"It's Thatcher's Fault"
"It's the legacy of Thatcher and the Tories, their crusade against the primary industry has produced children who have grown up with parents who have never had a job"
"Society was brutalised through industrialization and the aftermath and the denial of "society" by Thatcher, and the complete social-moral disintigration she caused"
"Most torturing of small children takes place within the family"
I think in the media-fuelled moral panic about 'stranger danger', people have ignored the fact that the greatest damage done to children tends to be within their own homes at the hands of their own families.
"You're worse than they are"
"I feel that people who seem to want to inflict punishment on small children are themselves in need of treatment."
"The lynch-mob attitude of some of the comments and the call for throw- away-the- key justice reflects just what a brutal society Britain is"
"Who knew that the true sociopaths dwell in this thread"
The all-purpose Guardian editorial seems to have been a pretty good predictor on this occasion. I see the Indie borrowed from it too :
Laban :
The natural horror felt at (insert appalling crime here) should not blind us to the fact that (crime is actually falling/it is all Thatcher's fault/such crimes have always been with us).
If we surrender to (the tabloid agenda/the Daily Mail hysteria/knee-jerk populism/the politics of the soundbite) and take the easy option of (jailing more of our young people/bringing back the birch/bringing back hanging/walling off the cities then bombing them/demonising our young people) we run the very real risk of (actually achieving something/alienating a generation/an invasion of killer bees).
There is only one answer. An enormous increase in the funding of (Sure Start schemes/outreach workers/emotional intelligence mentors/youth projects/anti-racist 5-a-day smoking cessation co-ordinators).
Indie :
"No cause for moral panic"
In the ongoing dialogue of the deaf which recurs whenever feral youths or children commit dreadful crimes, there are only a few liberal arguments, picked up in criminology class and amplified by the Guardian/Indie/BBC, and they come out every time.
a) 'it's always been like this' - aka 'moral panic'.
b) "one case doesn't tell us anything about British society" (except the Stephen Lawrence murder)
c) "it's Thatcher's fault"
d) "crime is actually going down" (having risen by 1,000% since 1950, it started to decline when we locked more people up)
e) "anyway, most torturing of small children takes place within the family" - not the married one it don't.
f) "you're worse than they are" - if you call for evil criminals to be punished, you're even more evil yourself !
One commenter links to this piece, about a classic Guardianista - a woman with empathy for everyone except her neighbours. Kind of reverse-Christianity.
"Who is my neighbour ?"
"The outcast, the rapist, the criminal, the thug"
"And what about your ...er.. neighbours ?"
"Those straights ?"
I had been a foster carer for just over a year when James came to us, and had worked for the council's mental health service for 10 years before that. But I wanted to help the teenagers who had been in the care system for a long time and had suffered serious trauma.
I did every training course on offer. Central Bedfordshire council was brilliant: I studied attachment theory, behaviour management, the problems caused by drug and alcohol abuse, and how to work with sexually abused children. I even did a BTec in advanced fostering.
No problem, then - all boxes ticked.
I was realistic enough to recognise that he was a danger to himself and to everyone he came into contact with, and so I was nervous about the young children who lived around us, but because I knew what a hurt, vulnerable side James possessed I wanted to believe that, deep down, he was a good lad.
We soldiered on. I refused to reject James like everyone else in his life had done, but 10 months after he had come to live with us my neighbour of more than 20 years sold her house and moved away. She told me she couldn't live near him a day longer.
Then, last July, James was accused of raping an 11-year-old local girl and forcing her to perform a sexual act on him.
So a woman is forced from her home of 20 years and an innocent child is raped - and all because "I wanted to believe".
That's religion we're seeing.
18 comments:
I do so love the way she excuses the social workers:
"It wasn't James's first foster placement to break down. He had been removed from his family less than 10 weeks previously, and three families had already found him impossible to cope with. Because he hadn't been in care for long, social services had not quite realised the true level of danger he represented to himself and to those around him. "
How long does it take, then..?
And despite this, she still refuses to admit the truth to herself:
"The rape allegations were still being investigated after he left my care and I don't know what happened – you have to learn to switch off from these children when they move on, otherwise they dominate your life – but while, on the one hand, I don't believe he could have raped that girl, on the other, I also wouldn't put anything past him. "
This level of inadequacy and faulty reasoning isn't enough for the SS to remove her from the list of approved foster parents either, I'll bet.
"I wanted to believe that, deep down, he was a good lad."
The truth is that that is the wrong starting point. We are all, deep down, vicious feral animals with all that that implies. The whole point of "civilisation" is to civilise that feral instinct and bury it deep deep inside where it is forgotten and, at best, becomes dormant.
But it never ever goes away and takes very little to rekindle it in any one person. One only has to look at the recent history of Germany, Japan, Soviet Union or China to see what happens when that instinct is unleashed on any scale.
The trouble for Britain in particular and western liberal democracy in general is that burying that feral instinct is incompatible with the "if it feels good, do it" society. The hedonist society guided by the pursuit of pleasure is the last stage before the collapse of a civilisation.
That collapse can be averted, but not by any methods approved by the liberal orthodoxy. Eventually, one of two things will happen - either we will have a re-assertion of Christianity as the basis for moral behaviour in Britain or we will become an Islamic Republic. There isn't any alternative to those two choices except total anarchy which could only exist for a short period before one or the other came along anyway
'This level of inadequacy and faulty reasoning isn't enough for the SS to remove her from the list of approved foster parents either, I'll bet.'
Unfortunately, it is the 'right' sort of faulty reasoning she exhibits. She boasts of having done all the right courses (arranged for her, no expense spared it would seem, by the Council) and seems as a result to have had all common sense or intuition exorcised out of her.
Laban is right; the mindset espoused in Society Guardian every wednesday is indeed a variant on religion. Faith trumps evidence every time.
All varieties of the Western church are dead on their feet in Britain.
Agreed we need a return to more moral times. Those kids were watching obscene horror films that years ago they couldn't have got hold of for example. (not saying that is the cause, but one factor of many).
But the fact is many of the european christian traditions pre-exist christianity, it displaced and incorporated them into itself.
I'm not trying to disparage christianity, but the point is if many of its traditions existed before it, they may survive after it also.
I used to have the misfortune to live next door to what I would call a professional foster carer. She had numerous children from past relationships who seemed to come and go at least one of which seemed more than a little disturbed. Her latest husband (a nice but put upon guy) was black and as she was white she had hit pay dirt. The fact they were a mixed race family ticked all the boxes and they were allowed to foster black & mixed race children. She proudly told us they paid her £200 per child per week and at times there were 6 children in a 3 bed semi. When the social workers called to discuss whatever the older and nosier children were locked in the garden.
Thankfully it all ended when the latest husband walked out and mixed race tick box was unticked.
£200 a week! Bloody hell! Thats not a bad little earner.
Even with only two children thats 20 grand a year and you dont have to go to work. Im going to have give this some thought!
What tax do they pay on this?
There is the ethnic Darwinian side to all this too. Its guaranteed that black/mixed race kids are over represented and black/mixed race adults under represented as carers. And who foots the bill for all this £200 a week. All in all a big transfer of resouces from white to non-white.
Excellent as your blog is Laban I do feel that it behoves me to point up the contradiction between this item and the last - on which you correctly highlighted this undeniable truth
"I came to the conclusion some time ago that what we'd been seeing over the last twenty years was a vast transfer of assets from the working and middle class to the rich and super-rich. "
"I've quoted before Simon Johnson, former IMF chief economist who believes that 'the finance industry has effectively captured our government' - that the US and UK are not so very far from post-Soviet Russia, or say 1980s Argentina."
And yet here you are entirely decrying the notion
"It's Thatcher's Fault"
I have always taken as axiomatic that if a people are laid waste economically then all sorts of social disintegration will take place - no more so than in the old mining areas - from brass bands to heroin addiction. The family life of the two little bastards was horrific - that is not to say that they might have been little bastards anyway on the Mary Bell pattern - but to deny the link at all seems fatuous.
Perhaps a better example might be the dysfunctional life of Karen Matthews and the desperate measures she resorted to.
On a wider scale it seems to me that if the economy is trashed for short-termist mega-greed, that if working people are reduced to dispensible serfs, that if the indigenous people of the land are confronted with becoming a minority with a highly uncertain future in their own land; that if they are gratuitously insulted and belittled at every turn, then there is bound to be a backlash
If idiot dupes scream at them that they are racists and Nazis for failing to jump for joy at their own dispossession and serfdom then the dupes will only have themselves to blame at developments not at all to their liking
I note that the EDL put 1500 "boots on the ground" in Stoke - they seems to have gone from the numerical strength of 3 companies to practically Brigade in very short order
Anonymous - Yes its a lot of money OK. By the end she was working for a foster agency rather than the council. So because the council hadn't enough carers it had to pay the agency to do it instead. God only knows how much the council were paying the agency.
I wouldn't see it all in such racial terms. The woman coining in the money was white as were all the social workers I saw.
What was sad was that she would sometimes foster tiny babies for months on end before a longer term foster parent could be found. These babies parents were usually junkies. We asked why they were put up for adoption but were told there weren't any suitable prospective step parents around. No doubt this was because the babies were mixed race and couldn't be adopted by white people. It was all a money making scheme for the SS and the foster parents at enormous cost to the taxpayer and above all the children involved.
I agree with Laban on how short-sighted and tedious the Guardianista obsession with Thatcher is. But I agree with Sgt Troy as well; I am not going to defend Thatcherism just because the Guardianistas attack it.
The social liberalism of the left and the economic liberalism of the right are two sides of the same nation-wrecking coin.
"The social liberalism of the left and the economic liberalism of the right are two sides of the same nation-wrecking coin."
Indeed. You have one, you get the other.
"The social liberalism of the left and the economic liberalism of the right are two sides of the same nation-wrecking coin."
There was nothing wrong with Thatcherism in terms of its economic liberalism per se; the problem under Thatcher was its combination with the growth in the size of the State and the closure of the grammar schools.
By the way Laban, have you seen Dan Hannan and Theodore Dalrymple are debating in London in February...? Would expect them to cover some of your ground.
In a world of great uncertainty and danger(a small price to pay for vibrant diversity of course) there is one constant, a fixity upon which we can depend
That Al-Graun, the great liberal organ, will readily give a platform to bought stooges
"Today, we are proud to launch the European Muslim Research Centre (EMRC) at the University of Exeter"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/jan/28/muslims-media-hate-crimes?plckFindCommentKey=CommentKey:ef9a3849-6da9-48ac-bba5-b68a5f4041e9
http://centres.exeter.ac.uk/emrc/
"Our core value is that a growing European Muslim population makes significant and valuable contributions to the safety and cohesion of European communities and countries and to the well being of Europe as a whole".
http://centres.exeter.ac.uk/emrc/news/hate_crime.php
Gleaned from CIF poster
"The Study contains the following information:
"We also wish to thank the trustees of Islam Expo and the Cordoba Foundation who have provided the funding to launch the European Muslim Research Centre (EMRC) and enabled us to carry out the research for this report"
IslamExpo was founded by Mohammed Sawalha, who was identified as one of the founders of Hamas by BBC Panorama.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/panorama/5234586.stm
The Cordoba Foundation is run by Anas Altikriti, whose father ran the Muslim Brotherhood in Iraq.
The EMRC Advisory Board includes Dr Basheer M. Nafi. He is indicted by the US Government in relation to activities with Islamic Jihad
http://nefafoundation.org/miscellaneous/FeaturedDocs/U.S._v_Al-Arian_SpcIndictment.pdf
http://centres.exeter.ac.uk/emrc/board.php"
^ Anyone for a Bali villa?
You obviously can't be posting often enough Laban, the spammers must think this place is abandoned. ;)
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Our core value is that a growing European Muslim population makes significant and valuable contributions to the safety and cohesion of European communities and countries and to the well being of Europe as a whole
Thats not a 'value', thats an ideal at most or a proposition, a theory, and no more. One which will live or die by the dull empirical facts on the ground. And I'm leaning towards the 'die' side of the argument.
I think in the media-fuelled moral panic about 'stranger danger', people have ignored the fact that the greatest damage done to children tends to be within their own homes at the hands of their own families.
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Hotel as an enterprise and an hotelier as a responsible member of the society have no option but to go green.
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