Tough on marriage, tough on the causes of marriage–and crime goes through the roof
norman dennis, 21 December 2004
I have been asked to add a bit to my last posted article. In it I said that crime had been brought down in the 1990s by people’s own precautions, instituted because they were very reasonably experiencing a growing fear of crime; but that crime on the streets, the control of which depended on the police, continued to grow for another ten years.
With the numbers of robberies doubling and redoubling, the country at last awoke from the stupor into which it had been lulled by our academic and media elites. For decades they had dismissed the rise of crime as what they loftily dismissed as “moral panic”. It was a double-barrelled sneer. Being “moral”, for them, was worse than being in a panic.
I’ve been asked specifically to give the facts about the Home Office under Mr Straw from 1997 to 2001, and under Mr Blunkett from 2001 to 2004. Robbery is a police-controlled crime, as distinct from crimes where the public can do something to protect itself without the police (locks, bolts, alarms, staying indoors).
Mr Straw and Mr Blunkett, as Home Secretaries, were in charge of the Metropolitan police, London’s police.
In the year that Mr Straw took over the Home Office there were 27,386 robberies of personal and business property in London.
By 2000 there were 35,709 robberies of personal property in London.
In 2001, the year Mr Straw was promoted to the Foreign Office, there were 47,559 .
No the wonder that Mr Blunkett said that Mr Straw left the Home Office in a mess.
In the first eleven months of 2004, the year of Mr Blunkett’s departure, with December’s figure of about 2,500 still to be added in, there have been 33,673 personal-property robberies in London–with December included, not fewer than 36,000 for the full year.
Thus Mr Blunkett has not succeeded in getting the figures back even to the 35,709 personal-property robberies of 2000. Mr Blunkett was all the further, of course, from getting back to the figure with which Mr Straw began, the 27,000 of 1997, which included business robberies as well.
Robberies of personal property in London is a good figure to take. The Home Office is directly responsible for London’s policing. There’s been no significant change in how robbery is defined. The category of “robberies” has hardly been affected by changes in recording practices by the police. The British Crime Survey has too few cases of robbery for it to be of much use, so the Home Office uses the police figures. The figures are right up to date, so officials and ministers cannot claim that things have (unprovably) improved since the figures were collected.
For all these reasons, the usual slipping and sliding between one set of figures and another is not possible here.
On the assumption that the December 2004 figure will be very low at 2,500, robberies in London would have fallen from 48,000 in 2001 to 36,000 in 2004.
But as late as 1990 there weren’t as many as 36,000 robberies in the whole of England and Wales!
Taking the generous and hopeful estimate I suggested above–that the figure for London for December 2004 might be only 2,500–as late as 1961 there weren’t as many as 2,500 robberies a year in the whole of England and Wales.
In the year David Blunkett became Home Secretary, 2001, there were 5,900 robberies in Lambeth alone. The national figure for robberies did not exceed 5,900 until 1969.
It is scarcely an occasion for popular celebration when the figure for Lambeth alone in the first 11 months of this year is 2,419. For this is more than the national figure of robberies for the full twelve months of 1961, 2,349, just before the cultural revolution began to shower its blessings upon us.
No the wonder people “fear” that crime is growing. People would have had to be extremely stupid not to come to fear crime. The stupid thing is to say that the fear of crime is “as much the problem” as crime itself.
David Blunkett has officially written as Home Secretary on “the family”. But for him, as his Home Office’s paper in July 2004 on community and crime made explicit, “the family” has virtually nothing to do with marriage.
He has revealed by his own conduct, furthermore, that he has no conception at all that he has done anything wrong, or that anybody can still be so benighted as to think he could have done anything wrong, in having a baby by another man’s wife.
As the father of her child he has a full claim, according to his moral code, to all the social rights of parenthood. He must have been as gratified as I was amazed that he had Fathers4Justice parading for him over the weekend. I had always thought that they supported the wronged husband, not the infatuated interloper who wrongs him.
The incidental disclosures emerging from the affair show that such attitudes, such conduct and such claims are now regarded as entirely normal in the political, administrative, media and celebrity circles within which David Blunkett has spent the last few years. He leaves the Government with his “integrity intact”.
The Blunkett case has made plain what before could be only suspected, that there was no chance at all that any possible connection between the dismemberment of the family and the rise in crime would be contemplated by such people, much less that they should favour any marriage-friendly policies.
Much better to believe (or feign) that crime is at an historically low level. (Is it possible that self-deception in own’s own interest can be so powerful as to make such a statement a genuine error, rather than just a barefaced lie?)
For if crime is at an historically low level, and is sinking even lower, then obviously the sexual and parenting culture of the ruling, commenting and entertaining classes–now imitated and embraced as their own by most sections of society–cannot be held responsible for the non-existent high crime rates. “The fish rots from the head”? Not here, it doesn’t!
It’s the lower classes that are to blame. Hand out the ASBOs! Finger printing all round! More surveillance cameras will do it!
In the meantime … improve rewards for any arrangement except permanent marriage as the basis for procreating and rearing children. Impress upon children in the schools that (with one exception) any “partnership life-style” is just as good as any other.
Denounce (in words approved today by a Daily Telegraph staff writer) criticism of the extra-marital adventures of Mr Blunkett’s married lover as “nasty, sub-Saudi-Arabian, stone-the-adulteress stuff”. [Comment, Daily Telegraph, 21 December 2004.]
Did you see any “sub-Saudi-Arabian stone-the-adulteress” stuff? Neither did anybody else. It was, the Daily Telegraph blandly tells us, the “sub-text” of “some of the stuff being put about”. All we enlightened life-style people have to do is to decipher the code of these nasty sub-Saudi-Arabian adulteress-stoners and expose their real message. All partner life-styles are equal, but some are more equal than others, and life-long monogamy is not among them them.
(Is it a racial slur and backward to say that something is abhorrent because it is Saudi-Arabian, but not a racial slur and progressive to say something is abhorrent because it is nasty and sub-Saudi-Arabian?)
The Blunkett affair shows that, however much they lack self-knowledge and however much they wallow in their own self-serving justifications, we now enjoy political and media elites that are wonderfully well adapted to carrying out these tasks with genuine if self-deluded enthusiasm.
And let’s be grateful to Mr Blunkett. Without so much as a nod towards the strengthening of life-long monogamy, and indeed giving a considerable shove that weakens it, he has reduced the robbery rate of personal property in London, so that there were “only” 33,700 robberies of personal property from January to November this year, and crime is at an “historically low” level.
By the way, from 1897 until 1941, there were never more than 400 robberies a year of personal and business property combined in all the cities, towns and villages of England and Wales put together.
These are not my figures. They are the Home Office’s.
TOUGH ON CRIME. TOUGH ON THE CAUSES OF CRIME
OR, JUST PLAIN WRONG?
A view from the street.
A penal institution is society’s dustbin and the dustbin is almost overflowing. This simple statement uncovers an uncomfortable fact. It means that all those so-called “experts” among us who work, or have an opinion in, the field of criminal justice have no idea how to solve the problem of the criminal element in our society. They are baffled and confused. After all, if they were good at their jobs, the prison population would be going down, not up.
Right?
The reforming judges, the politicians, the probation officers, the academic criminologists, the psychiatrists and psychologists and of course, those “experts” on everything — the media, talk endlessly about solutions to crime that range from “Get tough policies” to “Get soft policies.” They spend billions in public funds over decades trying endless “initiatives” and still the prison population rises and the streets get more dangerous each day. The British Labour Party came to power with the slogan, “Tough on crime. Tough on the causes of crime.” They have been unable to achieve either aim, despite those endless initiatives.
Why?
Because these people are not experts at anything to do with crime, other than sounding like confident people who know what they are talking about. They got that skill in university, but it’s a fake skill. It is camouflage for the ignorant. The people who teach them at university are the very people who have failed so profoundly to solve the problem of crime.
Who are the real experts? Who does have the knowledge to change things for all of us and make the streets a safer place and bring down the prison population? Strangely, at least part of the answer lies in areas of society so despised and distrusted, no one ever thinks of looking there for it.
There are three groups in society who can honestly claim to have tackled the problem of crime and seen at least some success in doing so. The first group are ex offenders no longer involved in crime. The second are the Christian Churches and the third are those people who know how to build trust in people who have lost all their trust.
It is a fact that one of the most successful criminality tackling groups in our society today is the Christian Church. [Pauses to listen to humanists grinding their teeth in fury. Ed] When we study the historical fall of Christian religious observance in the past, we see that every time the Christian Church comes under pressure to keep silent in one part of the western world, crime rises correspondingly. The Church never dies under these circumstances, much to the annoyance of the humanists. Instead, they simply change location and begin again elsewhere. Where that happens, crime and poverty starts to fall as people listen and respond to the Christian message. If you do not believe that to be true, study the activities of the Salvation Army and William Booth in Victorian Britain, or David Wilkerson in America, for just two examples of many.
There is an argument, often given when this solution is put forwards, that not everyone believes in the message of the Christian Church. My answer to that is that no one believes in the message of the Christian Church until they are given a chance to hear it. That was what William Booth understood in the eighteenth century.
On the right wing are the “hang ‘em” and “flog ‘em” brigade. They are convinced, that, “a bit more discipline would soon make men of these scum.” When they have the reigns of power they turn prisons into low level torture camps. They hand out savagely long sentences and penalties. They love to shout, bully and try to break those who break the law. Because the men in jail seem to respond to such tactics, they gloat that they are right. However, the men only respond as long as they are subjected to the treatment. As soon as it stops and the prison gates swing open once more, over 90 per cent of them re-offend. Prejudice once again blinds these “wise and educated” people to the truth.
Take a child and tell that child over and over again that they are rubbish. Scum that will never be anything else but scum. Criticize their thoughts, their aspirations, their dreams and their desires. Tell them over and over again that they are stupid. Guess what they become? Kids believe what adults tell them. What we say, sinks deeply into their hearts and psyche. The message we preach to them when they are young, makes them what they will become. So, there must be a lot of kids hearing a lot of messages that they are scum because our jails and our streets are filling up with the disempowered youth whose rage and fury are in real danger of crippling our society.
We have to start taking steps to make these kids think differently about themselves and we need to do it in two areas. The first is before they get sucked into crime and the second is, after those who slipped through the net, have gone to jail. Perhaps it’s time to silence those who love to run males down, constantly. Show them these children and shame them into keeping a lid on their bile. The organisation also known colloquially as the “Bitter Bitches Corporation” could start the exercise.
When a man or woman decides they no longer wish to commit crime they are forced into a process of change that, by its very nature, has to be very deep and very honest. It begins by recognising two very fundamental truths. The first is that their activities produce victims and that they should be sorry about that fact. The second is that they are trapped in a cycle of destructive behaviour. Two things that may sound obvious to us, but that are a long way from being obvious to them. Until a person owns a truth the truth is just words. Once these two truths have penetrated and stuck, the person has to figure out what they are doing that perpetrates the cycle they are trapped in. It is a difficult and long process and it needs a plan and the support of others who know what they are talking about. Those who achieve this change are rare indeed, because society does almost nothing to help them.
The ex criminal is stigmatised and almost never congratulated for being an ex criminal, unless they are a celebrity. Instead, they are offered distrust and fear. Often for years after they have stopped committing crimes. Hardly an incentive to give up crime!
Interestingly, one of the few places they can find acceptance is within the Church and with people who emphasise forgiveness. The loving, accepting environment of the local congregation can have a massive effect on an ex criminals self esteem and make them feel once again that they are not just scum, but real people who can take part in society. However, once this process has begun within a Church, nothing must be allowed to interfere with it. If the loving and acceptance stops, the crime will return and there are very good reasons for this happening.
Here is a statistic that should make us all shudder.
98% of all inmates in jail come from broken homes.
Even so, the left wing, right-on elements in our society have striven to undermine marriage for years in our land. The harvest of that foolishness is that statistic! This chilling fact is the result of their “wisdom” and their “freedom.” A broken home is not freedom at all. It is a prison of deep pain, torn emotions, fear filled minds, damaged people and often, criminal activity that affects us all and makes our whole society a little more sick. Broken homes give fodder to the media and a living hell to the rest of us. Victims of crime and criminals alike.
I don’t want to sound just like a furious “lefty basher” so let me just point out that the right wing political “experts” who are supposed to be defenders of our family values, have capitulated to the left wing pressure on the family in the most disgusting and cowardly way and, as a consequence, are just as guilty of creating that statistic as anyone. So are the rest of us! We voted these people into power and then stood back and watched, almost without protest, as they went about creating the mess we now have. Even when we do protest they do not listen. Instead, they use their friends in the media to ridicule and “re shape” our views. We loath and distrust them, but it was us who put them there. Perhaps we should become more demanding about the standards our politicians should live up too and refuse to endorse those who do not cut the mustard?
98% of all inmates in jail come from broken homes!
That statistic is a powerful one. When one looks at the reality behind it, one begins to get a glimmer of the truth about why people become trapped in a cycle of crime.
People in prison, by definition, hate authority. That is why they break societies rules. That much is self evident. Many children who are hurt by adults develop a deep mistrust of authority. Those children depend on the adults around them for their very survival and for insights in how to live their lives. Not just as infants, but way into their teens.
Both parents are supposed to pass on their accumulated wisdom and expertise to their children. In turn, those parents are supposed to turn to their parents for guidance learned after a lifetime of experience. (In other words, the nuclear family works. When it is allowed to work). Part of that wisdom and expertise is the importance of following rules. Family discipline teaches that importance. However, the left wing, right-on brigade, decided long ago, that families could not be trusted to discipline their own children anymore and the state should take over that role. To justify this extraordinary decision they pointed out — endlessly — the mistakes some families made in using excess discipline. Once again, their tendency to paint everyone with the same brush created the situation where it is now almost illegal to smack your child for doing wrong and the child’s “rights” have become paramount. The result? No discipline in the home or schools and the streets teem with spoilt, out of control youngsters who have not been taught that society needs barriers and there are consequences for crossing them. The PC lefties call discipline, “cruelty to children” and they have disempowered parents and teachers. Cruelty to children is a whole different issue to discipline, but the left wing have managed to blur the distinction between the two and muddy the waters. Preferring the blunt instrument of state legislation to hammer children after their respect for society has been destroyed. The rest of us suffer the consequences.
There is a still more pernicious side to this stupid policy of the do-gooder lefty who thinks he, or she, is all wise and all powerful: many parents cannot cope with their unruly kids without becoming like them. In households where kids run riot, tensions between the adult partners can become incredibly strained and lead to break up. To try and prevent this, many adults simply ignore their children’s behaviour. Instead of disciplining it, they defend it. It becomes a kind of, “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” mentality.
Welcome to neighbours from hell territory!
Good parents, who ignore the PC advice being thrown at them from all directions, find their work with their kids being undone by the other children the kids associate with in school and on the streets. The peer pressure the children come under to be part of the unruly gang is powerful indeed. They are taught by their undisciplined “friends” that their own parents must hate them for insisting they be home by nine o-clock, do their homework and go to bed early, etc. The good kids learn to deceive and lie to their parents from the other kids, who beat their parents with the rods of whining, threats and blackmail. The kids then lose their respect for, and trust in, the adults around them. Thus the cancer spreads. The family becomes dysfunctional and that horrible statistic becomes a reality.
Crime, like business, is spread by word of mouth and we have to work harder to stop that spread. Only the relatively rich upper middle classes have any chance of escaping this mess because their environment is so exclusive. On the big housing estates, this family unfriendly policy reaps a harvest of despair and pain that eventually, even reaches into the world of the rich middle and upper classes. So, for the sake of so-called “freedoms,” everyone suffers. Those same middle classes then point the finger at the poor and use them as a convenient whipping boy and this allows them to escape facing up to what their policies and ideas have created.
The genius of Charles Dickens was in making the middle classes of his day look at what they had created in their selfish pursuit of wealth for themselves and their friends. Scrooge is really a metaphor for the uncaring, self satisfied and selfish, rich among us. The advantage he had was that he was talking to people who were still listening to the Church. Today, (and this is terrifying) there is a real attempt to silence the Church and thus escape from the guilt that this generation of the greedy, should have. The results of this unrestrained greed will be horrifying, if it is allowed to continue, upon the next generation.
We have a situation today where fathers are being excluded from their children’s lives in ever increasing numbers. The source of this unofficial and unspoken policy? You guessed it. The all wise, politically correct, lefty again. The role of the father in our society is slowly diminishing because of a twin pronged attack on that role by the left wing. First they decided that a housewife was really a prisoner being kept in her home, against her will, by the horrible machinations of an oppressive male enclave. They decided to, “set her free” by putting her on the nine to five treadmill and letting state appointed strangers bring up her children. In this way, the children of these mothers would learn — not to trust in mummy or daddy for wisdom — but to trust “the movement.” (A euphemism for the great left wing social engineering experiment we are all suffering under). The advantage of this, to lefty minds, was two fold. It undermined the family by undermining the role of the male “bread winner” and it created the funds through increased tax revenue, to make full time state approved child care a reality. Secondly, to cement this wickedness into place, the great left wing set out to ridicule both marriage and fatherhood at every opportunity and thus bully society into playing along. They also ridiculed women who wanted to stay at home and be mothers and began a massive propaganda campaign to get them out to work. The resulting chaos is a rampaging hoard of single mothers trying to cope alone without a father figure for her kids; a political system that rewards them generously; a public labouring under a barrage of lies and propaganda claiming it’s all been a wonderful success; broken children; fathers demonstrating on top of cranes and buildings; a society riddled and heaving with crime, despair and fear and a terrifying statistic showing that 98% of all criminals come from the broken homes the left wing social theorists have created!
As long as families continue to fragment lives will be ruined as the crime statistics go through the roof once more. We have to begin supporting the family with economic and social pressures that really bite. It’s time to put fidelity and marriage back on the social agenda. In today’s climate, no sensible man would dare to get married. If he does and it all goes wrong, guess who is going to get the house, the kids, the money and the possessions and which one of the “partnership” is going to get the bed sit and child care payments? This is exactly what those who hate the family wanted and they put in place another set of laws to make sure it would happen, every time they were back in government.
One would think that this shambles alone was enough to place clear blue water between the two dominating political parties, but no. Today, it is difficult to tell one party from the other in Britain because the right wing long ago capitulated to the logical sounding arguments of the left. The right lost the debate because they lost touch with ordinary people. Their desire to live expensive lifestyles became more important than their desire to champion the cause of genuine social cohesion.
These are the real causes of crime that Tony Blair claimed he would tackle when he came to office. Naturally he was unable to do so because, he is the head of the “movement” in this country, that created the problems in the first place and that “movement” would not take kindly to him undoing their, “good work.” The Labour Party, it seems to me and to many people, still has a lot of internal reforming to do before it can become a real friend of the people again. In the meantime, offenders go on offending and as usual and politicians are weak on crime and weak on the causes of crime.
Because the leadership appears to be right wing, we should not be fooled into thinking that those who sit behind them on the benches of the House of Commons are! In truth the Labour Party should come with a cautionary label that says, Warning: May contain nuts.
It is not creating wealth or more jobs that tackle criminal behaviour, it is creating an environment that the reform minded can once again feel safe within and the criminal who wants to, can find genuine ways to change. That means putting a system in place in which the real experts can function and get on with the job of changing hearts and minds within the criminal community. Not every criminal wants to change. That is just a fact. Many of them enjoy committing crimes and many others cannot help it. However, there are also many others who do want to stop but have no idea how. These are the people we have to identify and reach out to and we must reach out to them, not with people in suits being paid large salaries for being an “expert,” but with people who know what the criminals are going through because they have been there.
We need a well funded, long term project to bring together those who know how to teach others to trust and how to develop self discipline; those who know how to teach the spiritual values that will change behaviour and those who have been successful in changing their life of crime into a life that is more productive. Let those groups sit down and thrash out a plan that includes listening to the villains that want to change and let them get on with it; without constant interference by the fake “experts” who have so far failed dramatically to change anything.
A holistic approach to the hearts, minds and spiritual needs of those trapped in crime will go further towards ending this mess than any amount of new legislation, new prisons and unwise “initiatives” ever will. Couple all of this with a public education campaign that seeks to change attitudes to those who succeed in stopping their criminal behaviour.
Clever short term politics do not stop politicians from exhibiting immense foolishness in the long term (just consider the Iraq war). The destruction of the family and the generation of the resulting crime levels is immense foolishness. Perhaps the arrogance on display comes from those who think they can solve every problem with a political solution that takes no account of the hearts of men and women and the pain and fears that drive those hearts?
I say, it is time to stop listening to the lefty do-gooder loonies and their crackpot, self-righteous theories and start really tackling crime and its causes where it begins, in the hearts and minds, and in the streets and homes of those trapped within it. Our choices are simple. We can spend billions on the symptoms and failure, or we can get back to a society that values the institution of the nuclear family, spiritual values and remembers that reform of crime costs less than managing the symptoms and effects.
Trust me. I am an expert.
George Rolph.
London
17th September 2006
If I may add a further comment. It has to be said, I suppose, that one of the reasons for so little public outrage is that most of the population have grown up wih this level of crime and know no different. They have no personal knowledge of a different civil society such as that remembered by people of my own age.
I also have some sympathy for the police whose numbers have increased by a mere 150% when the level of crime has increased by 1000%.
The increase in recorded crime over the past 50 years has been so phenomenal that one would suppose that there could be no greater public protest; that even politicians would be so dismayed that they would seek the most stringent measures to effect a return to a more civilised society. Not a bit of it: the public protest is, in my view, feeble and the reaction of politicians is to ignore anything that happened more than a year or two ago.
It is incredible that there are not screams of outrage at what has happened to our society over those fifty years. It is also incredible that society itself has turned a blind eye to the causes of this decline. There have been many studies into the probable cause of this national loss of virtue but the political, social and media leaders of our society do nothing more than say tut,tut and think only in terms of apprehending wrongdoers and congratulating themselves if the figures show a minimal reduction from the previous year (before they surge again in the following year).
There is a desperate need for a re-affirmation of an absolute morality and a political will to lead in that context and reverse all the policies and legislation that have eroded a sense of morality from the public consciousness.
We must reverse the liberal trends and use proper punishment to instil a fear in the minds of those who would commit crimes against society.