Sunday 27 July 2008

Proof, if it were needed...

Thanks to the Devil for pointing me at this excellent blog. I commend the whole article to you, but I wanted to highlight a couple of points:

Teenagers are not the source of knife crime, there have been teenagers since the dawn of the human race. They have been going outside in the evenings since the dawn of the human race. They have had knives since the dawn of the human race, before the dawn of the human race actually, but the dramatic rise in crime rates that we are worried about have only been going on since the end of World War 2. 50 years ago there where a lot more youths with knives walking about, but very very few of them using them to kill each other.




Perhaps you don't think that that shows an accurate picture? The definition of what is and what is not a crime does change all the time so you would have point. Literally thousands of things that where not crimes before now are, for example there has been one new crime a day since Labour came to power in 1997. So perhaps homicide rates would be better? There are fewer data, but the trend is identical.




So we are looking for something that had an impact on everybody in the country, but that affected the poor a lot more than the rich. something that happened just after World War 2 (the Home Office paper I linked to above dates it as 1954). Something big enough to change the very foundations of society


As the Devil says: I wonder what that could be?

Still think that safety net hammock is a good idea?

5 comments:

Old Holborn said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Old Holborn said...

Immigration. Not the Welfare State.

No self respecting spook, staani or bubble goes out untooled. Look at who is getting stabbed by whom.

White poor kids in Warminster or Caenarven or Whitstable are not stabbing each other to death. White poor kids who want to be like Yardies in Brixton are though.

AntiCitizenOne said...

Socialism is the belief that you can cure bad apples by moving them into clean barrels.

Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Anonymous said...

The size of the State in general, the perverse incentives, drug prohibition, mass education. etc etc.