950
http://tamebay.com/2007/02/police-officially-ignore-ebay-scams.html
http://www.straightstatistics.org/blog/2010/01/13/no-decline-assault-victims-admitted-hospital
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/violent-crimes-are-being-ignored-by-police-says-report-1807095.html
THe Police are I feel doing a good job with what they have but are ridiculously under resourced. They are having to deal differently with things, such as we nightly see on fly on the wall documetaries, like fights betweens young men outside clubs. They most possibly wouldn`t want the other charged anyway due to street code and credibility.
I know of men who`ve got away with drink driving because the Police who pulled them up getting called away to more urgent jobs. I know of many violent acts committed where victims don`t want the repercussions that will come with Police involvement, these include battered housewives. I know of men frightened to leave their homes because of violent threats against them, most having been involved in crime in the first instance won`t get the Police involved.
I know of Police Officers who try to make their lives as easy as possible because it`s just a job now and they can do without the added paperwork. The job isn`t easy and I know a few retired senior officers who quite clearly state they would not in anyway want involvement in the “job” now. Imagine having to deal with possible violent confrontation day in and still having to maintain a degree of decorum and duty when people are spitting or kicking you. You`ll see it often outside our clubs.
I routinely see the threats of violence between girls in the street and on the internet and often it`s not just threats. These liberated young women of 13-16 who delight in gang culture, getting drunk and chasing boys. I see their hoodie boyfriends smoking dope and taking other things, abusing these young girls but thinking they`re men. I see the results of their criminal damage regularly and have been on the receiving ends of threats more time than I care to imagine.
When I was younger with my first daughter I made mistakes, I was liberal. Now with her daughter, who arrived to her Mother at age 15, living with me I am no longer liberal. She lives with me because I can cope, I can try to salvage her life from the drugs, sex and violence she has been involved. I can salvage it because I`m NOT liberal, her boyfriend hates me because of the 9 weeks she`s been here she`s been grounded for 7, with no phone or internet. She`s been made to go to school, her performance has improved. Her idealogy has improved, without shouting and screaming at her just rules, rules that implemented without animosity toward her. If she breaks the rule she knows the punishment, it`s HER choice. There is no hanging around street corners at night, 9 p.m. curfew. Everything she says is checked rigourously, as she has lied more than once, well I might add.
LIBERAL doesn`t work, neither with our children or our criminals. The Police are forced into being liberal of under reporting because they have no choice. Most is Government policy, where rewards are given to those who report less crime. It`s a similar story in schools, I know teachers who are doing work for the students, why ? To get the results, the figures up, to appear a good school.
I have a report from my grand daughters school not two foot away, it tells me in Citizenship she gets graded an “A” and is on course to be graded such in her GCSE exam. That`s strange she just got a “U” ungraded because she hates it, it`s boring and really knows little.
I hope someone will do something soon, else society really will be ruled by criminal gangs.
“I know of Police Officers who try to make their lives as easy as possible because it`s just a job now and they can do without the added paperwork”
You have to be careful early in the morning. I am an early riser and stayed with a friend in Brighton just before he died, left his house at 0500, to get an open road home and was arrested up the road on the basis of being out “late”.
I advised them that I was not under arrest
because there was a difference between their state of mind and mine, that they were up late, and I was up early, but that also I was the lord Chancellor’s right hand man.
They were impressed by the latter, which was not strictly true, but since Lord Elwyn Jones had lived in Brighton for some years, it struck a chord, so I got my……open road home. Bless his departed soul!
The coppers were trying to make their life easy, by arresting somebody before they clocked off in the morning, an old trick played by lazy coppers. It makes it seem as though they have been working all night, whereas they have been snoozing in a lay by all night, out of …. harm’s way.
Sneering is an easy task, at the best and worst of times,for certain kinds of people, and the cockney term for the police is “the Sneer”. It attracts a certain kind.
@ Carl Holbrough
“Why should you listen to anyone?”
Why indeed. I think, from reading the context around my original question, that can probably be answered “because they provide a compelling argument with substantive supporting evidence,” but who’s to say, really, now the question’s floating there in a void?
This is probably a good time to say that anecdotes are still not synonymous with data. I shan’t imagine it shall make much difference, but allow me a brief explanatory illustration.
I live, now as pretty much my entire life, in a not particularly wonderful part of the world. I’m not isolated from crime, it happens, but even so… it doesn’t strike me as all that particularly being a sign of a horrifying broken society and a buggered-up police force struggling to keep a lid on a seething pit of anarchy or anything. There’s a pub down the road that’s due a good firebombing, and we have this sort of regular gang of about six deadbeats who, when they’re not in prison are responsible for about 85% of the petty crime in the area, but that all gets dealt with as best it can. The dealings I’ve had with the police have been variable, I’d say, but really aside from a few issues related to over-exuberance (it’s not actually dangerous to take a photograph on a camera phone) or incompetence (when specifically requesting that police don’t visit a certain place at a certain time in case certain people work out who called the police, it’s somewhat disheartening when a big fat meat wagon shows up at your front door ten minutes later for a statement) I’d be hard pressed to see how it could be significantly improved. Not every result has been the one I’ve wanted, but if the evidence isn’t there the evidence isn’t there. I’ve understood myself while giving statements about things that my eyewitness evidence won’t get to reasonable doubt if things get to trial, and most people don’t talk to the police. It’s all very well blaming “lack of resources” or lack of confidence or somesuch, but if an assault happens in a crowd of people, six officers are there within five minutes of the 999 call, and only three people out of that crowd later can be bothered to give a statement I don’t think there’s much anyone can do about that.
I’ve also spent time in places which are, to some extent, “ruled by criminal gangs”. New Orleans post-Katrina, Harare, places like that. So I do, actually, understand the difference, and don’t really feel that the scallies down the road are going to be picking up AK47s quite yet. And, for all the fact that Ordsall pales in comparison to New Orleans for gun crime, I still didn’t feel particularly unsafe, or take anything other than the standard precautions for any major city when moving about the place. And Harare’s a demonstration of why you can’t believe everything you see on the TV and how being ruled by criminal gangs is actually pretty tolerable.
Now, OK, perhaps my experiences give me a perspective that most people don’t have, and perhaps crime really is monstrous in the UK and I’m just far too comfortable with it. But here’s where the whole “data” vs “anecdote” stuff comes into play, you see. You and me, Carl, we’re just he-said-she-said-ing at the moment. You have your experiences and they’re terrible and proof that liberalism is an absolute failure (although I’d point out that if you really do believe that society’s collapsing there are alternative hypotheses to the “it’s all the fault of the liberals”) and that if SOMEONE doesn’t do SOMETHING then GENERIC BAD THINGS will happen and the UK will turn into Liberia. I, on the other hand, have my experiences and they tell me that crime exists but isn’t that bad, that the police do an OK job which they could probably do a bit better but, honestly, not a whole bunch better because you can’t just throw money at a police force and expect every copper to be a stand-up citizen who’s great at the job and totally in it for the Justice. And between us we’re proving absolutely nothing because anecdote is not the singular of data.
On the other hand, what data does exist totally supports my anecdotal experience. Now, it might be flawed and incomplete, this data, but data it surely is. Looking at your links they’re all just fiddling round the edges of this data, not presenting wild new statistics. The decline may be fudged (or it may not be: the more extreme the claims the more tenuous the evidence), but if all the criticisms levelled are true it still represents a level of crime overall in this country basically comparable with most other developed economies and with violent crime significantly below that of the USA, a country with a much more conservative legislature (even in the “blue” states) and a much higher incarceration rate. It certainly wouldn’t suggest a country on the edge of going to the dogs at the hands of teenaged muggers, nor would it suggest that things are so much worse than they used to be when you were but a wee lad walking to school uphill both ways in the snow.
Yes, I agree that the police should not ignore rapes when the victim has been drinking, but that’s what they’ve always done so I don’t think this represents a “new” decline in the figures (although with your history of arguing against feminist causes it’s nice to see you take up this one, even if – I suspect –only inadvertently as a result of a google trawl). On the other hand, contra the Times (and the Express, which you don’t read but do link to – did you notice you’d linked to two articles about the same report? Same quotes and everything…) I don’t think it’s a massive scandal if the police stop investigating crimes for which they have no avenue of investigation. Understanding as I do that the police are not based out of Hollywood, and have therefore do not have access to convenient plot devices, detectives whose gut instinct always turns out to be right, or magic wands and accurate scrivening, I fail to see what else they could do in situations where they can’t do anything. “SOMEBODY DO SOMETHING” is probably cathartic to scream, but I’d suggest that the police wouldn’t be arresting people they can’t identify under any government. Even the Chinese can’t do that.
As broken societies go, this one really does function rather well. It’s one thing to note that there may be 5,000 violent crimes more than we thought, quite another to suggest that the whole country’s on the verge of collapse because you saw some young ladies behaving more like young men and some policemen were grumpy about their workload (stop arresting photographers on trumped-up terrorism charges, if you’re that busy! Harrumph!).
Which brings us back round, really, to the major question of “what do you suggest as an alternative?” “Being tough” and “less liberalism!” aren’t really policies, you know. What works for a teenaged daughter probably won’t work on a wife beater or a tax dodger. “More, harsher sentences!” has actually been tried, here and elsewhere, and it never seems to make anyone happy. Most people don’t really believe it happens, especially in this country. Whether that’s because we’re a nation of misanthropes who get off on believing it’s all got worse since we were young or because we’ve got a newspaper industry that’s got fat on fake news about how we’re all going to die, I don’t know, but you just can’t please anyone these days.
My suggestion is “read statistics as reported in tabloid newspapers more carefully, taking care to remember that headline writers are probably lying”. Turns out, if you do that, crime instantaneously drops! Also, if you take off your rose tinted spectacles, it turns out that there were wife beaters and assaults and drunks back in the old days too. I remember we used to have this thing called “football hooliganism,” back in my day, which kind of leads me, personally, to believe that gangs of young men getting drunk and kicking seven bells out of each other is not a brand new phenomenon that the Labour government invented.
As a final note, you shouldn’t beat yourself up about the pregnant teenaged daughter thing. My parents were conservative, and also loving and generous and intelligent, slow to anger but sensible and strict with rules, and my sister still went and got herself knocked up at 15 just like your daughter. Turns out kids have sex drives, see! Now, I guess they could have chained her in the shed or something, but on the other hand they love their grandson so as tragedies go it’s fairly minor and I don’t think they believe it would have been worth making my sister despise them in order to avoid it. It’s just one of those things that they thought it wisest to chalk up to unavoidable experience rather than dwelling on the myriad ways in which they could have done something differently. There’s probably a lesson in there for those who want to find it.
McDuff, thank you for your elongated reply it was appreciated. There is probably a lot of common ground between us and had I been a drinker no doubt we could have enjoyed a pint or two and many long chats by the pub fireside. However I don`t think we`d wander into politics, as we disagree too much on the subject and that is unlikely to change.
You`re correct in stating I cannot challenge data with something that isn`t counted but it doesn`t preclude it`s existence. The data I was challenging is wrong, pure and simple, I know it, the Police know it, the statisticians know it, criminologists know it. You will not alway`s be so cool at dealing with crime, one day you`ll grow old.
Anyway I shan`t go on, what you or I have to say counts for very little. I`m afraid you`re very much like my good friend Mark, who I think the world of, lest we stumble into political debate and then we could both add to the homicide statistics.
“You will not alway`s be so cool at dealing with crime, one day you`ll grow old.”
The noted tendency of some members of the older generation to believe that things were so much better back in their day is not, to my knowledge, proof that things actually were. I know many older people who believe just as that they weren’t better when they were young, because they spent a lot of their youth trying – and often succeeding – to sort out the many flaws that the past so definitely had.
Indeed, one can infer from your comment that it’s not crime which has changed at all, but rather your tolerance for it, which again rather supports the point I was making that things aren’t spiraling out of control. I might well become grumpy when I’m in my dotage, but my perception of the kids these days with their lack of respect and their hoverbikes and their electrical guitar effects will not constitute proof that gangs of them are mere moments away from storming Whitehall.
As I said, there is a difference between saying “the figures are wrong” and “therefore crime is OUT OF CONTROL and SOMEONE needs to do SOMETHING!!!” I am not disputing the correctness or otherwise of your point about the distortions of the figures, I’m disputing the necessity for histrionics.
“society really will be ruled by criminal gangs.”
It is already and in this part of the country, the police are informal members of them.
Corruption rules ok.
The Mets are paragons of virtue by comparison.
Dorset.
The fine for the tinted windows on that tractor is disproportionate and when we ad the G19 protest`s, Denzel couldn`t make it, the Morning Post was full of Police brutality. They murdered them scones and I myself ad me toe trod on, poor Mrs.Weldon at the WI tea stall was totally kettled, surrounded by police she were, couldn`t move for hours.
Sorry Gareth
😉
Worth some comments from Baroness Murphy ?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/sussex/8479211.stm
“One can infer from your comment that it’s not crime which has changed at all, but rather your tolerance for it”.
One COULD infer but one would be wrong. Why should one have to tolerate crime anyway ?
“I was making that things aren’t spiraling out of control”.
You may think not, but from this side I can tell you that they are, slowly but surely.
I was rather trying to pull out of arguing with you, we`ll never agree and I am at present dealing with a 15 year old grand daughter who yet again has truanted and run away with her dope head boyfriend. These things were expected mind, apparently I`m too controlling, at least you`ve one person who agrees with you McDuff.
You may have spent sometime in some rough areas, I grew up in Hackney it was rough back then too but not as densely populated, Walthamstow, Clapton, Forest Gate, East Ham etc. My Mother moved to Moston, Manchester where she died, my sister still lives there. Across the street from where they set the girl on fire with a tyre around her. She`s been robbed more times than I can mention, her homosexual son is a constant target of gangs, her cats have deliberately had dogs set on them. She`s been the victim of numerous assaults, one of those times because she was a police witness. She has very debilititating illnesses, one being Distonia amongst many which are serious. When I do visit I tend to sort most of the youth problems out, without the Police and with risk to myself from both sides, there is no other way.
Do you really think all these private estate Security Companies would be springing up if all was well ? The Shomrim in Stamford Hill ?
I have failed to see you mention your young children growing up in these environments, or maybe it`s something you don`t have to worry about. I don`t really worry about crime in relation to myself, I can like you infer about yourself, look after myself. My daughters and the rest of my family were not dragged up in Hackney or have a background in boxing, self defence and the North Bank Highbury.
You`re right though these rude boyz are not about to storm Downing Street, or pick up AK47`s…9mm will do, there are plenty on the streets….But then I didn`t say they were going to….this week.
Is crime being controlled, as you lead us to believe ? I`ll leave you to explain that to the next Mother of a murdered child.
Your main concern seems to be the gangs storming parliament but not the fact ORDINARY people are having their lives ruined. That Police are under resourced in terms of manpower which means they have to prioritise and getting that wrong, as they do, can have devastating consequences. I see more and more areas of our towns that at night become no go areas for normal people, lest they look at the wrong hoodie. Should we allow them to be verbally abused, spat at, perhaps physically assaulted because it`s no different to the old days? I think you`ll find it is different, vastly so and I hope that because of your ego one day you don`t bite off more than you can chew.
If I have to be histrionic to get Police back on the streets to ensure my daughters are not raped, assaulted, abused, to get some protection for my very disabled sister I will. Or maybe I should get private protection…Which sounds rather Mafia/Kray Twin like doesn`t it. Either way I won`t sit on my hands as you appear and pretend the problems don`t exist because some knowingly false figures tell us.
You may think not, but from this side I can tell you that they are, slowly but surely.
May I introduce you to the works of William Hogarth. I think you’d rather like him; his work touches on the terrible problems of alcoholism, violence and wanton cruelty that we see all around us in England. He’s been a bit unproductive over the last two hundred and fifty years, unfortunately, although some people attribute that to his death in 1764. If it weren’t for that I’m sure the two of you would get on like a house on fire.
Now where were we? Oh yes, how things are so much worse than they ever used to be…
Incidentally, it’s interesting to compare and contrast your complaints about people assaulting your gay nephew, while in the other thread you mentioned that you wouldn’t employ him in a bar if it would mean risking potentially annoying an established clientele of bigots.
Of course these things are totally unrelated to each other, I’m sure.
The cause of the galloping inflation in Russia in 1991- onwards was said to be the lack of trained economists in the Soviet union at that tie capable of dealing with Capitalist systems.
The same comparison may be made with political executive between the two (world)wars in Europe.
Government could do nothing to prevent it; they did not know how.
I enjoyed reading those responses – a good debate! A couple of comments.
Twm. I knew Lord Elwyn Jones – A kind and thoughtful man who would have given a wry smile on hearing your story. I believe he was also the author of a sometimes quoted joke about himself when challenged on ducking a difficult question. He said ‘The trouble is I can not only see both sides of the question but also both sides of both sides of the question!’
Carl H. Liberal versus conservative parents is the wrong comparison IMV. Children need boundaries but they also need encouragement to explore boundaries and it’s sometimes difficult for parents and children alike. Consistent parenting is crucial and much more important than liberal or conservative parenting. A bit of TLC (tender loving care for the uninitiated!)is also to be encouraged!
But PLEASE don’t do the old person argument. I’m 71 and life was not better when I was young. Why? Because so much bullying and family violence was just ignored. Several of the kids at my school (I left school in 1954) carried knives and one came in with a gun. I have two false teeth – they were knocked out when I tried to stop a fight where another man was being kicked. So I got the kicking instead! I could have coped with that until the dentist trying to reconstruct my month gave me an unending lecture on why I shouldn’t fight! I would have explained but my mouth had enough dental machinery in it to operate on the whole population of the area!
Finally for the last thirty years I have lived in Acton and Shepherds Bush (once described as the murder capital of the world by the Evening Standard). There had been 7 murders in 12 months. It’s actually a great area to live in but obviously has some of the predictable inner city problems. I was never scared to go out and I don’t think most people are which is why the phrase ‘broken Britain’ doesn’t really work.
Life in Britain is actually rather good and we should be proud of it and enjoy it.