Poverty, Crime and Terror

As all good liberals know, poverty is a breeding ground for terrorism. That's why most of the 9/11 crew were middle class grads, why the people who killed Daniel Pearl were lead by a public schoolboy, why a grammar school kid from Gloucester has just pleaded guilty to plotting to blow up an airliner, and why there seem to have been more Web designers in Guantanamo than in Silicon Valley.

Similarly in the UK, poverty is inextricably linked to crime. It's nothing to do with culture.

Just look at this FT report, analysing the 10 wealthiest and 10 poorest seats in the UK. Forget that the wealthiest seats are more likely to vote Labour than Tory. Just think on the poor seats and the associated crime and disorder.

Take the poorest seat of all - Camarthen West and South Pembrokeshire, a notoriously high crime area where no-one goes out after dark for fear of gangs of marauding English hippies asking the way to the nearest Steiner school.

Or the seething multicultural melting-pot of the next poorest - North Cornwall, where it's literally impossible to leave your towel on the beach in summer without it being vomited on by a sixteen year old public schoolboy. No wonder houses there are so hard to buy - I mean sell.

Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross. Caernarfon and Meirionnydd Nant Conwy. The very names strike fear - by-words for burglary, alienation, drug abuse and gang violence. Places where after dark the inhabitants cower in their fortified, alarmed and bolted houses, anxiously waiting the daylight hours.

In the wealthiest places, like Wimbledon, crime is almost non-existent.

How right the liberals are that poverty causes crime.