Monday, March 12, 2007

Mugged By Reality

A week is a long time in journalism. Was it only a few days ago that a Sheffield officer was suspended for (righteously IMHO) smacking a vandalistic chavette, and that Janice Turner was lauding the wonderful colourblindness of London primary school kids ?

Smacking a woman may be out of order for a copper, but it's OK for a TV presenter.

Not all London kids seem to be as colourblind as Janice Turner's little friends :

"As his friend handed over the phone, Ben saw one of the youths reach into his pocket and pull out what appeared to be a knife, and instinctively he shouted to his friend to run. Thankfully, the boys were only 400 yards from Ben’s mother’s home and, although the youths pursued them on the bicycles, they gave up the chase when the boys turned into the suburban street. Ben, who never cries and is rarely frightened, was sobbing so hard and trembling so much that it was heartbreaking to behold.

The police were called, but the crime will not find its way on to the next list of robbery statistics (last year the figures of reported robbery rose by 8 per cent) because only one of the boys had his phone stolen and he was, understandably, too intimidated to be prepared to give video evidence against muggers who might approach him again. Because it wasn’t the first time that Ben or his friend have been mugged. Walking home from school a month ago, Ben was surrounded by a group of boys who demanded that he give them his phone ("You’ve been jacked, nigger," they shouted at him). Nor is it our family’s first encounter with street crime. My son, also 14, was violently mugged earlier this year by a group of youths"


Jane Gordon has most of the liberal prejudices of Janice Turner (with her Daily Mail reading father and his "poisonous, hard-core bigotry"). But her children are that much older. So while she still twists liberal corn dollies round her worried fingers ("I do not want to see all boys in hoods locked up or sent to draconian boot-camps." - as if anyone has ever suggested such a thing), she is not a happy mummy.


There are a number of milestones in a child’s progress that middle-class parents rarely allude to and one of them — as Richard Madeley discovered last week — is "the first time your son or daughter is mugged" ... The fact that a socialist Government seems so unconcerned about protecting children from violent crime is enough to make a middle-class mother like me want to vote Conservative at the next election (something I have never previously done).

At the Observer, uber-liberal Mary Riddell is so deep in denial she should buy a felucca.

My son, also a student, was attacked last week by two young men. He did not quite lose consciousness and his head injuries were not severe. He has not concluded that Britain is more lawless, and nor have I, angry as I am that he should have been the victim of gratuitous violence for the third time in his relatively short life. I do not imagine that he, an inner-city boy, has been unusually unlucky.

He's been attacked three times - which Mary herself accepts as NFL - Normal For London. Yet apparently this tells her nothing about whether Britain is more lawless. She wonders if Blair's illegal war is the cause of the violence. Such wilful refusal to look reality in the face is almost heroic. Stupid, but magnificently stupid.

There's a whole genre of middle-class mummies writing about the consequences for their children, or friends' children, of their hip urban lifestyle - from Jackie Ashley (significant other of one Andrew Marr) :

This child, so bright and optimistic so recently, is sunk in grey depression and won't go to school. That one, so athletic and cocky, has been violently mugged and now avoids walking anywhere, lurking inside his bedroom. Another cuts herself. Another suffers extreme bullying and has ballooned in size. Another was stabbed while walking the dog.

to the author of this urban nightmare :

Things had started to feel badly wrong in a matter of months. My kids stopped playing outdoors. They just didn't want to, they said. My daughter, who had started to go to the corner shop on her own, had to be brought home by the shopkeeper one day — she was afraid to walk through the estate because she'd been bullied on the way there. A friend who did not live on the estate pitched up one day with two kids whom she had found crying in the park. They had been left home alone all day, five and nine years old, and went to the park and lost their keys. I tried to get them a key, but the estate manager wanted more details. When it emerged that they were kids, Social Services came, and my heart sunk. I knew I would be thought of as an interfering old cow. To make matters worse, the older child was inconsolable, saying her mother would beat her. Why? She said she wasn't allowed into white people's houses. She had never been in one before. Five and nine, these kids were.

A gang of 15 to 20 teenagers started hanging out in the car park, revving up their motors all day, blaring jungle music from the car stereos. A pit bull ran wild on the estate, attacking workmen, stupendously leaping over our front gate, defecating on our doorstep on a daily basis.

After I shouted at the pit bull, the dog started snarling and running at me and my son. One day we opened the door and it was sitting there in front of us, growling. Insanely, I went to the kids in the car park and told them they had to keep the dog on a lead, and if it went for my kids, I would kill it. They looked incredulous and one said: "You kill the dog, we kill you." And they all burst out laughing and one shouted: "Crazy white bitch. We were here first." A few minutes later, to my horror, I noticed that "my" pit bull was in another part of the estate. I had threatened the wrong pit bull.

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

They just don't get it, do they?

Most of Working-Class London has been handed over to Ethnic Minorities, a substantial portion of whom believe that they are entitled to be violent towards 'white' people.

I can see no way out of this that does not include civil conflict.

Anonymous said...

Then bring on civil conflict. Why have you allowed your civilisation to become so degraded?

It doesn't matter what "ethnic minorities" think. Britain belongs to the British. It is the land of our ancestors.

Given that, the destructive Marxists have perverted ancient British justice and have signed up to the Blairina's cash cow the European Court or whatever it's called.

You let them do it. You let them destroy our sweet and lovely country.

I think I hate you almost as much as I hate Blair and the marxists.

Anonymous said...

The middle classes have gentrified traditionally working class areas. And are surprised to discover that working class areas can be rough. Especially in London where public housing it next door to pricey Victorian terraces.

Anonymous said...

Yes but the English have been feminised - this could never have happened 70 years ago.

The English have lost it - they are as disappointing as Texans or Australians who are more obsessional about pastel shades in curtain material than any sense of rugged individualism

It is the urbanised eunuch who has been taught by weak female role-models to suffer a beating in silence and make a virtue of it.

They have not learned that the first place you see the word Welcome is on a doormat....and as they find people wiping their feet on them they learn to submit.....it makes all occupations more tolerable

Anonymous said...

Janice Turner is ex-Guardian. Then again none of these middle class harpies believe what they right but it helps pay the school fees or the tutor and for the vacations in Italy.

All media is advertising. The "journos" are simply copywriters filling in the gaps between the ads.

Noone should take anything they write seriously. They get an Email to do 2000 words on colonic irrigation for under-5s by Thursday at 20 pence/word with the promise of a feature on sanitary towels and hysteria for the Saturday edition


I mean when they start writing about their children and the snack food they eat you can tell she's on the way to depression and pill-popping.

I just ignore people like Jackie Ashley and think it amazing that society can perpetuate student journalism into pensioner age by filling up the pages with adverts.

Newspapers should be free - they are certainly not worth buying

Anonymous said...

Just a small quibble on the dog story:
The Dangerous Dogs Act 1991 banned the importation & breeding of Pit Bulls. It also required those in existence to be neutered & muzzled in public places. Somehow one doubts that a 16 year old Pit Bull would be leaping gates or of being much danger to anyone - unless it collapsed on them.

Anonymous said...

Possibly OT, but I just noticed this on the BBC local news webpage:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/6444283.stm

I wondered if it was in any way linked to the recent late night multicultural riot at Upminster Bridge (Hornchurch is a station away) which tied up a lot of police time.

That incident didn't get a lot of attention from the media, but this one seems to have come to the notice of the Beeb!

Anonymous said...

Anon No. 1 and Verity,

Wandering into the less salubrious areas of London, i.e areas which are heavily populated with minority groups such as Brent, Southwark and Newham, I tnink the battle is lost. The groups who live in these areas see it as 'their manor.'

Anon No. 2,

The middle class gentrifiers who live cheek by jowl with the underclass, ethnic or native, are in denial.

Anonymous said...

Jane Gordon is a moron. She says it's almost enough to make her vote Conservative, but she isn't going to be tempted.

OTOH, with Dave in charge, what would be the point of switching anyway?

Anonymous said...

OTOH, with Dave in charge, what would be the point of switching anyway?

Cameron's charm is that we know he's insincere and he knows we know.......Miliband's problem is that he doesn't know that we know

Anonymous said...

Verity,
why do you hate me? I'm not a Marxist of any kind and I am British to my marrow and I would be prepared to fight for this country.

I spent most of my life in the East-end of London and loved until it very recently....
actually Verity you are right..hate me..hate me a lot..I'm a man, or supposed to be man, highly educated, not a boast just a statement of fact, and I, like many other people, have let these fuckers, Mad Marxists, mad Muslims, mad blacks, shit all over us.

All right I'm with you...I'll take civil conflict.

Let the wars begin!!!

First objective: stop that nutter Red Ken. He could only muster 15% of the vote in great Multicultural London.If we can take back London we can take anywhere.