So the solution to Britain’s “broken society” is to fight the criminal gang culture?
Well just let’s make sure we are fighting against the right gangs and attacking the right sources of the current brokenness of society.
The Sunday Times, August 14th Harriet Sergeant article on “Fixing broken Britain” proposes the view that not all the criminality comes from Hackney and Camden.
Whether in the prehistoric times of hunter-gatherers or our own post-industrial age, any society’s role is to advance the collective interests of its members, both weak and strong. To earn the right to do this its governers have an inherent responsibility to provide an environment that gives its individuals purpose, security, discipline, rights and responsibilities.
The criminal gang groups that inflicted mayhem on society in the cities of Britain will rightly be confronted and punished for their feral disregard for the property and indeed life rights of others.
But these are not society’s criminal gangs. They are gangs who have been evicted and excluded from the society in which the rest of us live – their threat is therefore external and not internal. And fighting them will never fix the brokenness within our society. The solution is to bring them back into society and it will take generations of cultural renewal to do it.
There is a view that the real criminal gangs who are breaking our society are the successive European politicians and mainly, though not exclusively, Labour governments of Britain since the mid-1990s.
By a lethal combination of their misguided policies and the law of unintended consequences, the criminal arrogance that promoted war in Iraq also created the nanny state that condemned the under-class to expulsion and exclusion from our society. They achieved this by
• creating minimum wage levels that sent millions of jobs offshore and robbed people at the lower levels of society of their global work competitiveness, daily purpose and self-respect,
• fostering a “progressive” public education system that has resulted in millions of young people being barely literate and thus unable to compete,
• removing competition from key aspects of childhood experience and fooling people that they can succeed without effort “because I’m worth it”,
• elevating the “rights” of individuals, including children, to such a level that discipline is virtually absent from life experience – whether in the family, the school or the workplace,
• diminishing the “responsibilities” of individuals to contribute added value to society by handing unearned benefits to all as their right, rather than selectively targeting the support to the truly needy
• and many more examples of ineptitude under the cloak of do-goodery.
The result is that these criminal gangs of bureaucrats have sent vast numbers of potential participants in our society to a freezing hopeless Gulag. Excluded in care-less purposeless state-supported boredom where they create – outside our society - their own society of heirarchy, order, purpose, security, competition, rights, responsibilities and discipline – their own criminal gangs.
