I Don't See Any Elephant

Two stories on BBC Radio Four. Apparently, the population of the cities is much younger than that of the countryside.

I wonder why ?

Next, a preview of today's French riots - in which Caroline Wyatt seems to have no clue as to the identity of the people expected to attack demonstrators, shopkeepers, police this evening.

It's Thatcher's Fault

This is obviously the NuLab rebuttal strategy - I heard David Miliband coming out with it a week or so back, now Jim Murphy (who he ?) on the Today programme. (Health Warning - contains obligatory poke at the 'middle class')

"Yes, OK, social mobility is declining. But the study that shows it compares children born in the 1950s with children born in the 1970s. Those 70s children were at school in the 80s - under Thatcher."

Apparently something in the zeitgeist - the sight of unemployed parents, the 'grotesque level of child poverty' - so traumatised Thatcher's Children that they ceased to strive for a better future. More importantly, they did worse at school, hence the "increasing relationship between family income and educational attainment" of which the report complains.

If Messrs Miliband and Murphy were right, we should have seen social mobility plummeting in the 1950s and 1960s, as the hideous effects of the 20s and 30s depression kicked in. I believe child poverty was a tad more severe, too. My mother had two pairs of school shoes - one full of holes, with cardboard in the soles to protect her feet, in which she'd walk to school. When she got to Dynevor, she'd put on the 'best' pair. (Cries of 'Luxury !')

Yet the 50s and 60s were seen as times of increasing social mobility. Anything else happen in the 1980s ? Like the first generation to have a fully comprehensive school system ?

Lighter than Light Blogging

Sorry - too much work. So I really shouldn't have created this.

We're Not Having Kids - Again

Alison Wolf with a long and fascinating essay on what she sees as the triumph of women in the labour market (there's another essay to be written on how female role-models have moved from the 'angel in the house' to the porn star, but that's a different story).

"Three consequences get far less attention than they deserve. The first is the death of sisterhood: an end to the millennia during which women of all classes shared the same major life experiences to a far greater degree than did their men. The second is the erosion of "female altruism," the service ethos which has been profoundly important to modern industrial societies—particularly in the education of their young, and the care of their old and sick. The third is the impact of employment change on childbearing. We are familiar with the prospect of demographic decline, yet we ignore, sometimes wilfully, the extent to which educated women face disincentives to bear children."

For the death of female altruism, you don't have to look much further than the nursing profession, where on-the-job training has been replaced by academic training (contining a hefty chunk of political indoctrination) run by the likes of Tom "Too Professional to Care" Murray.

And childbearing ... it was interesting to look at Nordish's snaps of the demos in Liverpool and Blackburn against the lovely Condi.

Scallyland seemed to have a lot of people of my age out on the streets.

From 1976 to 2006 ...

Blackburn was a little different.

"Tomorrow belongs to me ..."

Merle and Johnny

Howard Husock in City Journal.

In a television appearance with Haggard, Cash recalled one of his trademark prison concerts in San Quentin. Haggard remarked that he’d been there for the concert. When Cash noted that he didn’t recall Haggard being on the bill that day, Haggard replied, “I was in the audience, Johnny.”

I discovered country music through youthful drinking in Irish pubs, particularly the legendary Lamb and Flag in Worcester, whose jukebox contained two absolute classics - Merle Haggard's "I'm A Lonesome Fugitive" and Hank Thompson's "A Six Pack To Go" coupled with "The Wild Side Of Life". Beautiful. Short, sweet and to the point.

Hey Mr Bartender ... (long pause then a guitar chord)

Please don't be so slow ... (drums kick in)

I've got time for me more round
And a six pack to go
Tomorrow morning's Sunday
I'm gonna be feeling low
So please please bartender
I want a six pack to go
I've been drinking all day long
Taking in the town
I've done spent my whole paycheck
Just a honky tonking round
Well I don't have enough to pay my rent
I ain't gonna worry though
I've got time for one more round
And a six pack to go

(cheerful guitar ...)

One six pack to go !

Fair's Fair, Now

The attacks by the casseurs on French demonstrators are being covered by the BBC.

They're just not being given the kind of prominence they would be if the attackers were natives and the victims not.

During a recent protest "thugs hit the shop windows on their way up the avenue, and hit the demonstrators on their way down".

Who are they? Ask any shopkeeper, and they will tell you that they are the same youths of immigrant origin who rioted across France's impoverished suburbs in November.

This report manages to tell the truth and ignore it simultaneously. Can you imagine the BBC's coverage if the casseurs were white 'right-wingers' ?

"The festival atmosphere quickly darkened as a small group of troublemakers began to target trade union stewards trying to keep order on the march.

Those youths smashed the windows of a cafe and soon took on the trade unions' security men in random brawls, as the peaceful protesters - young and old - continued on their route across the River Seine and on to Place de la Republique"

"But once they reached their destination in the eastern city centre, most student demonstrators - and the workers who came out in support of them - quickly left as more youths descended on the square, with the sole aim of picking a fight with the riot police.

These youngsters - aged between 15 and 25 - were wearing hooded tops that obscured their features. Many wore masks, so they could not be identified."

"The irony is that the government's new job contracts were brought in hurriedly to help youngsters in France's troubled suburbs - where last November's rioting brought severe social and racial problems into sharp focus."

An irony not lost on the great Dalrymple.

"Whether they know it or not, the people on the streets in France were demonstrating to keep the youth of the banlieues — who recently so amused the world for an entire fortnight with their arsonist antics — exactly where they are, namely hopeless, unemployed and feeling betrayed. For unless the French labour market is liberalised, they will never find employment and therefore integration into French society. You have only to speak to a few small businessmen or artisans in France — the petits bourgeois so vehemently despised by the snobbish intellectuals — to find out why this should be so. The French labour regulations make employment of untried persons completely uneconomic for them."

UPDATE - via the comments, France-Echos with photos of the kind of thing the BBC prefer to ignore. Not sure if I follow his politics, but the snaps are pretty eloquent.





UPDATE 2 - More Dalrymple.

"The French do not go to the banlieues, but what they fear is that the banlieues will come to them. Perhaps it is starting to happen. My nephew and a friend of his were walking through the Bois de Vincennes, overlooked by elegant Parisian bourgeois apartment blocks, when they were set upon by two Africans and three Arabs. They were not badly injured, but at the hospital their mothers were told by the staff that such attacks, carried out not for gain but for the sheer pleasure of revenge upon the hated comfortable French, were now commonplace."

Stopped Clock "Sometimes Right" Shock Horror

In among the usual nagombi ("this howl of existential anxiety") the BBC's Caroline Wyatt gets the odd bit of sense in.

"To the barricades, they went, these revolutionaries, to fight for their rights - to pensions, mortgages and a steady job.

Such odd revolutionaries. No heartfelt cry to change the world, but a plea for everything to stay the same.

For France to remain in its glorious past: a time of full employment and jobs for life - a paternalistic state to take care of them from cradle to grave"

"A recent survey suggested that for most of the young in France, the real dream is to become a civil servant - a fonctionnaire. To work in government offices with regular hours, long holidays, and a 35 hour working week."

Blogger Rue Rude isn't so poetic about existential anxiety.

"Casseurs with hoods and masks are all around Place de la République right now breaking things and causing mayhem right now, 20h30-- stay out of central Paris if you can. "

And the Pub Philosopher on the story the MSM ignore - how, once again, ghetto youth are attacking the demonstrating 'bolos'.

Light Blogging

Lots of work, so a few links.

I said the other day that "one of the things I'm interested in is documenting how it all went pear-shaped, what life was like before the Fall, the cultural drivers behind the destruction, the personalities involved, and some of the original documents."

The destruction has fallen most heavily on what was once the British working class.

"And the sandcastle virtues are all swept away,
In the tidal destruction, the moral melee"

as someone once wrote. I haven't time to investigate the fascinating subject of how the MIDDLE classes, before the fall the touchstone, exemplar and ambition of the respectable working man, became the object of the hatred and scorn of the 'representatives' of the working class, themselves middle-class almost to a woman. It would be interesting to research Hansard and socialist writing to discover when 'middle-class' became a term of abuse. I'd guess 1970/80s, with a few forerunners like Richard Crossman.

Let's just look at what the working class could do for themselves, before they had an enlightened State to do it for them.

Via commenter Phil Jackson, a look at The Classics In The Slums. And Frank Prochaska's series of posts at the SAU on the voluntary institutions of the working class. Enjoy.

Those DFES stats

I speculated a while back that "if you asked the DFES for a breakdown of primary school numbers by ethnicity (recorded by each head and reported to the DFES) the figure would be 25%+ for ethnic minorities in England."

The figure (table 47a) is 20.2%, if you include Irish and Irish travellers as natives.

2.3% of kids are "unclassified" - including mine. You can opt out of this South African style system if you wish.

My Generation, Baby

"I am a modern man - the Beatles, colour TV - that's the generation I come from" - Tony Blair, 1997.


One of the things I'm interested in is documenting how it all went pear-shaped, what life was like before the Fall, the cultural drivers behind the destruction, the personalities involved, and some of the original documents.

This post will be a little disjointed, as it covers some big themes, each worthy of one or more essays - which I have neither the time nor ability to write.

There are several elements involved in this documentation. One important one is to bear witness. A key liberal myth, the "Myth of the Myth of the Golden Age" holds that crime wasn't REALLY lower in the past, streets weren't REALLY safer."He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future."

At present this is a difficut task for our liberal elite. There are simply too many people alive who can remember Britain in the 1950s or even the 1960s (remember that the culture of the 1960s only spread in the 70s - and went mainstream even later, around the time Habitat stores opened everywhere. For an accurate picture of 1966 England look at the World Cup Final crowd - 95% in ties - ties ! and many also sporting hats).

But these generations - the wartime generations - are dying and will soon be gone. Mortality is even now on the horizon of the post-war grammar school boys, the people - of whom I'm one - who destroyed the culture to which they were the heirs.

So it's important to record the lives and opinions of these generations, partly for their own sake, but partly to refute the arguments of those who believe that the present is always better than the past.

Three documents - two on the cultural drivers of destruction, one on Edwardian Britain.

First the Independent on the 50th anniversary of the play "Look Back In Anger", as reviewed by the late Keneth Tynan in 1956.

"All the qualities are there, qualities one had despaired of ever seeing on stage - the drift towards anarchy, the instinctive leftishness, the automatic rejection of 'official' attitudes, the surrealist sense of humour ... the casual promiscuity, the sense of lacking a crusade worth fighting for and, underlying all these, the determination that no one who dies shall go unmourned ... The Porters of our time deplore the tyranny of 'good taste' and refuse to accept 'emotional' as a term of abuse; they are classless, and they are also leaderless."

I'm not quite sure what happened to to the underlying theme, but all the rest were representative enough - a small manifesto for the counterculture.

Another document - I must admit to never having heard of the Preston poet Alan Dent - and having read some of his stuff I wish he'd never heard of Dylan Thomas. But his "Memoria Technica" is important in that if you wanted to know what the Sixties were a revolt against, you'd only have to read this. All the themes are there. Namely :

Capitalism - indeed, paid employment of any kind - is dull and morally reprehensible. Success in this world is a token of moral worthlessness.

Here
society’s handshake was a pay-packet and slavery

for he was famous in his realm
in Leyland and Chorley
from Accrington to Darwen
in Lancaster and Blackpool and as far as Oldham
he had conquered with his charm
the blue-eyed father and slick commercial traveller
filled the emptiness of his life by selling
as vain men fill the emptiness in their lives by selling
selling themselves a dream of themselves


Church is a dull thing that the straight parents make us do.

freedom from the narrowness of a niggard isle
from sexless Wesleyism
and God drowned in the Ribble
dirty with Protestant profit
and freedom was in no choice but to choose

On dull Sunday evenings at six
tight-suited smart and calm
on the back-row wicker seats
in a plain poor dour building
in a rich pretentious zone

I want to get drunk and have sex with girls.

I took my pre-sex preaching
then pubwards quiet querying and queer
went on my usual crusading quimquest


Respectability sucks.

my dream was freedom from the boss and the bureaucrat
my dream was the death of deference

In its own way it's also a manifesto for change - and a manifesto triumphantly implemented - as the figures for church attendance and a walk down any High Street on a Friday night will bear out. Though not quite fully implemented - all over Preston small boys, neatly dressed, will even today trot off to their religious classes once a week, with greater or lesser enthusiasm. But they'll be clad in white, not Sunday best - and their classes are on Fridays. I can still remember the cheerful kids pouring out of the madrassa in Woodhead Road when I lived in Bradford.

What a contrast with a Victorian working man - the Blackburn poet William Billington. What was that about the working class being uninterested in education ?

A dacent chap ull do his best,
An' eawt o' wod he's earnin
Ged th' owdest son a trade, an' th' rest
O' th' lads a bit o' learnin;
Bud iv he's eawt o' wark; wey then,
Unschollard, unbefriended,
His childer grow up into men—
Aw wod this war wur ended!

("this war" being the American Civil War, which closed half the mills in Lancashire)





The third document I stumbled upon while trying to find some lyrics for an old 78 in my posession. The Hubbard family archives contain the unedited memoirs of Frances Roper (nee Hubbard), an upper-middle class Englishwoman of good Christian family, describing the first twenty-odd years of her life in Ealing, the Forest of Dean, and her aunt's orphanage in South London. Absolutely fascinating stuff.

Four salient points - the safety and order of the Edwardian world, the all-pervading influence of Christianity, the still rigid class structure, and (as anyone reading childhood memoirs of the era will recognise) the enormous contrast betwen the tighty regulated and rigidly enforced relationship between adult and child, where any adult's word was law in every sphere, and the freedom/liberty/license of children's relationships with each other. In George Borrow's memoirs he desribes gang warfare and running battles between schoolboys (with however, none of the knife-work you'd get in, say, London today) in the Edinburgh streets. Reading the passage where the village boys torment Frances' Downs syndrome brother, I was reminded of Laurie Lee's gang of Cotswold adolescents plotting to waylay and rape the village idiot - a mentally deficient girl.

(The cultural level of the respectable working class in late Victorian times was remarkable. When our decorators arrive the radio is the first thing to go on. Can't work without it. Once ...

"When we had the local painters and decorators in the house the most beautiful part-singing would re-echo throughout the place all day, as they, the maids, the daily woman and the scullery maid all joined in, each one taking his or her part in perfect harmony." )

Straight Intta Compton

Imagine a part of the US where black children routinely skipped school on Thanksgiving Day in case they were shot for attending on a day of 'white celebration'. It would be all over the Guardian and BBC like a rash.

Different considerations apply when The Man isn't involved. Face Right reports on tensions in LA betwen black and Latino.

In 2005, widespread fighting between Latinos and African Americans, sometimes necessitating lockdowns and the deployment of police officers, rocked 12 schools in Los Angeles County....

Channa Cook, a teacher at the Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies, said that even in her school, routinely regarded as one of the best in Los Angeles County, black students each year skip school on May 5 -- Cinco de Mayo -- the day when Mexicans celebrate a 19th-century military victory over France. Mexican gangs have warned in graffiti that they will shoot African Americans attending school that day.

"Large swaths of Los Angeles, such as Watts -- a place that Earl Paysinger, the deputy chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, described as an "ecosystem for African American culture" -- are now increasingly Latino. The nearby city of Compton, the birthplace of gangsta rap, is now 60 percent Hispanic. "The movement of Latinos into these communities has been nothing less than a demographic earthquake," Paysinger said."

I remember even fifteen years go arriving in Chicago and being amazed at the number of Mexican immigrants - having to use my holiday Spanish in a bar to be understood.

Huge demographic shifts, previous inhabitants now outnumbered - sounds familiar somehow.

Lunatics - "We Run The Asylum Now"

"Patients who self-harm are being allowed to do so under supervision in hospital in an innovative scheme.
The practice is being allowed as part of a six-month investigation into the care of people who self-harm at St George's Hospital, Stafford."

"Around 100,000 A&E consultations each year are linked to self-harm. Experts say many more people may be practising the technique in secret."

I like "the technique". Just as we're on the way to the medicalisation of criminality ("a serious personality disorder") and the human condition ("depression"), we now see cutting holes in oneself as a form of therapy. How long before cutting holes in other people is treated likewise ?

As Dalrymple recorded a patient saying, "I had to kill her, Doctor - or else I don't know what I'd have done".

In line with the spirit of this post I suggest that the "technique" be videoed or put on a live Web feed. I'm convinced there's a market for that sort of thing among the Zoo and Nutz generation.

That Budget

The (privately-educated) Paul Anderson speaketh :

"The spending splurge on education is a serious challenge to the Tories — and it puts the sterile education bill arguments about the structure of the school system into perspective. Who really cares about the precise role of local education authorities if we're chucking cash at schools?"

It's a pity IMHO that they don't raise the amount per pupil to 8K (the same as average private school fees) immediately. Then we could see the poverty of the 'cash gets good results' argument in all its glory.

I write as a (state-educated) parent with two children at comprehensive and a third in year 6 primary, who with heavy heart and light wallet is mulling over an acceptance letter for him from a local school. Whose fees are, by strange coincidence, £8,000 a year.

Mary Ann - BBC Find New Ethnic Group

Thanks to the Rotty Pup for this one. From the artist's illustration of the trial usd by the BBC it appears that she was killed by a white guy and five of an ethnic minority new to me - the grey men.



Come to think of it, wasn't John Major from Brixton ?

Mary Ann - the backside-covering commences

I have little time for the Probation "Service", an organisation staffed mainly by frustrated ex-hippies with shaved heads, piercings and a bag of skunk in the back pocket. Guardian readers to a man - or these days, to a woman.

But for once they don't take the lion's share of blame for the fact that the four psychotic killers (one an illegal immigrant) who butchered Mary Ann Leneghan were on the streets. Step forward Britain's judges and magistrates.

Thomas, the gang leader, was on an 18-month community rehabilitation order imposed in November 2004 for possessing a Class C drug and possessing a bladed article. In April 2004 he had been given a community sentence for possessing heroin, cocaine and cannabis and a year earlier a referral order for possessing cannabis. Johnson, the most violent member of the gang, had a criminal career stretching back to when he was 13.

In 2001 he was convicted at the Old Bailey for abducting a 13-year-old boy with learning difficulties, hanging him upside down from a tree and beating him. He was sentenced to 3½ years’ detention.

In May 2002 he was given a conditional discharge for assaulting a fellow care home resident, and in July 2003 an 18-month detention and training order for assaulting two minicab drivers, affray and possessing a broken bottle.

A week before the murder he was given a community punishment order for possessing a Class C drug and assaulting a police officer.

If I remember correctly, the 13 year old boy didn't have any learning difficulties - until Johnson and an older boy nearly killed him. I think we're talking about this story - and I think Johnson, who stabbed Mary Ann to death, is the 13 year old. Mary Ann wasn't the first person he tortured, but good old Mr Justice Grigson ruled that he shouldn't be named.

Thirteen-year-old Michael Servante was returning from school by train when two youths, 13 and 14 at the time, took him to a building site in south London where they tortured him.

Michael's mother, Leisha Servante, said that she believed the courts should name juveniles who hurt other children.

"I think society has a right to know who we are living next to. They have been protected. We have not."

Mr Justice Grigson said: "To name them would be a very real risk to the progress that they have made and that would be detrimental to the long-term public interest that two young men should be rehabilitated."

Great progress, judge - a year later he was assaulting people. And a year after that. Chalk one to Justice Grigson.

"They were not on early release" says Judy McKnight, taking time out from the really important issues like taxpayer-funded pensions (better than anything in the private sector), or gender equality duty, to deal with those tiresome people who pay the wages.

Not this time. Johnson was given 3½ years in 2001. How come he was free to collect another 18 months in 2003 ?

But the Mary Ann Leneghan Memorial prize has to go to the unknown magistrate who sat in judgement on Thomas just a week before the murder. With two sentences already under his belt, he was charged with possessing drugs and asaulting a police officer.

Which genius magistrate thought community service was a good idea ?




UPDATE - for a realist view of community sentencing and the Probation Service, I recommend the briefing papers at the Crime and Society Research Association. Start with this one.

Sleaze Sleaze Sleaze

"I run a company that's in the market for lots of lucrative Government contracts. Would you care for a large sum of money ? No obligation, of course"

"Why, thanks, don't mind if I do. No obligation, quite. In any event, all Goverment tenders are handled by John Prescott's new budget troubleshooter, so influence is out of the question"



"I'm being investigated by the Serious Fraud Office. But that's no reason not to lend you the odd million, is it ?"

"Heavens, no. Thanks a lot. Gosh, speak of the Devil, here's the DPP"

How Did I Miss This ?

Out tax money at work ...

An unqualified accountant who hid his criminal past has been jailed for four years for stealing almost £1m from John Prescott's department.
Robert Adewunmi, 32, lied about his qualifications to work for the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister.

He was hired as a 'trouble-shooter' in the Budget and Data Management Division. Words fail me. Controls seem to have failed them.

Judge Christopher Hardy said the father-of-two had masterminded an "audacious" fraud on a large scale.

"Sadly it is yet another example of a public body being plundered by a dishonest employee in a position of trust, on this occasion the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister," he said.

"Of course it was not the deputy prime minister's money you stole, but money entrusted to him by the public, the taxpayers, and it was certainly not meant to satisfy your greed and lavish lifestyle to which you and your wife soon put it."

Entrusted to him ? Don't you mean 'taken under the threat of imprisonment' ?

Here's one for ....

... pro-life blogger Fiona Pinto - a link via Gardjola to a pro-baby march in the US - and their "pro-choice" opponents.

Gardjola quote the Guardian's Lionel Shriver.

"I have studied the eyes of the fanatics who regularly picket abortion clinics in the US and I do not see love of tiny unborn babies. I see hatred."

Have a look at the photographs and make up your own mind.

A Couple of Moorhens On the Curate's Pond ...

A couple of weeks ago police blogs all over London were closing down, following the fatwa by the Met against them.

On one of them I picked up an RSS feed, the source of which had vanished by the time I looked at the actual blog. It said that word on the Met street was that 'Sir' Ian Blair's days were numbered.

Although he has his defenders, it does start to look that way. How ironic for the PC Plod if it's the testimony of Commander Hugh Paddick that does for him.




Here's an interesting one.

Ms Docherty, director of social services at North Ayrshire Council, told BBC Radio's Good Morning Scotland that it was very difficult for social workers to establish grounds for removing children without drug testing.

"Parents can say that they are drug-free and in the absence of objective evidence, it is difficult for us to prove to the contrary," she said.

"We all need to think about how we get the balance right between the rights of parents and the state's duty to intervene to safeguard children and their wellbeing."

Professor Neil McKeganey, director of Glasgow University's Centre for Drug Misuse Research, said that too much emphasis had been placed on looking after addicts rather than how they were looking after their children.

You'd need to build rather a lot of care homes, given that the majority of underclass mothers do drugs of one sort or another. On the other hand, poor little Derek Campbell would still be alive.

The only other issue is one of frying-pans and fires. Taking the child away from a drug-taking mother and delivering him or her to social services seems a bit coals to Newcastle. In my salad days I knew a fair few social workers, including some working in residential care homes. From that admittedly limited (although thoroughly researched) sample, I'd suggest that they'll need to test the social workers too.



"And finally,"

another tremendous triumph for our hardworking Probation "Service".

Four of the gang were on probation at the time of the killing in Reading, Berkshire, it has been revealed.

Home Secretary Charles Clarke said it was "vital" lessons were learned. Sentencing was adjourned to 28 April.

Drug-dealer Adrian Thomas, 20, of Battersea, and fellow gang-members Michael Johnson, 19, of Southfields, Jamaile Morally, 22, of Balham, and Krasniqi were all under supervision when the 16-year-old was stabbed to death and her friend shot in the head in May 2005.

As Drinking From Home points out, Charles Clarke says that every time someone's killed by a probationer or early releasee.

Could Someone Please Explain This To Me ?

Mr Justice Fulford, at Snaresbrook Crown Court, east London, called for longer maximum terms in such cases.

Mr Fulford said Khan was a person of authority in Lashkar-e-Toiba - now known as Jammat-ud-dawa and banned in the UK - who could call on millions of pounds raised by UK supporters.

"You, Mohammed Ajmal Khan, in my view, are a committed terrorist," he said.

"I am of the view that greater maximum sentences are needed to enable judges to reflect more realistically the gravity of terrorism which does not need me to say is of great public concern."

What ? The maximum sentence, which the judge considered too low, is fourteen years.

So he sentences the guy to nine ?