Andrew O’Hagan in the Telegraph takes up the fashionable topic of ‘anti-social behaviour’:
I grew up on a housing estate myself, and I watched it go, in the course of 20 years, from being a zone of optimism and clean living to a sink estate and an unemployment black spot.
My mother lives alone and her door was kicked in by junkies in the middle of the night, just so they could steal her telly. My mother has never been the same (she moved into sheltered housing) and I recognise that the yobs who ruined our street are very different from the respectable working class of my youth, who deserved (and still deserve) every bit of support the Government and the community can give them.
But a couple of paragraphs later we have,
Miss Rooney’s street, like so many in Britain, has been over-run by people fuelled by a mad sense of entitlement, by a vast carelessness and selfishness, and violence on their minds.
Overrun? I suspect Mr O’Hagan would find the yobs, like him, grew up on the estate. The difference is they (and probably their parents and grandparents) also grew up on the state. It is the support the “Government [with the same capital G as God] and community” gave them that created the “mad sense of entitlement”. If the state teaches people that they are not responsible for themselves then those without other information will believe it.
Agreed.
We also see seagulls attacking people for food. The behaviour has a parallel. Feed them and they multiply. The next generation are fed and know nothing else and multiply still more until you find that they not only expect feeding but will use intimidation and physical violence to get what they see as “theirs” from the mugs.
Josephine Rooney seems to be one of the few steadfast residents holding on in that area – an area totally run down and seemingly populated only by criminals, junkies and the elderly who either do not wish to leave their homes or can not do so. The fact that the council has completely refused to do anything about the area suggests that they are letting it run down even further before bringing in the police and the developers in order to re-gentrify it as has occurred in other parts of Derby, according to a Newsnight report on Tuesday night. Presumably in the meantime the council can use the criminals to terrorise those remaining residents into leaving the area without asking for compensation (I would hazard that for Ms Rooney this would be a very sizeable sum indeed given the years she has lived there).
Quite so Guy.
As for Julian Taylor’s point:
This is also true – local councilors (in the past with government support – especially from Mr P.) have long carried on a policy of not just tolerating, but encouraging the driving out of home owners from an area they wish to hand over to “the developers”.
The alliance bettween certain business enterprises and the state (local and national) is well established.
Small property owners (whether of homes or small business enterprises) have no chance. And even large companies can be destroyed (in various ways) by rivals working with the government – if they lack the right political links.
Even if a businessman does not seek to use government to destroy rivals he must still spend a large part of his time and money going to the right conferences, supporting the right schemes (and so on) to try and make sure that he is well in with the powers that be.
Otherwise his rivals will use the government to destroy him (of course it may happen anyway, regardless of how well connected someone thinks he is).
The rule of law may exist in other countries (I do not know, I have never lived anywhere else), but Britian is a place where there are a vast number of laws – but no rule of law.
The thugs on the streets understand this (at the level of instinct) rather better than the people who write in to (for example) Mr Booker of the Sunday Telegraph saying things like “but I obeyed all their regulations, at vast expense, but they broke their own regulations [or made up new ones] in order to destroy me – I do not understand it….”
Of course they “do not understand it”, because the fools think they are living in a place where there is justice.
There may be justice in other places (I say again that I do not know) but there is no justice here.
Almost needless to say, Mr Cameron would not change this.
There is no more damaging status for a person than to be a ward of the state. In the US, the two most prominent groups whose history has included long periods of this status are Native Americans and African Americans.
One of the major blank outs in current statist ideology is a desperate attempt to pretend that this is not the case. The admission that being a “special project” of the government was, in fact, a direct road to disaster would entail the opening of a debate about the efficacy of a wide range of statist “solutions”, and that possibility must be avoided at all costs.
Guy’s point is entirely correct—these deplorable situations are not natural developments, they are artificially created by utterly wrong policies foisted on people as helpful efforts to solve problems.
Maybe each benefit giro, letter, agreement, form or whathaveyou should have written what James Bartholomew highlighted had been on Moorfields Eye Hospital’s documents when it was a charitable entity.
“This Letter is granted to the applicant in being poor. Its acceptance therefore by anyone not really poor constitutes an abuse of charity”.
Excellent stuff. No need for laws or fines if we had a world where benefits were won or given by choice, not handed over as an entitlement or from “rights”. No obligation to support means people have to ensure they behave themselves. No such constraint exists in any real form today and we now endure the poisonous fruit.