Monday, February 19, 2007

Blatcherism's shadow

Janet Daley writes a brave but sensible Emperor’s New Clothes-type piece in the Telegraph following the recent spate of gun deaths in London.

Contra Unicef's destructive and hateful report, modern Britain is a place numerically dominated by an affluent, ever-growing, multi-ethnic middle-class whose children are living in a positive Golden Age of parental care and attention.

The problems lie beneath that gentrified, recycling, 4x4-driving majority in a small but disproportionately disruptive welfare-dependent underclass that has riches (globally-speaking) but no culture of responsibility.

Gun violence is a problem within black drugs gangs in specific, identifiable urban areas, and general low-level antisocial behaviour is a problem of dysfunctional, white, welfare-funded families. Everybody knows this, but our politicians insist on tiptoeing up to the brink of admitting it before backing away. The failure of Blatcherism is thus ultimately a failure of nerve.

Everything fails to some degree, and Blatcherism fails a lot less than anything else that’s ever been tried. But that’s no reason to condemn further generations of the minority underclass to failure, and its neighbours to misery.

Two of the best things to have happened recently are this initiative and the rise of the Dragons' Den entreprenurial culture.

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