'Broken Britain'

[Sir Tokyo Sexwale]

LONG article from the Economist

 

some bits I picked out:

 

IT IS hard to believe that such appalling crimes could have been committed by anyone so young. Two boys in the north of England were subjected to a sadistic attack that caused parents across the country to shudder. The anguish of the children was awful enough. But in a grotesque twist, their tormentor was also a child, not yet even a teenager. The attacks had been carried out “solely for the pleasure and excitement” of it, the judge in the case said. What has society come to when such evil is found in those so young?

 

That was in 1968. Mary Bell, the daughter of a Tyneside prostitute and supposedly the victim of repeated abuse herself, became Britain’s most famous child-killer when, just 11 years old, she was convicted of strangling two young boys. Now, a similar case is causing people to wonder again whether society has gone to the dogs. Two brothers from the South Yorkshire village of Edlington, aged ten and 11, were convicted on January 22nd of torturing and sexually abusing two younger boys in an ordeal that left one of them close to death.

 

The case was highlighted by David Cameron, the leader of the opposition, who on the day the boys were sentenced launched a chapter of his Conservative Party’s election manifesto dedicated to dealing with what he calls Britain’s “broken society”. The Edlington case was not “just some isolated incident of evil”, Mr Cameron said. Connecting it to four other infamous examples of callous brutality, he declared that it raised “deep questions about what is going wrong in our society”. Britain is experiencing a social recession to match the economic one, he reckons.

 

Chief among people’s worries is their security. Under Labour, fear of crime climbed until by 2007 it had become the issue that pollsters identified as the main complaint among voters. (Since then worries about the economy have eclipsed all else.) The heightened fears are a puzzle to criminologists, who point out that over the past 15 years Britain has experienced a steady, deep fall in crime. The statistics are notoriously hard to interpret, but according to the British Crime Survey, the Home Office’s most reliable measure though still far from perfect, crime overall has dropped by 45% since its peak in 1995. A big chunk of that fall is owing to reductions in vehicle theft and domestic burglary, for which alarm manufacturers and increased householder vigilance probably deserve as much credit as the police. But violent crime has fallen too. It is now almost half what it was in 1995, and no higher than in 1981

 

Gun crime has in fact been pretty flat nationwide. Data on knife crime are poor, but some doctors say that they are dealing with more stabbings, and the number of murders involving “sharp instruments” (bottles as well as knives) has risen slightly. Murders using guns increased alarmingly during the first few years of Labour’s time in office, but have since dropped back down. Indeed, the day before Mr Cameron made his “broken society” pitch it was announced that the total number of homicides recorded by the police was at its lowest in 19 years.

 

The number of killings of under-15s has “collapsed” since the 1970s, according to Colin Pritchard of Bournemouth University. Professor Pritchard calculates that in 1974 Britain was the third-biggest killer of children in the rich world. By his reckoning it is now 17th, following a 70% drop in child homicides. To be on the safe side, he did the analysis again, including cases where the cause of death was undetermined; even then the number of cases had halved. He credits closer co-operation between police and social services, which kicked off in a big way in 1979.

 

Less crime, less killing, fewer teenage mums, far fewer fags, perhaps a bit less drink and drugs: why is it that the idea of “broken Britain” rings true with so many, when it seems far from reality? Partly, it is because people’s ideas about the state of society are simply inaccurate: the average voter reckons that four out of ten teenagers have children, for instance, whereas in fact perhaps three in a hundred do. Official statistics to the contrary are viewed with suspicion after successive governments have relentlessly massaged them.

 

Another reason is that other countries sometimes seem to be dealing with their problems more quickly than Britain. It is galling to see Italy, say, cutting back fast on the booze. In America, too, voices of right-wing doom who once urged the righteous to set up firewalls against contagion from the Sodom and Gomorrah around them are now seeing heartening signs there of social “re-norming”.

 

 

 

 

 

there's lots more, if you're interested

[Stevie H]

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[fyds]

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[John am Rhein]

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[Tosh]

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[muleskinner]

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