UK knife crime epidemic.

He's a pompous git, Heffer, but occasionally I find myself agreeing with him, as here on knife crime.

How many will die before we get serious?
Simon Heffer
Daily Telegraph Comment
05/07/2008

I don't know whether to laugh or cry at the reaction of the liberal Left to the epidemic of stabbed teenage boys that is not merely bereaving family upon family, but is also disfiguring society. They argue it is society's fault. The state, they say, is spending too little on giving the murderers pleasant places to live, and is failing to supply them with recreational facilities or "mentors". Inevitably, therefore, they feel the need to go out and kill: as one does.

That this is self-serving, ignorant nonsense should not be in dispute. How to win the argument with these people is another matter. One can say that many people now in middle or old age grew up in circumstances so deprived and so primitive that they would now be classed as fit only for animals: yet they did not feel the need, when afflicted by "child poverty", to go out and stab people. That is irrelevant, we are told, because times have changed.

They certainly have. As I have written before, a welfare state that absolves people of responsibility for their own lives, and for bringing up their children, has created this feral society in which the recourse to lethal violence is second nature to so many young boys.

They are the product of a land in which the traditional family has been obliterated by state benefits: where a father is an oddity rather than the norm; where the police feel it is their job to engage in acts of social engineering rather than to prevent crime; where the drugs laws are largely unenforced; where the race relations industry calls any attempt at police prevention "racism"; where schools are, with rare exceptions, either entirely ineffectual or out-and-out war zones; and where the judiciary sees it as its duty to protect the criminal classes from whatever strictures the penal system might throw at them.

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