Sorry ...

for a lack of original posting and a surfeit of depressing news stories. Busy.

Take a look at :

This little post from Unenlightened Commentary.

Links to two fine David Thompson pieces, on Islam and Guardianista culture, at Mick Hartley.

And I've been meaning to put something together on the lines of 'black gun crime is the bastard child of the Scarman report'. The Pub Philosopher has written it.

The government continued with its policy of tying the hands of the police and not allowing them to take the measures that would have enabled them to win back control of the streets from the rioters. Had this been done at an early stage, the riots could have been controlled. The feeling that black youths could attack the police and get away with it would not have spread and there would probably have been fewer copycat riots. The myth of insurrection that led to the curbing of police activity in Afro-Caribbean areas would never have taken hold ...

The Thatcher government's unwillingness to fight this street war makes some sense. The government was deeply committed to an economic battle with the unions at the time and needed to prepare for the inevitable industrial unrest. Taking on the street gangs and the so-called anti-racists as well was probably seen as too much of a risk. In any case, the people who were being abandoned to the rule of drug-dealers and unelected community leaders were mostly poor and black, not the sort of people who were likely to vote Tory.

Twenty years later, the sons and daughters of those who rioted in the eighties are shooting at each other. Two decades of sensitive policing have allowed a generation of black youths to graduate from cannabis and machetes to crack and machine-guns. Those who once cheered the rioters are now asking what the police and the government are going to do about the violence.

There's an interesting comment on the Janet Daley piece that PP links to :

"A black man phoned a 5 live phone-in on this subject, he said it was a cultural problem and that the BBC, in an attempt to be inclusive, have been peddling this violent black rap culture at the tax-payers expense for years. The show’s host took objection to the fact that he thought it was a black problem and cut him off – that’s all you need to know."

The great John McWhorter wrote about this years ago.