I agree with the general points made here, and the underlying concerns, but I have one reservation: is it really helpful to write in quite such a 'tabloid style'?

"self-respect and parental and community responsibility have catastrophically broken down."
" Teen magazines advise on sex acts for tots" (tots, really?)

"part of our society has degenerated into a fetid stew of anarchic sexual activity"

So after such revelations, Melanie says "The murder of children remains, thankfully, very rare." Isn't that the point then? We can overreact to such undoubtedly shocking cases precisely because of their freakish nature. If things were as bad as this otherwise admirable argument points out, surely such incidents would be a far more regular occurrence? I think it's hard to keep perspective in a case like this, but we seem to in line for more knee-jerk reaction in response to a single case again (like Dunblane).

Is it a terrible atttitude to take to say that people like Huntley are in a tiny, tiny minority and unfortunately, a free and open society will always be unable to guard against intelligent, cunning and twisted personalities like his without making life for 99.9% of the population unbearable?

Your children are safer, healthier and have a longer life expectancy than ever before, though if you just read newspapers all day you wouldn't necessarily think so.

Huntley is a manifestation of the damage done to Britain by the radical left. Currently, they are in ultimate charge because they are the elected government. But before Blair and his socialist cohorts got in, the radical left dominated the British film industry and, of course, the broadcast media. The BBC especially took a nauseating pride in "pushing back the boundaries", as though destruction of civil values was a service to humanity.

What Melanie calls "the governing class" - I assume she means teachers, people in law enforcement, religious leaders, doctors, community leaders, etc - has abdicated its responsibilities to the community, although not before putting up a good fight. But they have been sneered at, ridiculed and called "uptight" and "pathetic" for the last 30 years and no one has spoken up for them. So what used to be known as pillars of the community are no more.

Today, what adult would be bold enough to reprimand someone else's child? When I was little, an occasional telling off by a neighbour was part of the fabric of our lives. Adults kept children in line and children accepted this as normal - as indeed, it is in other human societies the world over.

So Britain civil society has been beaten about the head and shoulders and its life battered out of it. Now we have little sexual predators of 11 and 12 whose parents leave them to frequent clubs and bars in the name of letting them "make their own decisions" and we have a weird acceptance that adult male predators are free to indulge their fantasies with children.

We have little girls of 13 and 14 running off with men they've met in chat rooms over the internet and their parents profess surprise. In one recent case, the mother said the girl used to be on the computer up to 11 hours a day but she had no idea what she was doing or who she was talking to.

This social anarchy and failure to protect the young is a purely British phenomenon. I have not encountered it in any other country. So far as I know, no other country's government devalues marriage and the family structure as does ours. No other country contemplates giving temporary partners the same legal rights as married couples. No other country encourages households without fathers but constantly changing male companions of single mothers - many of these men themselves sexual predators on the little girls within the household. And the police don't bother to enforce the law, perhaps because the new British phenomenon of radical activist judges will find for the perpetrator. And the new parasite stratum of "social services" and "counsellors" will surge in and leaven the offence with psycho-babble.

This is all part of the agenda of the radical left which has governed Britain in fact, or dictated standards via the broadcast media, for the past 30 years. The goal: total dependence on the state. I find it astounding that so many millions are complicit in their own destruction. I wonder if the ease with which a determined clique can take over an entire society surprised Stalin, too.

Rusry,

"So after such revelations, Melanie says "The murder of children remains, thankfully, very rare." Isn't that the point then? "

I agree very much with your comments.

Melanie would have written a better article if she had stayed on the theme of the disastrous effects upon children of irresponsible parenting - and the lack of corrective action exerted upon damaging and anti-social behaviour by institutions (families, police, welfare personnel, teachers, communities etc)- and had mentioned Huntley within this context but not as the main focus of her article.

The fact is that most of the irresponsible behaviour of the parents cited does not lead to murder - as she rightly states - and, in fact, the murder rate of minors in the UK is, thankfully, still very low (and has hardly changed in 50 years).

So, one might conclude, differently from Melanie, that Huntley and Carr are aberations and, in fact, modern day equivalents of Brady and Hindley (who were even more sadistic in their torture and murder of their victims).

Even if someone inhabits a moral 'swamp' it rarely leads to murder. However, Melanie does point out quite rightly that some children are growing up in an environment that is morally chaotic with no people or institutions providing any real guidance as to the difference between right and wrong with well-defined boundaries that set out acceptable codes of behaviour. Often, they are born to parents who no longer seem able to distinguish. These are symptons of a modern sickness within British society and one that results in a whole range of anti-social behaviour that is now beyond the control of the institutions and the people that traditionally regulated social behaviour.

Wile I see that "society" has its share of blame for these disordered personalities; I would like to focus on more immediate causation.

Huntley drives a car.....did he present his driver's licence when applying for a job ? His birth certificate ? His NI number ? Did they all state his name as "Ian Nixon" or were they still "Ian Huntley" as his real name ?

He needed to use another name because his reference for this position was his father, a caretaker of another school.....and we all know that "Huntley" as a common surname might suggest they were related. Did those taing up references from Huntley Senior ask what his relationship was to the applicant ?

Michael Howard was Home Secretary when he put in place a laborious procedure whereby people had to prove identity when applying for jobs.....I am interested in learning just how Huntley proved he was "Ian Nixon".

The failure is at every level....from a school which provided housing to an unmarried couple. one of whom used a false identity....but presumably paid NI and Income Tax.......and another who worked in the school itself.......based on the fact that Huntley's background check was imperfect, how can one assume Maxine Carr's was okay ?

Up and down this country, teachers, scout leaders, voluntary workers, doctors, nurses are being charged £40+ and months of waiting to get a "Persilschein" to say they are unblemished......what this charade shows is that it its yet another Government Con and these people are now cast into doubt when volunteering is hard enough anyway.

Just why is our State run by such serial incompetents and bunglers ?

Romulus - Good questions, although not relevant to the article. However, re how Huntley aka Nixon, according to reports, did formally and legally change his name by deed poll. It still seems strange, though, that no one called him on it. He said he'd legally changed his name because he'd "had some problems". Strange that this didn't prompt anyone to ask, "What problems?"

I must say that I wholeheartedly agree with Rusty here.

"So after such revelations, Melanie says "The murder of children remains, thankfully, very rare." Isn't that the point then? "

It is indeed the point. Melanie's general argument about the destruction
wrought by left-liberal social policy is one with which I am in complete agreement, but the Soham case was not a legitimate hook on which to hang such an argument.

Rusty.It takes a great deal of courage to take such a rational position as you have here. Respect.

However....I fear that you push it a bit in your last paragraph.While bairns these days are indeed at no greater risk of being murdered in headline grabbing fashion than in the past, they most certainly are NOT safer.

Caroline:

"What Melanie calls "the governing class" - I assume she means teachers, people in law enforcement, religious leaders, doctors, community leaders, etc - has abdicated its responsibilities to the community, although not before putting up a good fight. But they have been sneered at, ridiculed and called "uptight" and "pathetic" for the last 30 years and *no one has spoken up for them*. So what used to be known as pillars of the community are no more."

Other than the assertion, which I have enclosed between asterisks in the above quoted paragraph from your posting, I agree entirely with what you say and as a long retired Police Officer I appreciate the skill and acumen with which you expressed your points. The only reason I quibble with the phrase "nobody has spoken up for them" is because there have been very good commentators and journalists that have consistently spoken up for them and Melanie Phillips is our champion in this regard and has been for many years.

The problem is, the logic of Melanie and others who have tried to stem the descent of society's infrastructure into the abyss has either been ignored or vilified by the agitprop tactics of the leftist libertarians.

When I watched the police incompetence, bungling, stupidity and post trial arrogance and complacency
publicly displayed throughout this tragic case of double murder, which could have been prevented with the basic application of common sense and crime prevention measures in Huntley's erstwhile home town, I was deeply disturbed and dismayed that the police service has deteriorated to it's present level of utter incompetence.

It confirmed what I have long feared, that many Chief Constables have been drawn, not from the pick of experienced and wise officers who have spent long periods of time in each rank and accrued experience and nous, but from a cadre of graduates whose accelerated promotion through the politically correct Bramshill brainwashing and Gramscian propaganda process has rendered them apparatchiks of the current government's appalling libertarian revolution. As a result their officers have become demoralised, incompetent (the worst form of corruption) and lazy.

After the trial was completed, both Chief Constables should have turned up at their HQ's just once more - to hand in their resignations, and, as they did so, to hang their heads in shame and contrition. If their Universities did not teach them that, then it was waste of public money, just as their fat salaries have been throughout their 'service'- or perhaps I should say, their careers.

Kenny, I don't agree. I cannot think of a more appropriate hook on which to hang her points about the destructiveness of the liberal left on society than this topical story. Huntley had sex with a series of underaged girls. This is statutory rape. Yet he was never charged. Society has given up on protecting under-aged girls from sexual predators. Had he been brought to book even once on any segment of these episodes of sexual predatation and violence, he wouldn't have checked out clean and he wouldn't have got the job. That is a point worth making and is perfectly illustrated by these nightmarish events. I read that a senior officer says he may have committed murder in the past, but he is so forensically savvy that he may have gotten away with it.

"This is statutory rape. Yet he was never charged. Society has given up on protecting under-aged girls from sexual predators"

my understanding was that prosecutions require a complaint. If the 'victim' was complicit in the act I do not see where you obtain your witness statements

Although I can't cite the statistics, I read not so long ago that the incidence of the murder of children by strangers has remained pretty much constant since figures have been kept. Choosing to ignore this fact, Melanie is more or less linking paedophilia with any other form of sexual activity of which
she disapproves. There is too the usual lazy and spiteful homophobia - it was all the fault of Ian Huntley's mother because she is a lesbian, apparently. If one-parent families and lesbian mums created psycopaths, then the UK would be teeming with them. It isn't, and the revulsion that everyone I have talked to, heterosexual, gay, or lesbian, feels at the events in Soham shows that nor is there the 'terrifying loss of human empathy' Melanie talks about. It is also completely illogical to believe that, for example, the change in attitudes towards lesbians and gay men, whose behaviour is seen now by most people to be natural, consensual and to harm no one, means that there is now going to be acceptance of all sexual behaviours that are clearly harmful and abusive, such as assault or child-abuse. It assumes that the majority of people are moral half-wits who can't make simple distinctions. But then I think that Melanie really does believe that us poor plebs need to be rescued from our 'fetid stew' (shades of James Anderton there talking about gay men who were HIV+ 'swirling around in a cess-pool of their own making') by our moral and intellectual superiors such as herself.

"it was all the fault of Ian Huntley's mother because she is a lesbian, apparently"

Interesting ! Where did you discover that ?

Romulus,

I didn't 'discover' it - Melanie states it in the article above.

Romulus - Perhaps Frank Pulley, above, can enlighten us. When a crime is perpetrated against a minor, who files the complaint? Who filed the complaint about the rape of a five month old baby a couple of months back? Surely the parents file complaints in such cases?

Frank Pulley - Yes, I was wrong to say no one spoke up for maintaining the structure of society when others were busy with the wrecking ball. You are right. There is Melanie, there's Peter Hitchens and quite a few others. Before them, there were equally famous, albeit it ignored in this context, names. But Melanie et al are calumnied, jeered at and mocked by the left and special interest groups who wish to elevate their own importance on the planet (see Matt, above) as being "judgemental". That is about as severe an offence as exists today.

The police in Britain have lost all sense of service to the community. There was that prat who let the drug industry basically take over Brixton, who allowed his male lover to smoke pot in his flat and who said he had a sneaking admiration for anarchy. His reward is, he's been promoted to an even higher position where he can do even more damage.

The tragic, tragic deaths of these two little girls can be directly traced to a lack of interest in upholding the law (under-age sex is against the law; several complaints about one man over a period of time would have raised the hackles of an alert police department). I also agree that, under this present jackbooted regime, it is the police officers who know how to pass exams, and not those with street savvy and finely tuned intution, who have taken over.

One tiny quibble: "liberals" (for which read "thought fascists") are not "libertarians". Libertarians are for much less government and less interference. They are at the other end of the political spectrum from "liberals".

"GPs hand over the morning-after pill. "

I don't know what Melanie prefers, but a GP faced with such a situation has either the choice of the RU pill or the whole debilitating procedure for abortion......just why should GPs be put in the position of policing society....they are too busy trying to cope with the after-effects of its social problems !

You can see why so many GPs are quitting the NHS !

While we are on the subject: Winston Churchill's father was a syphilitic philandrer and his American mother collected lovers; he seemed to be able to pursue a reasonable course in life.......maybe just maybe individuals should start to take responsibility for themselves and stop this "New Society" type stuff .....remember this periodical Melanie ? .....blaming parents, schools, traffic wardens etc.........yes, I know, we are familiar with the fact that Hitler could not get into Art School so he invaded Poland and Russia......but what did the other rejects do ?

The one thing (or one of the many things) that Melanie Phillips forgets/ignores, is that it doesn't matter whether Ian Huntley's Mum was a lesbian witch activist and his Dad Richard Nixon, the girls came to his house because they were asking after his then-girlfriend, Maxine Carr. It could well have happened as it did whether he was employed by the school or not.

Caroline:

Firstly, to address your point about ’leftist libertarians’ I would argue that the phrase is not necessarily an oxymoron, but if it helps I will emend it to ‘leftist libertines’ in the context of this subject. We can discuss the effect of libertarian ‘life styles’ and Lord Devlins’s ‘single seamless web’ argument at some other time and in some other context to clarify what my necessitarian stance would be in the broader context of your thinking.

But to return to the question of the deficiencies of the investigative processes in Grimsby: obviously, prima facie evidence has to be presented if someone is arrested, particularly on such a serious charge and one can forgive the police on the first occasion if they felt that reluctant witnesses and lack of corroborative evidence made the chances of a successful prosecution very slim. I would have persevered myself, but let’s be generous.

But thereafter Huntley should have been a target as a known sexual predator; his background should have been researched; a dossier should have been opened and kept active. On the second occasion he came to notice, every effort should have been made to secure, by gentle persuasion and with due reassurances, direct evidence of Unlawful Sexual Intercourse (USI) and every effort made to bring the case to court and secure a conviction. Experienced officers should have been able to cope with this and the full resources Social Services should have been brought into play. It is unforgivable that more effort and resources were not put into stopping this predatory pervert. I simply do not believe that there was no officer in Humberside Constabulary capable of bring a successful prosecution. If there is not, then I hereby offer to come out of retirement, at 70 years of age, and show them how. And I certainly wouldn’t use the Data Protection Act as an arse shield. I could think of a hundred ways that Huntley could have been put under surveillance and captured in delicto flagrante.

The fact that his proclivity was exposed on ten occasions and the only response from Humberside police was to “weed” the information relating to it is so bizarre as to be absolutely incredible. I understand that Humberside has Child Protection Unit; moreover, every police station has a Collator, someone whose job it is to collect, evaluate, collate and analyse information on individuals, groups, businesses and premises that have come to police notice on their patch for suspected criminal behaviour or enterprises. To suggest that none of Huntley’s actions came to the notice of the Collator, or the Child Protection Unit simply cannot be true. The ultimate duty of a Collator, having performed four intelligence functions listed above, is to disseminate information to an appropriate level of authority for the necessary resources to be acquired and executive action taken. The Data Protection Act is irrelevant - the CC is grasping at straws that will surely crumble in his trembling hand. If he really believes what he has asserted he is a fool. If he doesn’t he’s a liar. Take your pick.

If these steps were not taken as a matter of routine, then the chain of command, right up to Chief Constable, is both responsible and accountable for the dire results that ensued. Heads should roll from bottom to top, including his. He can’t plead that he “was upstairs collecting fares” as the old cop-speak goes! It is not possible that a man with Huntley’s intelligence could thwart an efficient police force on ten occasions. It is farcical to suggest it. I do not buy the argument that Huntley was so clever and cunning that he could have outwitted any police officer that was worth his salary. It is utter cobblers. He did not, as the Counsel for the Prosecution suggested during the trial “run rings around them”. It was a no-brainer from the second day and the police ran rings around one another, whilst his demeanour, his behaviour and his words should have flagged even to a rookie cop with the most basic training under his/her belt that they had their man; and that the location being used as a press office and general meeting place was a sensitive crime scene. As for the officer in charge of the enquiry – don’t even ask me to describe what I feel about him!

Furthermore, the performance of the arrogant Chief Constable of Cambridgeshire during his post-trial press conference had me throwing things at my TV screen. If this is an example of modern Chief Officers, then the abysmal failure of police to contain the exponential rise in crime, social disorder and dysfunction becomes much clearer.

And before anyone talks about 20/20 hindsight; I was screaming at anyone who would listen from Monday 5th August onwards, “I hope they have filleted the caretaker, he’s the obvious prime suspect, why isn’t he sitting in the interview cell? Why are they trampling all over the crime scene?”

I simply couldn’t believe that he had not been thoroughly investigated and eliminated. If I had known that he hadn’t, I would have gone to Soham myself and prompted them, I live only 20 miles away in my retirement.

There must be thousands and thousands of ex-coppers like myself who have been going through the same thought processes during the past few days. But it is not just the police that failed; I read the transcript on Sky inter-active throughout the trial and I am not surprised that the Jury had problems and took 18 hours to reach a verdict. The opening speech and the cross examinations were poor, the summing up speeches were also confusing. I also cannot understand why Huntley was allowed to allege the police had “stitched him up” on a previous occasion in Grimsby and that was the reason he was afraid to report the “accidental deaths” of the girls – for fear of being stitched up again. By making this allegation he opened the door to rebuttal evidence being introduced. I see no reason why the police officers in that case should not have been called to explain that not only did they not stitch him up, but also that they had given him the benefit of the doubt in a very dodgy set of circumstances. I am pretty certain too, that if the police, the CPS and the Counsel had done their jobs properly, some way could have been devised to introduce evidence of the record of serial sex allegations against him, as further rebuttal of his assertion of previous good character and victimisation by the police. I think there are many villains who would be happy to suffer the police victimisation that he suffered, viz. being let off ten times when he was obviously bang to rights on each occasion.

This case must result in a shake up from Land’s End to John O’Groats, not only in deference to the memories and Holly and Jessica and their agonised parents, but also to shake up the complacent Chief Officers who think that there main purpose is to make sure they get their holidays on time, play plenty of Golf, get to their Lodges on Thursday evenings and plan for their inflation proof pensions, rather than supervising their systems and functions and kicking ass when appropriate.

I am now reluctant to admit to people I meet that I ever served as a police officer, such is the ignominy that these deficient guardians of the Queen’s Peace have brought down on the reputation of Her Majesty’s Constabularies. Their attempt to garner credit outside the Old Bailey after the trial was another obscene and inappropriate attempt to draw a red herring across their bungling buffoonery during the investigation. Had it not been for observant members of the public and persistent press investigation Huntley would have evaded capture for the 11th known occasion (and God knows how many other times that are still ‘on file’ in some forgotten file dump).

Loz

Don't be daft. He would never have been in Soham if Humberside and Cambs constab had done their job properly. Moreover in my experience most nonces come from dysfunctional families; it certainly can't help a psychopathic pervert to control himself if his philandering Pa runs off and leaves the family and his Ma takes up with a Dyke. But all of that can't excuse double child slaying, otherwise there would be few children left to defile in these libertine times.

Good item Frank Pulley. It is clear that it is not only railways which we have let decline abysmally in this country.

Frank Pulley - That was a mind bogglingly riveting post. I wish it had been longer! A fascinating analysis, from someone who knows and understands all the strands of law enforcement, of the baffling inadequacy of the police in this (and how many others?) case.

I seriously suggest that you write a book about this. Your writing style is gripping.

When Melanie Phillips writes about the worrying state of our education system she chooses and researches her examples well. Yet when she hypothesizes about the makings of a mind like Ian Huntley’s, the morally flawed errors begin to pile up.

It is more likely that a dry and guilty symbiosis between man and wife leads to the passionless consumer culture that Melanie rightly despises rather than the fact that sexuality is not at all as simple as Melanie would like it to be. Her tenuous connection between sexual orientation and murderous violence is preposterous. So is the insinuation that no more than one life-long sexual partner is the key ingredient to a morally healthy and self-accountable human being. Of course care and interest in our children is vital and it is extremely worrying that the vast majority of girls who suffer from anorexia come from middle class families where the parents still appear to be happily married.

If a child learns nothing but social lies through the imitations of the “model stability”, the fallout is like to be just as devastating as the one which might occur from the child who is provided with no family stability whatsoever.

Karen: "more likely that a dry and guilty symbiosis between man and wife leads to the passionless consumer culture that Melanie rightly despises rather than the fact that sexuality is not at all as simple as Melanie would like it to be."

One word: HUH? We are discussing murder of two children by a sexual predator here and the destruction of community enforced rules of behaviour which enables the Huntleys of this world to operate on the edges without censure or even, as Frank Pulley points out, notice.

What on earth are you talking about? The connection between sexual predators, sexual violence and murder has been established for centuries. Check Vladimir the Impaler for someone who kidnapped children for sexual pleasure, then murdered them. Or the Marquis de Sade. Or, oh, let's bring it forward to moral bankrupts you might have heard of: Myra Hyndley and Ian Brady.

A "passionless consumer culture" ... uh, say what?Ian Huntley preyed on little girls and adolescent girls because he is a violent pervert, not because his credit card was maxed out and he was mad with the bank.

Hey! Maybe it's something to do with people called Ian! You know how dryly consumer oriented they are!

I think you're the same Karen who posted on another Melanie Phillips thread that you wanted society to give your husband a job that would enable you to stay at home and look after your children. Only socialists/communists think that "society" should give "to each according to his need" rather than merit. I think you have a problem with a capitalistic/consumer society and that Christmas spending is upsetting you. And you think all society's ills and perversions derive from consumerism.

In a previous article yopu complainmed about the victim culture. You feel it is wrong for victims of bullying, rape, or wife beating to complain yet now you have decided it is OK to complain. What sorts of abuses it is it acceptable to complain about. Should we label those who hate Ian Huntley as "man haters". After all you labelled the governments anti domesitc abuse laws as being those of "man haters".

My own view is the victim culture is good. It is the bedrock of a civlised society. We should complain about abuse we should hate abuse and feel negatively to those who act such abuses.
It is not a victim culture that causes the soham murder it was an abuse culture.

This is meandering a little. Ian Huntley was treated as a rational human being until sentenced, given the benefit of the doubt; and allowed to vote and drive.

He failed to act as a responsible human being and failed......he alone is responsible. He is not a doll, nor was he attached to his mother's apron strings; he was the kind of man that attracts weak women and makes them subservient....either through force of will, or the use of force.

HE and HE alone is responsible for his actions; and not some "culture" "society" or "syndrome". He is the perpetrator and he failed to control his urge to dominate and subdue and destroy.......he gets his very own cell for his very own action.......if he wants 'society' 'consumerism' or 'culture' in there with him....good luck......he should just thank Sidney Silverman MP for carrying out Roy Jenkins' wishes........

Romulus just excellently cut to the chase! There are no side issues. And all that prevented this controlling pervert from being apprehended several years sooner was an enabling, non-judgemental society which has lost its sense of direction. But ultimately, as Romulus nails it, Huntley was responsible for controlling himself, as we all are.

Rory you are not thinking straight. What is wrong with the victim culture is that people who abuse other people are encouraged to think of themselves as victims too.

We saw this in the United States with the OJ Simpson trial, where a black man, an abuser and killer of women, got off because he presented himself as a victim of racism.

Who wants to think of themselves as a perpetual victom of society any way? Is that the way to build strong healthy cultures and communities? I think not.

In the US and the UK, the stoic survivor who took adversity in stride and bounced back was once considered an admirable role model.

Today, the race is on to see who can present the most pitiful case to excuse their actions. I was watching the "current events" chat shows last night and they made me sick. Various relatives of Michael Jackson were all over the TV moaning about how he had been victimised by the media, the racist police, anybody and everybody responsible for his arrest except himself. They have misappropriated the victimhood of the children he molested for themselves. I find this utterly disgusting.

First of all ,
this is in response to Micheal Jackson to Susan.

For Micheal after watching the video in which he was exploited by the English reporter. One thing that stood out was how simple was Micheal in term of socializing skills. Also , the fact that he likes to hang with kids is that well he never had a childhood of his own and just wanted to make life a better place for children.

Before we put any accusation against the African american
gentle man lets not hang him before a fair trial people.

All he is guilty of doing is giving some kids free luxury that most of them never had either because they were poor or sometimes it was their last wish.

Furthermore, in case of his children , he loves them I mean its clear that he is with them 24 hours a day , what else do you want in a parent?

As for the masks for the children , he just want their identities to be protected so his children will not have reporters chasing them ...

Did he molested people or not that is for the court to decide. I honestly do not think a guy who treats children of others as his own childrens is gona be savage enough to comit an act of molestation.

Its a shame that our society we actually punish characters as lovable as Micheal with titles as Whacko Jacko and now serious charges of Molestation. So what if he wants stright hair instead of his natural hair, so what if he wants a smaller nose...who cares?
its his nose...his life.

One thing does stays very strongly in my mind though is the length people will go to see this guy humiliated in public.

Example # 1 The british reported made a name for himself on Micheal's expense.

Example # 2: The child dangling pictures were really so much intensified, in reality the whole incident was 0.23 seconds. In the picture the child looks dangling since the child had a cover .. on their head. Actually the child was in his hand quite firmly.

Example #3 50 police officers rampaging his ranch .... as if they were on the hunt for Rambo or somthing.

I personally thing 25% of those officers just wanted to be involed for the heck of it may be ride a ride on the jackson park for free.

Question: So is he a victum?

Yes Micheal is a victum of Society , where people make carees out of his misery simple as that. A happy Micheal means they have no jobs. They create these fictional stories to make life interesting in the tabliods and papers.

Anyways so no need to be disgusted , yes he is black and has whited children and he is their biological father. Some people may find that offensive and gives them enough motive to take the custody of those chidren away form him. America is not a free country yet.

As for Oj simpson well ..

I think the Jury was not all black .. their was no substantial evidence to convince them .. so OJ was set free..

I don't know much about the case myself to say anything I was too young at that point .. when this case was going on I cared more about harmones then some court case going on .. but I do admit the world stood still when they announced that verdict.

The "standard disclosure" for people working with children and "vulnerable adults" checks the Police National Computer for any court convictions plus details of any police cautions, warnings or reprimands, and runs a List 99 check.

The "enhanced disclosure" for people "in sole charge of children or vulnerable adults" is the same as a standard disclosure but can also include locally-held police intelligence about an applicant, and obtaining that still takes time.

Since 1990 the Department of Education for Northern Ireland has required a criminal record check on anyone before they are appointed to a position giving "substantial access to children".

This applies to employees and volunteers, whether full-time or part-time.

The list of posts covered is extensive: all professional, ancillary, administrative and clerical staff employed by all state and independent schools and further education institutions, guidance centres, education and library boards, the youth and music services - even home tuition teachers, drivers and school crossing patrol staff.

In addition the department records cases of misconduct by teachers, which takes account of not only court convictions but dismissals and even press reports.

What about teachers from overseas?

Not covered by the CRB.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/2223657.stm

What is important to me, given that Melanie Phillips is adding to the worrying diagnosis of Britain as a complete basket case, is where does she see Britain in five or ten years' time without any radical change? I also looked back and read her piece "Locking up the British mind" from 2002, and that was like a precursor to the current trend. Having lived in Germany for a number of years, I am beginning to feel like an alien in Britain. Everywhere I go I see the vacant stares of thousands of Brits whose shallowness is evident from their appearance and behaviour and the thin veneer of respectability has worn so thin as to be practically non-existent. If we do not change, where will it all end?

Mike

Five further levels down the abyss - add another notch for every year therafter. 'Twas ever thus. And that's an optimistic forecast.

Frank Pulley. That was a bit Delphic. Care to explain?

Mike if you want to add to it read Theodore Dalrymple's piece in The Sunday Times today.....he talks of "pigsty" Britain in terms of behaviour and values

Mike if you want to add to it read Theodore Dalrymple's piece in The Sunday Times today.....he talks of "pigsty" Britain in terms of behaviour and values

Interesting posts but the sickness of society shouldn't be a surprise to any of you.

Where you have no absolutes in the life values of the people in a society, you will just have shifting sands of personal morality.

The natural law is to chaos so if there are no absolutes to hold on to then everyone does as he/she thinks is ok.

When you couple that to they not being held accountable for their behaviour, then you pour the lack of absolutes into the succeeding generations.

As Frank has said it is going to get worse.
Read the internet papers around the world.
Look at your own "role (royal) models".

Underage sex, Phooey.
The total sexualisation of the media has produced a society that is desensitised to the traditional values (and responsibilities) of relationships.

We've been reading the glee of your papers in describing those paragons of social standards the Footballers and their "roastings".

Is it any wonder that society has become unhinged about relationships.

Just a thought, How many of us can throw the first stone?
Mike NZ

"Just a thought, How many of us can throw the first stone?
Mike NZ"

That Mike is why Heaven rejoiceth over one Sinner that repents.....because he can cast the first stone !

Romulus

If the article by Theodore Dalrymple is on line would you kindly post the link.

Reply to Sheraz: I agree with you that Michael Jackson is a victim. He was abused and exploited by his father and other family members since he was a small boy. He suffered tremendously and that's probably why he is so weird today.

However, none of this should be a justification for him passing the abuse on to someone else. If his relatives think he is innocent, they should lay out why he is innocent in solid and reasonable terms - not try to deflect the issue by babbling about racism and police brutality and his horrible childhood. The fact that this is what they do, instead of defending him point by point, should tell you something about whether or not he is guilty.

And yes, indeed, the OJ verdict was about racism, not about whether or not he killed his wife and her friend. The fact that you can't see that is probably due to the fact that you've been brought up in the morally fuzzy morass created by moral relativism. It's so hard to get away from that kind of pervasive thinking that I do it myself sometimes, even though I know better.

Note to Rom and Mike: I love Theo. Dalrymple. I bought his book "Life at the Bottom" and have given it to others as a Christmas present. However, you can find all of his essays and articles -- going back to 1995 or so -- linked online at Judd Brothers' blog, including all of those that were collected in Life at The Bottom.

Mea culpa - it was The Sunday Telegraph

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=%2Fopinion%2F2003%2F12%2F21%2Fdo2102.xml

Even if Ian Huntley had not killed Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, he would have deserved a life sentence or two. Society desperately needed to be protected from the predatory and conscienceless behaviour that he exhibited over several years; but if this is so, scores and possibly even hundreds of thousands of young British men deserve the same fate. For the horrible fact is that Ian Huntley was in many respects a perfectly normal young British male - normal in the statistical sense, that is, and within a certain social stratum. Only his superior educational accomplishments (nine GCSEs) and his two murders set him apart.

As for Maxine Carr, she was normal for young British womanhood in precisely the same sense. Her dialectic between abject submission to a violent, jealous man on the one hand, and utter drunken sluttishness on the other, is characteristic of hundreds, if not thousands, of young women whom I have seen as patients over the years, and whose behaviour is to be witnessed in every British town and city at weekends. Except for the extremity of its denouement, the Soham story was typical of the pigsty that is so much of modern Britain

Let us get one thing straight: Huntley was no paedophile. True, he liked sex with underage girls: but since the age of consent has, in effect, been abolished in this country, there was nothing in the slightest unusual about that. Indeed, some of his liaisons with underage girls were conducted with the full knowledge and consent of their parents, who either winked at them or positively acted as panders to Huntley.

The very banality of the Soham episode (except for its unusually horrific outcome) is what so enrages a great deal of the British public, for they see in Huntley and Carr not monsters, if monstrosity consists in being out of the ordinary, but themselves. Huntley and Carr are a looking glass in which they are reflected, and they respond by wishing to break the glass. Many of the prisoners who want to kill Huntley will have fathered abandoned bastards, will have abused women, will have been possessive, jealous and violent. In many cases, it is more by luck than judgment that they haven't killed. And so they react with the ferocity of the justly accused.

Their girlfriends, of course, will have been Maxine Carrs. These Maxine Carrs do not break with their criminal boyfriends because they are appalled by what they have done, or by the vileness of the acts they have committed, but because their men are absent in prison for prolonged periods, and they receive what they think are better offers elsewhere, usually from men of precisely the same type.

Huntley's need to dominate women, or girls, is typical of the inflamed egotism of many young British men. Claiming complete sexual freedom for themselves, they nevertheless desire the exclusive sexual possession of a woman or girl (the younger they are, the easier to dominate they are). These young men need exclusive possession to boost their fragile sense of self-importance in an age in which wealth and celebrity fill their minds as never before: and while they may not cut much of a figure in the wider world, at least they are all-important to one woman (or girl, in Huntley's, and many other young men's, case).

The problem is that their own sexual unscrupulousness leads them to suppose that everyone else is cut from the same cloth. Thus no relationship for them is ever secure, or even reasonably stable. For them, every man is a threat and every woman is a slut (after all, they should know, because they have "pulled" scores of women, each within a few minutes of meeting them). Arbitrary violence alternating with charm is the obvious, if unstable and only temporary, answer to the conundrum.

The arbitrary violence sets the woman an insoluble problem: how do I avoid it? For example, a man may demand a freshly cooked meal on his return to the house, but adamantly refuse to say when he is coming home. There is no possible answer to this conundrum, but so long as she is puzzling over it, she is thinking - to the point of obsession - about him, which is precisely what he wants her to be doing. That is also why, as Huntley did with Carr, he tries to separate her from all her previous friends and even from her family, in short, all other sources of social and psychological support. Huntley and Carr went to live in remote villages in which there was no public transport, so that Carr, who did not drive, could go nowhere, and do nothing except wait for Huntley.

Of course, after each episode of violence, the woman threatens to leave. Then the man turns on the charm. Not only does he apologise and swear never to repeat the episode, but he becomes attentiveness itself, all flowers and chocolates (Huntley knew the technique). The woman says, "When he's nice, doctor, he's very nice." I wish I had £100 for every time I have heard that. The trouble is, when he's horrible, he's murderous, and in my view strangulation trumps chocolates any day.

But the Maxines of the world "love him to bits": first, they are scared of what he would do to them if they left; second, they are scared of what he would do to himself if they left (Huntley was an adept at the tactical overdose); third, they believe that all men are the same and better the psychopath you know than the psychopath you don't; and fourth, after decades of propaganda in favour of romanticism, they believe that feelings, in this case love or lust, are more important than knowledge, for example that a man is feckless, violent, dangerous and worthless.

Huntley and Carr, therefore, were by no means exceptional; rather, they were typical, at least of a disturbingly large proportion of the inhabitants of these islands. The insensate fury aroused by the case is caused by the fact that it has shone a light in dark places, on the mob. They have seen the enemy, and it is themselves.

News: Huntley must serve at least 50 years, trial judge is told

© Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2003

Gosh, Romulus. Why not just post the link?

I see now that the British taxpayer is to spend £750,000 protecting Maxine Carr from the consequences of her own criminal behaviour. She is not just to be given a new identity, but a whole new country! (They seem to think Australia is still taking lags and slags, unaware that the immigration standards have been elevated considerably over the last 200 years. Nowadays, you need to be of good moral character and have a degree or a technical skill that the country needs. Which would seem to exclude Carr on every count.)

Giving police informers new identities makes sense because they've jeopardised their own lives by giving information valuable to the police, thereby contributing to the British justice system. Carr attempted to pervert the course of British justice and is therefore an enemy of the system. Why are the politically correct morons who make these decisions going to spend £750,000 of taxpayer's money to shield her from the consequences of her own criminal behaviour? It is only at the discussion stage just now, and perhaps anyone who feels that Carr should be left to make her own way in the world and cope with the consequences of actions she knowingly undertook should contact his/her MP and let them know that you want this zany notion abandoned.

She is certainly very weak, ill educated and easily manipulated, and she committed one criminal offence that we know of. How this entitles her to £750,000 of taxpayer's money to shield her from the consequences of her bad decisions is quite puzzling.

Gosh, Romulus. Why not just post the link?

Well Caroline, in my misapprehension that the site was The Times, I realised that those from outside the UK could not access the site.....and I wanted everyone to have a chance to read it

No offence, but I don't think Americans would be particularly interested as there aren't really any corresponding types in the US that they could relate to. At least, not in the almost universally accepted manner Melanie and Dr Darymple describe. The pervasive breakdown of society and social norms is a particularly British phenomenon. I haven't encountered it in any other country. Someone having sex with underage girls would have been banged up a long time ago in the US, even in very liberal states with liberal laws, like Massachusetts.

Every society has its underclass, of course, but in Britain, the mores of the underclass have been elevated to being regarded as the norm.

True Caroline, but in the US you have PWT - Poor White Trash and although different in constitution, I am afraid exactly the same misfits run around and underage sex is not uncommon, nor drugs, alcohol and truancy......

I am afraid that things such as happen and doninate our press are exaggerated by repeated coverage.....how many children were murdered in the same time period is not publicised.......in the past this would have been an inside story.....I bet the coverage of Brady and Hindley in 1968 was much less sensationalized.

Germany has the same problems....hardly a week goes by without some young girl vanishing and turning up raped and dead......and it is only the insularity of our media focussing on one issue ad nauseam which gives this feeling of uniqueness.

We live in an era of convergence where many of the problems in our own society are replicated elsewhere.....Germany, USA, France....all suffer the same maladies......only the remedies will have to be different.....society is atomising and politicians are deconstructing society as they pander to sectional interests and fads.

"Society is atomising" - great phrase! In my post above, I intentionally tried to indicate that I was not talking about po' white trash in the US. If you lived in the US, you'd know that they have very little in commone with the disaffected, self-centred flotsam and jetsom that washes around Britain today. There is nothing in the United States approaching the mayhem in British towns and cities on weekend nights at closing time. Nothing.

There is nothing like the drinking to get drunk to get sick culture. No other country in the world exports the garbage that we send to resorts like Falikari (sp?) all through the summer. I have never seen anyone have sex in the street in the US. There are standards of behaviour in America that all classes adhere to.

I live in France and I have never witnessed here anything like the "normal" behavior of young British men and women.

That people are raped and murdered happens all over the world and has done throughout history. It is not murder that we were discussing. It was the unpicking of the fabric of society which allows people who should have been prosecuted and punished 10 years before to carry on offending as though their behaviour was unexceptional.

Sorry, Romulus, your arguments are well reasoned and very interesting to read, but your facts are wrong. Britain is worse than anywhere else because the social cohesion has gone and no one dares to try to keep up community standards for fear of getting a beating. In French hospitals, they don't have bulletproof glass between the medical personal and the patients. In France, doctors don't conduct their surgeries inside police stations for their own safety. In France, school children do not attack their teachers. In France, parents don't go down to the school and beat up the teacher for reprimanding their child. This happens only in Britain.

It is due mainly to the Marxism which strangely took root in Britain through channels like the BBC, but also through faux academics like Hobsbawm and a legion of others and preachy pacifists like Bertrand Russell, that has dripped its poison into the civil society for so long. People have feared to say them nay because the Marxists round on them with such viciousness - like wolverines or vipers. Just look at the Marxist-funded anti-war crowd. Not in Our Name is funded almost entirely by Marxist organisation, which are, unbelievably, alive and thriving. The people who attend their rallies are vicious and destructive.

Well Caroline, I will accept your point. You forgot our Marxist friend Miliband whose son is now Schools Minister.......

There has been an undermining of structure and authority it is true.......Grammar Schools were modelled on Public Schools......and much of that was linked into County, Church, Regiment, House, Prefect.......and funnily enough it was the Public School progeny like Anthony Crosland, Shirley Williams, who deconstructed things together with Grammar School boys like Woy Jenkins.

Well Caroline, I will accept your point. You forgot our Marxist friend Miliband whose son is now Schools Minister.......

There has been an undermining of structure and authority it is true.......Grammar Schools were modelled on Public Schools......and much of that was linked into County, Church, Regiment, House, Prefect.......and funnily enough it was the Public School progeny like Anthony Crosland, Shirley Williams, who deconstructed things together with Grammar School boys like Woy Jenkins.

Yes, Romulus. How strange that the socialists destroyed grammar schools - the one route a poor but intelligent or gifted child could take out of poverty and into a life of achievement and reward. This is why I believe the socialists are destructive Marxists; they seek to divide and destroy society; not to promote cohesion and opportunity.
You can see it today in the absurd promotion of racism into a major crime. Certainly, it's hateful, ignorant and hurtful, but it has been elevated by the socialists to be more important to the police than booking burglars and muggers. The political correctness freaks who outlaw Christmas carols because "we must remember we're a multi-cultural society and we mustn't offend other religions". This is so specious as to defy description and it is an argument designed to divide society.
Britain is between five and six percent ethnic minority. They could fit in and fade into the general woodwork and get on with their lives if they weren't constantly being used to beat the white majority. And it's very seldom a minority, per se, complains about anything. No Muslim has ever complained about Christmas carols or services. They're not stupid. So the socialists promote disharmony by pretending to a care for immigrants while actually portraying them as being so ignorant and stupid that they hadn't realised by were living in an at least nominally Christian country.
They destroyed the grammar schools so everyone would be fed the same thin gruel of what passes for education - certainly not tutored in thinking logically and thinking for themselves. The socialists are well on their way to getting the passive society they seek. I've never understood what their ends are, though. It always strikes me as a "So what?" deal. OK. Everyone's passive and does as they're told. The tax system has been organised so that even the middle classes now have to apply for clawbacks. In other words, the intention to make the population dependent on the government, not on itself, for its wellbeing is well underway. Now what?

There was an interesting programme on German TV about life in the GDR...how children of Christians were persecuted, banned from university, and some were imprisoned to eradicate it.

In many ways they have succeeded as the predominantly Lutheran GDR is very secular and somewhat amoral, whereas West Germany is largely immoral...but there is a solid core of Christians defending themselves against the Secularists esp. in Bavaria.

It is interesting how the Left has used the Muslims to attack Christianity, whereas moderate Muslims prefer those who believe in God to the secularists of The Guardian whose verities are rejected by anyone with faith in God.

It is however for Christians to resist....after all Andrew, Paul, Jesus himself were all executed by Roman Secular Power......when all modern Christians have to do is to stand up and be counted.....they don't even have to defy a dictator as did Pastor Niemoeller or Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Caroline, you're wrong, Americans are very interested in Dalrymple's ideas. "Life at the Bottom" was a major best-seller in the US. Also the US may not be as far along as Britain in the path to socialist-inspired anarchy, but we are certainly getting there in some places -- or were until a backlash recently set in, epitomized by ex-Mayor Guiliani's zero tolerance for crime policy and some school districts adopting sexual abstinence-promoting programs for teen-agers, and by the welfare reform act of 1996 which tied benefits to job seeking. However all of these improvements can be easily over-turned when the "progressives" get back into power, as US politics is very cyclical.

We have had "progressives" inner-city schools trying to teach poor black children -- those of our society who need a good education the most pressingly of all -- that ghetto patois is a legitimate "language." We have had whack-job "teachers" who have plenty of time to hold "Free Mumia teach-ins" for the same kids -- but apparently, not much time or money to teach them to read, speak and write English properly. And on and on it goes.

One more thing: Caroline you correctly note that the main goal of the "progressives" is to destroy Western Civilization, social cohesivness and culture, but you wonder what their "end game" is. The simple answer is that they don't have one. They only know how to destroy, not build up. Building up something, anything, is a heresy against their one over-riding social imperative: equality of outcome for all people at all times. The very act of building something up is a statement that violates the "equality" of builders and non-builders, and that's unacceptable to the "progressives."

Why do you think the current slogan for the Marxist retreads is, "Let's destroy capitalism and replace it with something nicer." They have no idea what that "something nicer" is. They only know how to destroy, and they despise those of us who know how to build up as heretics and apostates from their irrational, destructive social religion.

Romulus - Certainly most Muslims - save those in bonkers regimes - respect people who follow a religion (particularly Christianity, as it is part of their own tradition) in preference to people who don't, because people with a faith are generally moral,law-abiding and considerate. They never asked for any of this divisive political correct garbage. It was an officious little indigene school teacher in Yorkshire who took The Three Little Pigs out of the nursery school library in case it "offended Muslims. We are a multi-cultural society".

First, we're not multicultural. 5-6% does not make "multicultural",although the idea is being imposed on Britain by the application of a jackboot to the forehead. It makes an ethnic minority that most societies since the beginning of time have been perfectly able to absorb happily. People have been travelling and changing countries for tens of thousands of years. American Indian tribes are noted for having had "foreigners" through marriage integrated into their societies. It's no big deal - certainly not at 5 or 6%. This is normal among humankind.

Second, the Muslims, when confronted, said they'd never complained about the nursery school book and they well understood that the host society had a different attitude to pigs than they do. In other words, the lefty multi-cultis had attempted to make the Muslims look bigoted and intolerant - not to say totally stupid - when they weren't at all. Why?

Divide and rule.

I don't take your final point, however. You say that Christians don't have to stand up and face a dictator, but they do. The entire radical left establishment, including the Archbish of Cantab. No wonder the churches are emptying faster than the mice can scurry out.

I'm not arguing from the Christian point of view, but from the position of one who thinks Christian attitudes have brought, on balance, benefice and progress to the human race. I seem to be more alive to the mind-boggling intellectual and humanitarian contributions made by the Judeo-Christian root than many "Christians" like, oh, Tony Blair, who advertises his Christianity, but failed to understand that a christening is a public event and he couldn't ban the public from the church.

Susan - I'm really interested to hear this. And, based on what you've posted, I understand how Dalrymple could apply. And I'm grateful to have been alerted.

Given what you've said, are you not referring to the black underclass? (Forgive me if I misread you.) I would still propose that the destruction of an indigenous society by the woodlice within, has never occurred in humanity before. (Black people were sold by their fellow blacks - what a betrayal! - into a white society. To further the ends of the cotton plantations.)They were inserted into the ruling society for economic gain - not to destroy that society.

The white lefties of Britain have imported black people and Muslims specifically in order to provide themselves with a "cause" they could right.

This is not to imply in any way that immigrants cannot fit into the fabric of British society, and certainly, it's to everyone's benefit to see them assimilated. But they weren't encouraged to come to Britain for any reason other than the dilution of Britishness.

I was fascinated by your point that the left doesn't know what to do next. I'd never thought of it before. I always thought there was a glorious end-dream, but I think you're right. There's nothing. A void. Vacuity. But why fight so long to establish a vaccum?

Caroline...the dictator was Adolf Hitler....the penalty was Concentration Camp where Niemoeller was incarcerated and Bonhoeffer died - I think the situation in the West is a pushover compared to what they had to face; it is a pushover compared to the earth-shattering situation Martin Luther faced bringing himself as a mere monk into conflict with the most powerful institution on earth with a mandate from God and a continuity from Kefa or Simon-Peter who stood beside Jesus Christ

www.bonhoeffer.com

http://thesumners.com/bonhoeffer/

APRIL 9, 1995 was the 50th anniversary of the execution of Dietrich Bonhoeffer by the Nazis. He died at 39, but left a legacy in his writings that now, a half-century later, still provides valuable insight for Christians seeking to live faithfully to the Gospel in a culture dominated by hostile ideologies.

http://www.gospelcom.net/chi/GLIMPSEF/Glimpses/glmps063.shtml

Bonhoeffer was condemned for his involvement in "Operation 7," a rescue mission that had helped a small group of Jews over the German border and into Switzerland. The 39-year-old theologian had also been involved in planning an unsuccessful assassination attempt on the life of Adolf Hitler. His participation in the murder plot obviously conflicts with Bonhoeffer's position as a pacifist. His sister-in-law, Emmi Bonhoeffer, cited his reasoning. He told her: "If I see a madman driving a car into a group of innocent bystanders, then I can't, as a Christian, simply wait for the catastrophe and then comfort the wounded and bury the dead. I must try to wrestle the steering wheel out of the hands of the driver."

http://lutherthemovie.com/

Caroline, it is not I but Dalrymple himself (he also writes for a New York e-mag called "City Journal") who compares the US black underclass with the British white underclass. He points out many parallels between the two, illustrating that it isn't a matter of race or ethnic origin, but an indictment of how the welfare state currently contributes to the formation of a violent, barbaric underclass.

There are of course US blacks who have made it into the middle and upper classes who see the light, but their enlightenment is so far only trickling down into the ghettos.

Also, we also have leftists who seek to import immigrants (the most valuable to their cause being non-white immigrants, of course) to use as a battering ram against the state as currently constituted. It is particularly bad in my home state, California, where the left has introduced its most destructive policy yet: all sorts of proposals to give illegal immigrants the same documents and rights as legal citizens and residents, including the right to vote in local elections. San Francisco recently only narrowly defeated a "Greens" mayoral candidate who wanted to give illegals the right to vote in school board elections -- obviously a first step toward giving them the right to vote in other, more important elections as well. Now, the illegal immigrants in California can easily obtain the rights of citizenship by standing in the same queue as other immigrants to the US and taking the citizenship oath, etc. But the left doesn't want that to happen. Those Latinos who undergo the citizenship process have an annoying habit of assimilating into and supporting the prevailing political order, just what the left doesn't WANT to happen at all costs. They think they can keep Latinos out of the assimilation loop by absolving them of the need to go through the citizenship process.

And the political establishment in California is just mad enough to eventually let it happen and with that, Civil War would probably follow.

I do not have a problem with Latinos, I have lived with them all my life. Prior to being exploited by the leftists, they have assimilated into the US melting pot just like everyone else. Intermarriage between Latinos and whites and other races has been historically high. But from the mid-70s on, the trend has been toward non-assimilating, encouraged of course by the oh-so-solicitous left.

Our traditional American culture of the immigrant melting pot is under vicious attack by the leftists who seek to destroy our unity on all fronts and replace our society of individual rights with one of group rights (in other words, a return to tribalism and all the lovely things that will follow from that.) It is frightening to behold. The US is too ethnically, culturally and religiously diverse to sustain a serious breakdown in the old melting pot culture; what would follow such a breakdown would be chaos, anarchy, civil war and violence. The left knows this and that is what it is counting on. For them the United States is the Great Satan of capitalism same as it is for the radical Islamists. Only when the US is destroyed will their holy grail be achieved.

With regard to the left not having any end game, it is readily apparent from their writings. They in fact admit it themselves. George Monbiot admitted it only a few weeks ago after attending the "anti-Globalization" forum in France recently. He wrote a column for the Guardian saying he didn't know what would replace capitalism after it was destroyed, but he just kenw it would be something lovely and wonderful and full of bunnies and kittens and rainbows. (I'm exaggerating of course, but not by much.)

Read David Horowitz's memoir, "Radical Son." Horowitz is an ex-Marxist radical from the 60s who turned hard Reaganite in the 80s. He records that one of his epiphanies about the left occurred when he looked at his book shelf and realize that there were hundreds of tomes describing what was wrong with capitalism and how to destroy it, but only a handful postulating what its replacement would look like.

People like Monbiot (and like Horowitz in his radical son days) have no clue; they have never held a real job except for teaching and writing about their pet theories. They have no clue how to create a product, make a sale, bring in a crop, load a ship, meet a payroll. They are completely divorced from reality. How can they have any idea of how to build the more "just" society they fantasize about? Matt Gonzalez, the Green candidate who nearly became mayor of San Francisco, has spent his entire career as a public defender -- a state-paid defense lawyer for the poor. A necessary job in the scheme of the US legal system, but it is hardly a job where one becomes acquainted with the realities of producing the goods and incomes which pay for such niceties.

Monbiot is a Class A loon...funny that his father Raymond is Deputy Chairman, Conservative Party and was CEO of Campbell Soup in the UK.....

Well if you give way to these loons you get what Lenin predicted:

"Probe with bayonets. If you encounter steel, withdraw. If you encounter mush, continue."

Well, there you go Rom, Moonbat's an upper-class trust-fund brat who never had to do a real job in his entire life. In the old days his kind would have been forced by social pressures into the Imperial Army or Navy and gotten a taste of real life at Maffeking or Mandalay.

Caroline, I am surprised that you are surprised that the US faces the same kind of social attacks from the left as the UK. These things are happening, to one degree or another, in all of the Anglosphere countries (and we are more alike than not, methinks). Sleepy old New Zealand has one of the highest crime rates in the industrialized world -- I think it even tops that of the UK's now. Read Dalrymple's excellent essay about when and how the crime rate in NZ started to climb. Very interesting reading.

Again, I urge everyone to check out the exhaustive, "Complete Guide to Dalrymple" that is posted on the Brothers' Judd website. Reading Dalrymple certainly changed how I look at the world!

I am surprised by your reference to Imperial Army....what is that ? There was a British Army and an Indian Army, but never an Imperial Army and only a Royal Navy.

Still Monbiot would not have done that....he would have been a lawyer or politician or journalist.....I lay odds he would have been a pacifist.

NZ had the weird experiece of loopy Left politicians like David Lange riding the anti-nuclear horse to change to embrace Friedmanite Monetarism and Chicago-School neo-classicism undermining much of NZ social fabric.....so the culture built up by Scottish immigrants was diluted by a foreign culture of theoretical free market ideology which even the US would find unpalatable

Romulus

NZ has at present has a lot loopy left politicians that would make David Lange seem like a conservative.

There is a mixture of militant feminists, man-hating dykes, homosexual activists and militant Maori activists.

The Prime Minister has publicly denied that she is in a lesbian herself. I do not have proof that she is so I would not want to call her a liar publicly. However, an editor of a magazine called Investigate has done just that. The following is part of his response to someone that wrote a letter to the editor the following month criticising his editorial.

“As I explained in my response Diana Wichet’s attack in the Herald, we have uncovered far more than we have printed. If you seriously think that I would make the bold assertion that the Prime Minister of New Zealand is gay without being 110% sure of it you are naïve. If you knew what we had assembled on the Clark marriage and withheld, you’d be praising us for our restraint.”

BTW – The URL to the article by Theodore Dalrymple in the Telegraph was okay. I think it could be read from anywhere in the world. The problem is with newspaper that one has to pay to subscribe to.

Susan - Yes, California is the closest state insofar as being destroyed by the left goes, to Britain. And I agree that welfare dependent blacks are the closest to the bottom feeders in Britain. Although, even then, I would say that their society - although a highly unattractive dependency society, is not as degraded as this class of British whites.

As in California, the British socialists are using mass illegal immigration as yet another battering ram against the native population and not allowing any dissent from the indigenes, under threat of prosecution of "hate laws". Like the public defender you mentioned in California, neither Tony Blair nor his "human rights" lawyer wife have ever done a day's work in their lives that wasn't paid for out of the public purse. Neither has ever had a job in the real world. They have no idea how anything works. Blair's a chameleon, but underneath the skin deep changes of shade, a chameleon is still a chameleon.

I am a huge admirer of David Horowitz's brilliant writing. He has a new book out, by the way.

I don't know what can be done, because rational arguments are met with hysterical screams of "racism!" or "dangerous right winger". Meanings of words are perverted and distorted to meet the one-worlder goal.

Tony Blair has stated many times that he intends to destroy the Tory party and make it unelectable ever again. In other words, his stated goal is to destroy democracy. No rival parties. Everything decided by concensus in the muffled carpeted halls and the five star restaurants of Brussels. He is hellbent on signing a Mickey Mouse "constitution" for Europe making "Europe" into a country (poof! You're a country!)and destroying British sovereignty forever and he is not going to allow the British a referendum. Stalin could not have put it better. So, the destruction of ancient laws and affiliations and "loyalty" (and subservience) transferred by fiat to Brussels.

What is astounding is, they get away with it. (Hopefully, with Schwarzenegger, the Californians may get a welcome injection of hard reality into their system.)

Most mind-boggling of all is your notion - with which, on reflection, I agree - is, they have no idea where they're going. They just want to destroy. Why?

"Most mind-boggling of all is your notion - with which, on reflection, I agree - is, they have no idea where they're going. They just want to destroy. Why?"

nYe Bevan spoke of the Left having an "emotional spasm" over nuclear weapons......well think of people riddled with guilt at their own privilege and feelings of low self-esteem......"I am here because of what my parents did" kind of thinking.....and a sense of throwing a tantrum against authority figures or structures

Sorry, Romulus, but I just don't buy it. I do not believe there are millions of people in Britain alone wracked with guilt because they are privileged. They're not guilty at all. They're bossy, preachy and controlling. They have written "thought crimes" into British law! Formerly, the Anglosphere had the freest speech in the world. Now, people even worry about what they put in an email. They fear they are being monitored by Big Brother.

They almost succeeded, in Britain, in smothering all free speech about floods (hundreds of thousands into a tiny island) of illegal immigrants swamping our system - but people got so angry they began speaking out regardless. The idea is to dilute, with a view to destroying, Britishness. I do not believe it is motivated by humble revulsion of being "privileged". It is sheer, overweening arrogance and I believe they are driven by hatred of privilege.

Blair knew he had a third rate mind and he'd never rise above taking publically funded cases. So, having failed to be a rock star and failed to be a showy star in the courtroom, he went into politics, where his phony charisma (which amounts to nothing more than an insane belief in his own infallibility) could be put to work in the drab Labour Party. Half his cabinet is made up of people of similar ilk, and the other half by a particular bossy British type - the lady of the manor syndrome, who takes greedy pleasure in organising other people's lives. The leaders in the Labour-held councils are bitter failures bent on revenge against a society which failed to recognise their merit.

As in the US, the legions of state school teachers are in it for themselves - and they are the ones training up - while failing to educate - young minds. What a morass!

But guilt? No, Romulus, I don't see it.

"I do not believe there are millions of people in Britain alone wracked with guilt because they are privileged" BUT cArloine you appear to believe millions "have written "thought crimes" into British law! "

It is a minority Caroline. I mean the USSR ran for 70 years with a Communist Party of 300.000 controlling 267 million souls !

Obviously, millions aren't in a position to write laws into the law books. But millions are passive about the theft of our traditional freedoms as long as those unemployment cheques and child benefit cheques and who-knows-what other cheques keep rolling in.

I admit the action-takers are a fairly small cadre, but they are in positions of enormous power. Who put them there? Why is the BBC still up and running? In whose interest is it to keep this nest of Trots and Marxists on the public payroll? Forty thousand of them.

Why on earth, would anyone in their right mind, buy The Guardian? It couldn't survive were not the sole place to advertise all the state-supported toy jobs. Who pays for all the ads? The government, in one form or another.

So that's two communist organisations being supported by the British state.

Who is inviting more and more people onto the public payroll? They now number one-quarter of the workforce. Add to that all hundreds of thousands on the dole in one for or another - that is a pretty large army of people dependent on the state for their daily bread. Possibly almost half the adult population. Add to that, those supplicants who have to be treated by the NHS because they can't afford private insurance, and there you have another immense constitutency which will vote to protect their "right" to get free-at-point-of-delivery treatment.

"Add to that, those supplicants who have to be treated by the NHS because they can't afford private insurance, "

Now Caroline you become OTT...private Medicine has never functioned in Britain, and as you know most private hospitals were bankrupt pre-war and there is NO private insurance policy in Britain which does not exclude pregnancy, and most private insurance is just top-up like BUPA and cannot exist without taxpayer subsidy to employers....most of whom want to dump private health insurance together with pension plans on grounds of cost.

Even Americans flock to buy medication in Canada, and few are satisfied with their health cover....and as you know in France and Germany, the health budget cuts are going to end the free-ride.......cost-containment is the order of the day everywhere

Romulus - I have friends in Britain with very good comprehensive health insurance. In any case, a discussion of Britain's NHS isn't the point. The point is the way state dependency is encouraged, and individual initiative and responsibility discouraged. My point was that the socialists have got huge swathes of people (1/4 of the total workforce works in the public sector; add to that the people who don't work - yobs, louts, single mothers and pensioners - and that is another vast tranche of the population totally dependent on the government, whether on state-paid salary or state-paid benefit. Then there's the NHS. People in Britain are being infantalised. They are being encouraged to regard the state as a parent.

There is a roiling instability under the surface in Britain. Who has the world's most feared football hooligans? Who has the least welcome young tourists? Whose town centres are the most dangerous on weekend nights? England. Not Britain, but England, which has had its history cut out from under it by the socialists and whose young people have no sense of who they are or where they came from.

"I have friends in Britain with very good comprehensive health insurance"

Please tell me the underwriter so I can buy some too !

"Who has the world's most feared football hooligans? "

Netherlands ! Dortmund supporters are not nice either, but Turkey has a few who stab foreign visitors to the regret of Leeds United Supporters Club.

You are far to apocalyptic Caroline which ruins your case Britain is not the darkest corner of the deepest pit, with the sunny uplands reserved for all others.....we certainly have none of the racial problems in France or Neo-Nazi groupings of Germany, Russia or Denmark

http://www.galatasaray.org.tr/english/default.asp

The name of a football club with truly awful, criminal, football-supporter thugs

I agree entirely with Caroline's very sensible comments above. What really sickens me is the way commentators say that the present trends are "inevitable", that society in the UK has changed "irrevocably" and that if the Conservatives (for instance) ever want to regain power, they had "better catch up". The point is that no social change is irreversible and when a new generation sees the damage done by the previous, it will react against it.

I work full time in Germany and whilst their society is far from perfect, there are some fundamentals we could learn from. One is that Germans value their culture, history and traditions. Despite having substantial ethnic minority communities, the celebration of the traditional German way of life is all pervasive, including its strong Christian tradition. Another is that the traditional family is still very important in Germany and is recognised by their tax system which allows a working partner to claim the tax allowance of a non-working spouse. Parenting is a full time job and it is time the UK Government recognised this instead of trying to force young mothers back into the workplace, offering inadequate childcare in return.

It is time the current bunch of wreckers were turfed out of office. I cannot bear the thought of having to wait until 2005.

and yet Richard the Sozis are currently talking about national Kindergarten strategies to get women to work; and that 30% women in Germany are childless, and the birthrate is below replacement.

The Verfassungsgericht hhas hit the Govt because families are disadvantaged in the tax system compared with DINKs, and that the country has quite a single-parent problem esp. in the former GDR.

The traditional family is probably valued in Germany because it is rare, and the presence of children infrequent outside the lower income groups and Auslaender...education level and income are negatively correlated with childbearing amongst women.

Germany and Italy have abysmal birth rates and Britain is one of the very few countries in Europe with an expanding population. Whilst I agree with your points about social mores are mere corks on a bobbing sea and can/will be changed; I find your idealism about Germany misplaced, and perhaps indicative of small affluent islands of Germany but certainly not typical.

Germany has much the same problems as Britain but has thrown money at them as was done here in the 1970s now as the Rotstift cuts back inexorably Germany will no longer lubricate its societal fractures with cash.

Thatcher took a big swipe at the family, and Lawson did much to undermine it....it was Thatcher who viewed children as a consumption good to be financed by the parents not society. Labour has merely nationalised the children.

Try living in Wernigerode outside Magdeburg, or in Berlin, or Gelsenkirchen, or Hamm or Duisburg and see the other side of the tracks.....visit the Sozialamt or Jugendamt or even the Einwohnermeldeamt and see some of the detritus of society....

German Krankenversicherung is esp ungenerous for children when both parents work, and the changes afoot are certainly detrimental to families.

The fact is simply that throughout the Western world politicians have undermined families, imposed heavy burdens on such families, and created chaos in divorce and child custody arrangements. The German system is a nighmare if you do not conform to the exact template the legislators enacted for your family.....it is so highly prescriptive it is the very model of the system Gordon Brown wants to create

Caroline,

“Why is the BBC still up and running? In whose interest is it to keep this nest of Trots and Marxists on the public payroll? Forty thousand of them.

Why on earth, would anyone in their right mind, buy The Guardian? It couldn't survive were not the sole place to advertise all the state-supported toy jobs. Who pays for all the ads? The government, in one form or another.

So that's two communist organisations being supported by the British state."

Sorry - I’m really having difficulty keeping up with this debate. ARE YOU BEING IRONIC? If so I apologise for being stupid?

Surely the BBC is a rather stuffy conservative institution - it displays ludicrous amounts of sycophantic reverence to the monarchy and sees Westminster as the only real focus of political attention. NOT VERY SOCIALIST I'M AFFRAID.

The Guardian has entirely bought into the Blarite project and dropped any of its socialist pretensions. It has the occasional token left-wing columnist but the editorial direction is pretty New Labour.

The only "Marxists" in Britain are the SWP and other silly organisations, which make a lot of noise but don't really amount to anything. (In fact they aren’t really Marxists at all but Leninists - a very different kettle of fish)

As someone very much on the left, I wish "socialists" did have as much influence as you claim they do. Only I don't see it - ANYWHERE.

Incidentally - "socialism" preaches community solidarity and fraternity - precisely the values that our neo-liberal society erodes through pitting human being against human being, recklessly moving labour around the globe and destroying whole communities and placing the obsession with consumerism before any genuine moral foundation. In capitalism we come to regard human beings solely in terms of their "use" and not their inherent value.

I am sympathetic to your lamentation of the demise of the core values that hold society together - only you should perhaps look to the abstract conception of freedom stemming from neo-liberal economics rather than blaming the situation on some mythical other.

rob maynard: Socialism preaches community, fraternity and solidarity? Sure that's what they say when they want you to look at "socialiasm with a human face."

What it really preaches is equality of outcome at the cost of everything else, including the family. Maybe even especially the family.

To name just one example, why do the socialists consider it "selfish" for a parent to send their child to a private school? Because they don't want parents to value their own children over someone else's. After all, if one publicly admits that they love their own children more than their neighbor's child, that would upset the "equality of outcome at all costs" social imperative that is socialism's only true moral value. A parent who loves their child too much might be willing to make sacrifices for that child, so that child could "get ahead" -- monetarily, careerwise, intellectually, it doesn't matter -- and therefore render that child unequal to other children.

I can't believe someone is arguing that socialism somehow underpins social cohesiveness and the family unit. Did perhaps the Gulag imprison whole families together? Did perhaps the Khmer Rouge and the Red Guard slaughter whole families together? Well, in that case, yes I guess you could argue the point.

"- "socialism" preaches community solidarity and fraternity - precisely the values that our neo-liberal society erodes through pitting human being against human being, "

So are you Bernsteinian or Kautsky-ite ? You may recall that the proclaimed "Socialism" is a Christmas-tree upon which baubles catering to every fancy are hung; until it becomes the governing creed when some take away their baubles claiming they were not polished enough, and then disown the governing regime which once it has power disappoints the more idealistic.

I am afraid that "socialism" as a nirvana is little better than Adam Smith's nirvana of the free-market Utopia where competition is perfect and rewards are distributed evenly through the Market.

I prefer the real world with its problems to solve rather than revelationary visions of utopian glory.......Blair is the figurehead that god Labour in power, and when they lose power the party will disintegrate as it has no core values and the trades unions cannot afford another £200 million to carry it through opposition as 1979-1997

Rob Maynard - The BBC is a seething viper's nest of Trots and Marxists and your calling it stuffy and conservative must have had them rolling in the aisles from Land's End to John O'Groats. It was the BBC which "pushed back the boundaries" of social cohesion and polite behaviour with a mind-numbing relentlessness. They were first off the mark with naked people having sex. It got so, with BBC plays and series, one waited with dread for the naked sex scene. The BBC did not want to cover the late Queen Mother's 100th birthday celebrations (a national event) and was only persuaded with customary churlishness to cover her funeral. So much for a slavvering interest in royalty. They hate the royal family. They adored Princess Diana. Even now, they jeer at every word the Prince of Wales says. Paul Burrell is their hero.

You are correct when you say they are not very socialist, however. They are deeply communist and deeply destructive.

I can't even be bothered to respond to you about the Guardian. I don't know whether it's bought into Tony Blair's "programme" (if he has one; I've never seen any signs of a coherent plan, or even thought, emanating from this flibberty-gibbet)but Blair, for what it's worth, is a dyed in the wool socialist with equality of outcome (except for himself and his family)as his first priority. Look at the mess he has made of the examinations system. And university entrance.

If I were about to go to university today, I would be on a plane to the United States.

Read what Susan said, above. She has a firm grasp on the truth of the situation.

I have no idea what the SWP is.

Actually, Richard, above, has a very good point. The socio-communist agenda comes in many disguises, some seemingly harmless.

Commentators note that the world has changed "irrevocably". Not at all. Social engineering can be undone. Tony Blair, ever the helpful head prefect to the world, lectures that the Tories cannot possibly win an election unless they adopt his policies. This is part of his subliminal campaign to kill democracy and the two party system in the UK, which is his oft-stated goal. These words like 'irrevocable' and 'inevitable' are simply code words for keeping the fascist element in power.

Vast swathes of illegal immigrants can easily be returned to their home countries, or at least dumped back in France, but any attempt to say so is beaten back with cries of racism and "hate crime". So the British are currently not allowed to make mild comments on the fact that their shores have been invaded. We fought off the might, discipline and intelligence of the German war machine, but we are expected to believe the false declaration that the appearance of these hundreds of thousands on our island shores is 'inevitable'.

It is all part of the iron-fisted thought control being exercised by the current government. The social problems that have developed on their watch are 'inevitable'. For 'inevitable' read 'drunkenness, licence and trash TV keep attention focused elsewhere'.

Of course too much is assumed: that democratic systems will survive. As Europe's decline accelerates, there may be a time when new forms of government emerge.

I no longer take it as given that these politicians will continue.....surveys already show 20% eastern Germans despairing of "Democracy"....and the corruption and amoral behaviour of political leaders debasing their societies and exporting jobs to the Third World while extracting every more burdens from their populace, is not a sustainable position.

If Italy think the taxpayer will stump up £7 bn + to bale out corrupt management and save a mere 7000 jobs in Italy...Berlusconi must be hoping they will rescue his house of cards.

The crisis of democratic legitimacy is pervasive and severe and affects all parties

Europe's decline is certainly accelerating, through greed for ever more "free" social programmes, sheer laziness as in demands for ever shorter working hours, and moral degeneracy.

That doesn't mean that democracy is dying. It just means that Europe is dying. India is a democracy of over a billion people. The US, religious and hard working, has a population of 300m. Democracy is alive and well - just not in Europe. Europe's going down the pan of history.

Democracy in Europe was only ever skin deep and I don't think it will be missed. We, having had democracy for 1200 years, have more to lose. We should be careful we don't get dragged down with them.

Caroline, who is "we" in the context of 1200 years ? For a start the "democracy" in Britain between 800AD and 1815 AD is the form of government I think we shall return to.

When I speak of 'Europe' I mean the European Continent including Great Britain, which as a matter of geopolitics is "Europe" whatever political grievances you might have.

I think democracy in Britain is more impaired than in Germany; and that Margaret Thatcher's autocratic didactism destroyed the culture of debate and discussion, eroded local democracy, and broke the ties between government and governed: they have not been restored since.

Government, like Policing, no longer can rely upon the consent of the public and the link of trust is broken and faith in institutions is gone....it may take 20 years yet, but the polity in Europe is heading for turmoil and disaster.

Melanie: we agree it is immoral and evil to terminate the life of two schoolgirls.

We are in dispute as to whether it is right to terminate the life of Ian Huntley with an execution. Myself, I favour this solution, but many do not.

Yet in this country, and on this Continent, there are thousands of beings terminated before, at, and sometimes after 24 weeks of life through abortion.

We also expend huge efforts to preserve the fragile life of babies born prematurely at or before 24 weeks.

It is a confusing picture, that in the US Ian Huntley might be executed, but here not. Yet in Europe an unborn (yet viable) human being can be terminated, but not in the US. It seems it is wrong to murder schoolgirls (or even adults), but not right to punish murderers through execution; yet it is acceptable to liquidate an unborn child in one part of a hospital; yet spend huge sums to save such a life in another part of the hospital.

Do you think the Vo Case in Strabourg will throw any light on this, or is it our moral philosophy which is lacking ?

OK – so you’re not being ironic.

Caroline,
We must be living in parallel universes if Tony Blair is a socialist. Yes he does have a programme, which he pursues with evangelical fervour. Firstly, came the removal of any commitment to common ownership in Labour party doctrine through the abolition of Clause 4 of the Labour Party constitution. This was followed up by a desire to bring private finance into every sphere of public life and the insistence upon beating down any opposition from the public sector unions. Overall he is religiously committed to the free market as a means to solve each and every global problem. Of course, I could talk about his attempts to out-Thatcher Thatcher in terms of the transatlantic alliance but this would be too obvious.

“They [the BBC] were first off the mark with naked people having sex.”
If didn’t realise that this constitutes “socialism” – I must have missed the point of Marx’s capital somewhat.

Do you really believe that “naked people having sex” has a substantial role in causing social decay? More so than the issues I listed above – e.g. higher labour mobility, the culture of disinterested individualism, consumerism overtaking any religious or moral framework.

On royal reverence, surely you have heard Jenny Bond or Andrew Witchell’s sycophantic ramblings. Also, does liking Diana mean hating the monarchy? – I thought she was the figure who rescued them from public disinterest or contempt.

Susan,
On the question of “equality of outcome” – I’m not sure this is necessary to attack private education. You can do so on the basis of “equality of opportunity”. If we believe that children’s education is fundamental to giving them life-chances and we are committed to giving each and every child an equal starting point in life, then it is inconsistent to have a differential system of education. Read Rawl’s seminal “Theory of Justice”, for example. No mention of “equality of outcome”. I don’t think many on the left get involved in debates over individuals sending their children to private schools – they are more worried about the systemic imbalance of opportunity which must be addressed at a systemic level.

Bit of a cheap point bringing in Pol Pot or Stalin. Stalinism gets most of its doctrinal support from a distorted reading of Leninism, which is itself a bizarre extension of Marx. The Khmer Rouge, in turn was a mix of 'Khmer elite chauvinism, Third World nationalism, the French revolution, Stalinism, and some aspects of Mao Zedong's "Great Leap Forward” – not much to do with Marx either. Don’t lump everyone in together – it’s not very scholarly.

As for the left being anti-family, it is certainly true that Engels equates the modern family with an attempt to privatise the reproduction of future generations of labour. However, many Marxists (e.g. Adorno – Minima Moralia) also talk of the family as a refuge of ethical worth above and against the cold logic of the market. It represents a symbol of goodness – of unconditional attachment – which resists instrumentalisation.

Romulus,
The “real world” – that old chestnut. Socialists never really discuss utopia – they have something akin to the Jewish ban on graven images which prevents them from laying out positive plans for a “socialist” world. What they do have is a radically historicist understanding of “the real world” which understands it as fragile, dynamic and susceptible to radical change once the masses realise their collective power. Utopia appears as some sort of regulative ideal, which allows us to claim that more is possible than the closed discourse of the “realities of politics” would appear to allow.

I take your baubles analogy – socialism is a very broad church – but don’t think there is any reason why (of necessity) that it should always become some form of hideous monolith.

Trace

What is your source that abortion is not legal in the US?

Abortion is legal is some circumstances in most parts of the western world. To equate the cruel murder of two young girls by some sick individual diminishes the gravity of his crime.

The original article was about how the lowering of standards contributes to these sorts of crimes.

Hi rob, thanks for your comments.

I'm sorry, but I'm afraid I couldn't give a flying fig for all the "scholarly" books you cite, so no, I'm not interested in reading turgid tomes about the various gradations and sectarian offshoots of your socialist/collectivist religion/belief system that have developed over the past 150 years. Bit like debating how many angels can fit on the head of a pin.

I draw most of my observations from real life, because I have a real job, a real husband, a real child and a real family. I have also worked for 20 years in various real, product and income-producing industries, not in professions that derive entirely from teaching and writing about theories and abstracts, for an audience of people who also derive their income from teaching and writing about theories and abstracts.

You haven't really gotten the point I made about equality of outcome being the overriding social goal of your collectivist faith. You simply jumped ahead and agreed that equality of outcome was a laudable social goal (as I pretty much expected you to), without thinking through the moral implications of such a mindset. Also, you took the example I gave of private education and responded as if that is really the issue, rather than simply an example of a moral/social trend that I'm discussing.

Let me try again: Having equality of outcome as the overriding social goal turns morality on its head; in the example I gave, in most societies, it's considered a virtue to love your child and sacrifice to ensure a good place in the world for him or her; but that is not a virtue, it's a vice, in the world where equality of outcome is valued above all.

In most societies, it's considered a moral act to stand up and defend your own person and your own home from a criminal invasion; but not in the society where equality of outcome is valued above all other moral imperatives. Thus, Tony Martin must go to jail as an "enemy of the state" - he committed the unpardonable sin, the sin of valuing his own life over that of a criminal's. The sin of declaring himself "better" than the two burglars he shot. In this context, self-defense is a vice, not a virtue.

See how it works? It goes on and on. This is how the unshakeable belief that equality of outcome for all people, at all times, is somehow a good thing, changes virtues into vices, and vices into virtues.

Why is it a "cheap shot" to bring up Pol Pot and Stalin? Is it only because you don't like to be reminded of the path your collectivist religion has always led to, no matter what particular sect practices it?

How can someone, when faced with the history of Communism in the 20th Century, and the unsuccessful and unlovely societies it has ALWAYS produced, continue to cling to it?

Get a job, rob, get a real job. Learn how to make a sale, bring in a crop, load a freight ship, create a marketing strategy for a product, supervise a factory production line, teach five-year-olds how to do sums. Anything and everything, except reading, teaching and writing about socialism and social theory.

Addendum to my remarks above: It doesn't really matter whether Blair, etc. has abandoned socialism as an economic theory or not. That is simply a matter of the inevitable admission that socialism as an economic theory doesn't work. A no-brainer.

Blair and the Third Way are still Marxists, because they still believe in the underlying cultural and moral values of Marxism as unquestionably desirable to pursue. Such as the overriding moral imperative of producing equalty of outcome for all people at all times.

The means of achieving this goal, whether with "Third Way" policies or nationalization of industries, matters not in the scheme of things.

On the other hand, what makes me a hard-hearted, cruel "right-winger", is that I've dared to put forth the social heresy that equality of outcome for all people, at all times, is not really a healthy or laudable goal for society to pursue.

Romulus - you make some interesting points about Germany, but I did mention that it is far from perfect. I work in Bavaria which still clings to its history and traditions. That said, yes the nanny state is alive and kicking in Germany, which is one reason why their economy is now under-performing and another why they need freelancers like me even though local unemployment is high.

Merry Christmas.

Susan,

Well, to be fair you do use the concept of "Socialism" frequently and it's only reasonable that I challenge what you mean by this.

"Get a job" - no marks for originality there. You seem to have a very instrumental notion of human existence - marketing, sales, loading a freight train...my god this is depressing. And by the way, teaching Philosophy is an honourable profession - stretching back to the ancient Greeks. It certainly puts money on the table.

You still haven't demonstrated why Blair is committed to "equality of outcome". What policies exactly demonstrate this? Differential university fees? Foundation hospitals?
I'm confused.

Tony Martin is a common criminal. He shot someone (albeit another common criminal) in the back when they were running away. The individual posed no immediate threat to his life at the time.

If the way the courts responded to Martin's crime was indicative of any "social trend" it is only that of differentiating between legitimate self-defence and unnecessary vigilantism. This distinction is key to maintaining social cohesiveness.

You are still to PROVE that "equality of outcome" is the overriding goal of "socialism"/society in general. In the two examples you give, I maintain that this is not the case.

To reiterate, I don’t know who exactly condemns parents who send their children into private education. The debate is of a different nature. It is "equality of opportunity" that is the overriding concern of the left. If we take this seriously it means that every child born should have an equal chance in life. From the point of view of the child, their predicament is merely one of luck – with no moral significance.

Therefore, we develop social institutions that minimise the percentage of luck in a child’s development and emphasise the free, individual development of that child’s capacities from an equal starting point. This does not equate to “equality of outcome” – although the gamble often underlying the argument is that children will develop some form of parity of development from an equal starting point. So, yes, there is often some sort of normative claim that all can achieve given the opportunity to do so but this claim is secondary to the claim of equal opportunity.

Hi rob, thanks again for the response. A bit of jumping around here and there. I'll try to be succinct.

In response: there isn't anything wrong with being a philsophy educator, but it doesn't make you qualified to come up with practical plans on how run the world's economic and social systems. Your remarks about how "depressing" it is that I view the world in "instrumental terms" -- god, how airy fairy is that? Philosophy teachers are only useful in the scheme of things when the freight trains move on time and deliver food and fuel to hungry bellies and cold houses. Otherwise philosphy teachers are basically worthless. No one is interested in Plato when his stomach is empty.

I believe that someone who knows how freight logistics works, or how a factory production line works, is a lot more qualified to have an opinon on how the world's economic system should work rather than a philosphy teacher. So shoot me.

Your own response is so utterly, predictably typical of elitist, clueless academia it is not even funny. You posit a statement that socialism is superior to market capitalism but you are not in the least interested in finding out if your theories are actually true by getting a real job in the business world and seeing how things really work. Which is undoubtedly why socialism continues to fail, again and again and again, when it is actually charged with growing food and loading it onto trains and distributing it to people. Who would go to a doctor who had only ever read about the circulatory system in books, not actually ever opened up a human being and looked at it from the inside out?

I don't have to "prove" that Blair or any other socialist is dedicated to equality of outcome at all costs -- this type of thinking is so pervasive in the West, most people do not even question it anymore. It is part and parcel of the civil religion developed and proselytized by the Left for decades.

Regarding education, I'm relieved that you believe in "equality of opportunity" -- or at least say you do. However that is really a meritocratic (i.e. capitalist) belief system so I don't really believe that's what you believe in. What happens when everyone has the same "equality of opportunity" and -- gasp -- some people still come out richer, smarter, better educated, etc. despite the best efforts of the state? Are the socialists/collectivists really going to stop then and say, oh, we tried our best, but it didn't work!? Hell, no. They will come up with some other repressive program to bring those on top down to the level of those on the bottom, all in the name of the eternal quest for their Holy Grail, the perfectly equal society.

Regarding Tony Martin, I'm not aware that he was a "common criminal." What exactly had he done before his property was invaded by burglars for the 10th or 12th time, and he shot at them?

On the other hand, I read that one of the burglars who invaded Tony Marint's property had more than 30 prior charges against him.

Yet another feature of your statist/collectivist religion -- it turns otherwise harmless people into "criminals."

I still think you should take a sabbatical and get a real job for a year or two. Until then I'm not exactly sure what it is that you want to say to me? If you'd read any of Ms. Phillips' books you will see exactly how her political turnaround came about when she actually deigned to visit a few state schools to see how all her lovely theories and writings about "progressive" education were really working. Which was to say, not really at all.

Chuck Bird - before I return to Christmas....I am pertrubed you cannot see the leitmotif. Simply that respect for human life has declined immeasurably over decades where 'convenience' is rated above obligation.

Huntley 'disposed' off the children because their continued existence was a burden to him, it incriminated him, and he had to remove them permanently.

The judicial/political system refuses to allow us to remove him permanently and he will be with us for the next 50 years at least. We apparently have a 'duty of care' to Huntley which was not exercised with respect to his victims.

That respect for human life has declined in Europe to the point where "For women aged 20 to 24 the rate was more than four times higher in 2001 than in 1969, increasing from 7.0 abortions per 1,000 women in this age group to 30.6 abortions per 1,000 women"

and "There were almost 98,000 conceptions to teenage girls, aged under 20, in England and Wales in 2000 - 61 per cent of these led to a maternity and 39 per cent to abortions. There were 8,000 conceptions among girls under the age of 16, less than a tenth of the total number of conceptions to teenagers. Of these conceptions almost 400 were to girls under the age of 14, 160 of which led to maternities."

http://www.statistics.gov.uk/CCI/nscl.asp?ID=6424

You are correct Chuck Bird that since Roe v Wade abortion has not been illegal and that 40 million abortions have taken place. I suppose my point would have been better made by asking if abortion is taxpayer-funded as in the United Kingdom, and whether doctors suffer threats to their careers when refusing to carry out such procedures in NHS hospitals ? "78% of abortions were funded by the NHS, of which just under half took place in the independent sector under NHS contract"

This is not just a problem for Muslim doctors either, viz http://www.cmf.org.uk/

and why do we provide for "Non-residents
in 2002 there were 9,400 abortions for non residents carried out in hospitals and clinics in England and Wales"

Source: statistics@doh.gsi.gov.uk
Published October 2003
Free of charge
ISBN 1 84182 782 7
© Crown Copyright 2003

So, I have no answer but think we should have the debate......has there been a decline in the value attached to human life, and a degradation in standards of personal behaviour concomitant with, but not necessarily a result of, attitudes towards termination of pregnancy as a frequently-used rather than rare, medical procedure ?

We preserve the life of Ian Huntley; have a ramshackle set of procedures to protect the lives of his victims; and are assailed by politicians telling us we need to import asylum-seekers as our population is falling.....despite the fact that it is growing rapidly.....and "the total number of abortions was 175,600, compared with 176,400 in 2001, a fall of 0.5%" ...in a country importing 250.000 people a year.

Susan - You are totally brilliant and have saved me the work of responding to many of Rob Maynard's "airy-fairy" notions of the world as he sees it from his ivory tower.

I'll add: I didn't say constant sex on TV was a socialist construct. I send that it unpicked the standards of society - and that such unpicking is part of the deconstructing of society sought, with malevolence aforethought, by the socialist one-worlders. Read Theodore Dalrymple on the Lady Chatterly's Lover trial, then get back to me on that one.

Tony Blair certainly has you fooled if you think this CNDer is not a mind-boggling standard issue socialist. Ever notice that all his little "free market" programmes are the ones he knows will be squelched by Labour backbench MPs? Truly. Ever noticed that? Not one free market idea has ever been designed to get though a vote in Parliament, but rather to reassure all the stupid former Tories who thought he might be safe. Blair is to the left of Cromwell. He's a rabid one-worlder (with his glorious self at the top table, ca va sans dire).

Susan is so right when she says: Get out and find out the logistics of getting pizza supplies sourced, people and machinery to make the pizzas, people to package the pizzas at a price which still allows everyone to make a profit, people (and trucks designed to carry frozen food) to deliver the frozen pizzas to the supermarkets which have, in advance, calculated how many frozen pizzas they will need to sell before their shelf life expires.

Until you've done all this, like Susan, I don't care a flying flea fart about how philosophers in ivory towers play around at ordering humanity, nor do I care about the philosopher sources the cite.

One of Tony Martin's assailants has 38 convictions (convictions, not charges) against him. Tony Martin, knowing his house had been invaded, again, was pumping his gun into the dark at the bottom of the stairs. He didn't know that one of his persecutors had decided to make a run for it. So, one creepy, intimidating burglar dead. Boo hoo.

Susan and Caroline *you both seem to be saying the same thing),

Final post as this debate is obviously pointless. I suppose I was just intrigued by the workings of the rightist mind and have been amply rewarded.

Again, you seem happy to posit claims about "socialism" or “Marxism”, for example, but seem genuinely disinterested as to whether they actually apply to actual “socialists” or “Marxists”. As some constructive advice, you really need a more subtle understanding of “the enemy” or else I’m not sure whom you are talking about or talking to.

So, for example, you make claims such as…

“I don't have to "prove" that Blair or any other socialist is dedicated to equality of outcome at all costs -- this type of thinking is so pervasive in the West, most people do not even question it anymore. It is part and parcel of the civil religion developed and proselytized by the Left for decades.”

This is utterly meaningless.

You make bizarre claims that the Guardian or BBC are somehow "communist" but fail to substantiate them above mere rhetoric. By the way, have you ever seen/read the BBC/Guardian?

No, I don't think that philosophers are more important or even comparable to people who produce food, heat and dwelling (forgive me for being facetious). I do, however, think that many issues in society (for example, the balance between the state and individual, what counts as just - in both economic and judicial circumstances) can only be resolved in terms of normative argument. They depend ultimately upon a particular moral framework. No amount of understanding the intricate mechanisms of pizza delivery will change that. I also think that societies are richer if they have some deep moral understanding of their foundations.

And, as much as I hate demeaning myself by responding to such cheap, pathetic argument, I have spent the last decade working in the “real-world” – from dish-washing, to working in call centres to accounts to fund my current lifestyle.

If I genuinely believed that Tony Blair was a CND’er, a One Worlder or an unreconstructed socialist I would vote for him wholeheartedly.

I very much doubt that either of you really believes in "equality of opportunity" either. If you did, it would require a radical reconstruction of the very foundations of society. Think through the implications of offering an equal (or even a good) start to each and every individual within a capitalist market.

Martin got what he deserved - the jury decided that he was **not** firing in self-defence. Unlike the Neanderthals in the US, we do not have a culture of shoot first, think later and thank god. It is imperative that courts lay down a hard line on these situations to make it clear what the bounds of legitimate self-defence are.

Finally, Melanie's article was trying to contextualise the evil of people like Huntly in terms of the evaporation of solid moral foundations in society. Again, I’m fascinated as to why you don't think that the typhoon capitalism reeks upon communities and the establishment of consumer greed as our one true god has any role in such a development.

Rob, look at Amy Chua's book "World On Fire" which corroborates your last paragraph.....but we should recall even in the Industrial Revolution it was religious and moral conviction which counter-balanced the greed of capitalism, and it is the religious conviction which has declined and not self-interest.

Men like Samuel Colgate were motivated by God not Politics.

Rob Maynard - I would have thought with all that swanky reading you do you would have known the difference between reeks (smells) and wreaks (present tense of wrought).

Tony and Cherie Blair quit the CND when they realised their membership was rendering them unelectable. But his heart's still in it, so you'd be OK voting for him. Turned out Cherie made the sacrifice for nothing as the voters rejected her anyway.

I didn't bother expounding on the BBC and The Guardian because everyone is familiar with the whole bitter lefty ethos and I didn't want to use up bandwidth stating the obvious.

Your gratuitous insulting of the United States - the most beneficent and least territorially ambitious superpower in the history of the world - was repulsive. You've never been. I can tell. 'Shoot first and ask questions later'. My goodness, your ignorance is quite staggering. You have absolutely no idea how the US works.
You must tear yourself away from BBC television and go to the United States one day. You will be astounded. It's not like on TV or the movies.

And next time you need to rid the world of a wicked tyrant who has tortured and murdered hundreds of thousands of souls, don't ask the Americans to use their might and daring and technology to track him down and arrest him. Send a Guardian reporter.

"It is part and parcel of the civil religion developed and proselytized by the Left for decades"

No ! this is not a "religion" it is simply a dogmatic assertion.......and to equate it with religion is exactly the fallacy made by Greens and Marxist-Leninists of creating Secular Gods and Pantheism

Caroline,
Try asking the Nicaraguans, the Chileans, the Laoitians or the Vientnamese about US benevolence.

...and sorry about the spelling. Must be a consequence of my "progressive" education.

Rob Maynard, America is not a coloniser and it's not imperialistic. That was my point. I didn't say it has never made a mistake - as in SE Asia.

Next time you're in Cuba to wonder at the miracles wrought by Castro, why not stop off in Miami and see why it's every Cuban's dream to stop off in Miami - and never go back?

BTW, if offered a Green Card, how many Chileans and Nicaraguans do you think would turn it down? Yeah. I thought so. I wonder why so many tens of thousands of Vietnamese and Laotians are queued up outside their US embassies, applying for visas. Maybe they know something you don't know?

Also, you promised us an end to your participation a couple of posts ago, as Susan and I were posting pointless trivialities and not addressing the great issues as defined by lefty philosphers.

Susan, Rob, Caroline please calm down and return to the subject at hand, which was Ian Huntley and his moral degeneracy and whether this behaviour and lifestyle had any wider implications for the state of British, and possibly Western society.

Somehow we have been dragged off into set positions and slogans, when the article Melanie posited concerned the death of two 10 year old schoolgirls in a Cambridgeshire village, away from the inner city.......and whether there were other issues besides Ian Huntley's guilt.

Can we return to that subject and leave the abstractions of Socialism and Capitalism and US foreign policy ?

Romulus, This is what we were contributing to before Rob Maynard started lugging in all these leftwing philosophers whose theories "proved" that our personal observations of society were faulty.

Actually, I think I have contributed all the thoughts I have on the subject and don't have anything further to add. It was a very interesting discussion and I'll look forward to reading your thoughts on some other subject on some other thread.

Signing off.

Just a note to Caroline and Rom, who have been holding down the fort quite nicely in my absence :)

Rom, I don't really believe that the Left has a real "religion". But I do believe that they sound like a pseudo-religion when they preach. This especially comes through when you read the BBC Online and the Guardian -- really no difference between the way it SOUNDS (not the content, but the TONE) and the way some missionary tract from the 19th Century aimed at the "dark-skinned heathens" sounds like. They preach and preach and preach that their politically correct constructs constitute the one and only true moral position, and woe betide any heathen (like me) who disagrees with them. This is really the most offensive aspect, I find, of the Leftist media in general. The whole moral smugness thing is just unbearable.

Rob maynard, I'm not really impressed with your debating skills. I'm an American and I seem to know more about the Tony Martin case than you do, as well as about the Blair government. Once you get out of your element of various lefty theorizers you seem lost. For the record I certainly did not have "equal" opportunity with many other Americans of my generation, but I've done quite all right form my self nevertheless. Funny that. I went to a "private" school run by my church -- in the second grade I had more than 50 kids in my class, and the only adult authority was a 22-year-old nun fresh off the boat from Ireland. Nevertheless, when I left that church school in the 7th grade to attend a state-supported school, I discovered I was one full year ahead of my new classmates in math and more than 3 years ahead in grammar, spelling and reading. I don't really believe in "equal access" in education as defined by more and more money thrown at fad-dominated state schools without demanding accountability and discipline from same. My church school had very few $$$ resources, but they did have a few things working for them that the average socialist educational wet-dream does not: a belief in absolute right and wrong and the importance of teaching self-discipline, personal responsibility and other values that have been thrown out the window by the oh-so-enlightened leftist educational establishment.

Rob wrote, "Again, I’m fascinated as to why you don't think that the typhoon capitalism reeks upon communities and the establishment of consumer greed as our one true god has any role in such a development."

As I'm mystified why you do not see that the lack of personal responsibility, and the relativism of morality, as engendered by your socialist utopian ideals, is responsible for "such a devleopments" as the Ian Huntley murders.

Have you ever stopped to wonder, oh Tob the genius, why it is that the rise in "consumerism" that you hate so much has coincided with the rise in the welfare state (of which I am sure you are greatly enamored)? It used to be that the socialists in the West argued that capitalism was Bad because it made averyone but a few people poorer. When that assumption was proved false, the socialists started to argue that capitalism is Bad because it makes the average person too rich ("souless consumerism"). Funny how you keep moving the goal posts to accommodate your beliefs. That is the mark of a fanatical True Believer.

I said I was quitting this thread, but I cannot leave it for good until I say this to Susan: YOWZAH! Those were some posts! Every sentence a bullet!

Those nuns gave you something not available to those in state school establishments with their mind-deadening leftist nonsensical dogma and spirit quelling political correctness. (You don't have to seek your own morality any more! The government will be moral for you!) They gave you the training to think logically and develop your own position, and the means to employ what was obviously always a mind with a bent for precise articulation.

I said I was quitting this thread, but I cannot leave it for good until I say this to Susan: YOWZAH! Those were some posts! Every sentence a bullet!

Those nuns gave you something not available to those in state school establishments with their mind-deadening leftist nonsensical dogma and spirit quelling political correctness. (You don't have to seek your own morality any more! The government will be moral for you!) They gave you the training to think logically and develop your own position, and the means to employ what was obviously always a mind with a bent for precise articulation.

Sorry for the double. My ISP disconnected itself and I thought it had eaten the post.

Caroline, wither goest thou ?

Caroline, whither goest thou ?

I am thinking straight Caroline, there is nothing wrong with a victim culture. If an abuser was abused they are still a victim but they are also an abuser. They can be both.

I was bullied at school and was never a bully myself. But I need to complain about that. Yet if i complain i get told this is a victim culture. And that some of the people who bullied me were abused in some way. My comment is they should be allowed to complain about the people who abused them and i should be allowed to complain about them. It is not sensible just to say that as some of the people who bullied me were abused we should all just shut up and pretend nothing ever happened. Thay is just helping the abusers only and suppresses any complains any punishment, any discussion.
Bullies alllways complain about the "victim culture" as a way of shutting up complaints about abuse. Thye have some insane idea that if everyone shuts up about abuse then it will all go away. When al that does is supress deep problmes, help the abuser and cause severe anger, and resentment among the supressed. Whether you like it or not that is all that happnes.
Not even the truth and reconciliation committe, in South Africa said to victims shut up.

If you really think a victim culture is a bad thing. then the next time you get robbed attacked, will you call the police. Or do you think that would be passing responsibilty.
The critic of the victim culture is just abusers trying to supress victims. Wake up and smell the roses.

Rory - It's 'wake and smell the coffee' and 'take time out to smell the roses'. Two different thoughts that I am surprised to see conflated by such a student of philosophy as your good self. A bit like not knowing the difference between reeks and wreaks.

Yes I did promise an end to my participation...but I can't let such utter ignorance stand.
Also, sorry Romulus but the debate strand was about the general state of moral decline in the UK, which Caroline/Susan seem to think is related to the prevalence of the political left.

Susan,

Stop attributing things to me that I don’t endorse.

“the relativism of morality, as engendered by your socialist utopian ideals”

Have I ever said anything that constitutes moral relativism? What has moral relativism got to do with Socialism? I though it was precisely our moral self-righteousness that you found so offensive.

Is the amoral “culture ruthlessly fixated on pleasure and instant gratification” which Melanie Phillips rightly condemns, a product of “socialism” or are the pornographers or reality TV producers (for example) not just good capitalist entrepreneurs?

Likewise, Caroline, I don’t recall saying anything positive about Castro. Also, don’t you think that US “mistakes” might have had some impact upon peoples desire to leave their own countries?

Also Caroline, I hate Political Correctness - I think it is patronising and a barrier to free and informed discussion.

“Have you ever stopped to wonder, oh Tob the genius, why it is that the rise in "consumerism" that you hate so much has coincided with the rise in the welfare state (of which I am sure you are greatly enamored)?”

The welfare state is not rising. We are gradually selling if off. Since Thatcher, we have seen the gradual contracting out of more and more Health and Education services to private companies and a process of giving both hospitals and schools more power over their own affairs. The Blarite agenda is precisely to continue this trend – indeed Murdoch’s Times recommended we vote for him in 2001 because “the Thatcherite legacy is safe with New Labour”. I have already cited examples of this - differential university fees, foundation hospitals and the direct confrontation with public sector unions over pay (see the handling of the fire-fighters dispute, for example). Then I forgot, you know far more about the UK government and despite every policy move to the contrary, you “know” that Blair is really committed to “equality of opportunity at all costs”.

Also, i'm not sure what causal link you could find between the welfare state and consumerism? What point are you trying to make here?

As for Tony Martin, I’m sure he has become some sort of folk hero for the US gun lobby.

As for moving the goal posts…I know you don’t care about “Marxist tomes” but I challenge you to find any reasonable evidence that “soulless consumerism” has ever been off the socialist agenda. It has always been first and foremost an attack on the self-centred, ethically devoid nature of modern society – the tearing apart of social solidarity and the misplaced belief that it is in commodities that human beings find fulfilment and not meaningful human relationships. I suppose the only real “change” has been the addition of environmental concerns to the agenda – which make the opulent consumer drive lifestyle of the west less and less tenable. As for your first point, that the economic wonders of capitalism have proved socialists wrong, the richest 1% now own more wealth than the bottom 95% in the US. Over 1 in 10 people in the US live in poverty. Move to the global picture and things are even more depressing. So we’ve been proved wrong?

YOWZAH indeed.

Caroline,
Think your getting poor Rory confused with myself - unless he's a fellow resident of the ivory towers.

Rob - Yes. I'm getting as confused as Rory. I apologise.

Rob - This myth, carefully nurtured by Alastair Campbell and other practitioners of the dark arts, that Blair's actually a Tory in disguise is a canard. At one time it suited Rupert Murdoch to pretend to buy into it, although he seems to be losing interest in Blair, so look for a change in stance at The Times.

Britain has become as socialist/communist under Blair as it was under Attlee and Nye Bevan and all those ghastly 10th rate pedestrian Marxist minds. (I may be using Marxist wrongly, but I don't give a crap. Everyone knows what I mean.) There is no way little control freak T Blair, Esq would allow his thin greedy fingers to be pried off state enterprises.

You say they're being sold off. But they're not. Some of the services are being subcontracted, to give the appearance of a free market, but the cold, dead hand of statism has never lightened its clammy grip. An increased public sector - now numbering a staggering and shameful 1/4 of the British workforce - oversees these public/private arrangements. And the state, and the public sector, always wins.

Blair has created something like a quarter of a million new public sector jobs, all with benefits and pensions at the expense of the wealth-creating sector. You buy into the Campbell-created myth that Blair's secretly a Tory? You cannot be serious.

Is Rory an automaton ? He has posted exactly the same postings on each thread irrespective of its theme.....slightly trollish behaviour

Rob maynard, more socialist b.s. cliches. Where do I begin? 1 in 10 live in "poverty" in the US -- ?the official "poverty" line in the US is equivalent to the average per capita income of Greece. "Poor people" in the US often have two cars parked in front of their apartments or houses (and a lot of them DO actually own houses -- fancy that!). And don't come back with a bunch of b.s. "stastics" from some "progressive" think tank in the US - I've lived in the US at the official "poverty" level and believe me, it ain't "poverty" to the average grass-eating North Korean living in socialist paradise.

Nevertheless, there are two major causes of poverty in the US and neither of them has anything to do with "capitalism." One is a high rate of single, teen-age pregnancy. The other is crime.

Conservatives are doing rather well at the moment in combatting both of those social ills. Sexual abstinence programs in the schools have cut teen-age pregnancy rates in the US by 35 percent since 1994. ("Progressives" despise these abstinence programs and have fought them tooth and nail -- I wonder why? Could it be they fear a lessening in the number of desperately poor people they can exploit for ideological purposes?)

"Zero tolerance" crime prevention programs have cut the NUMBER of overall violent crimes in the US by 50 percent in the past 30 years -- despite the fact that the population has increased by 100 million people in that same amount of time. Keep in mind, that's not a 50 percent cut in the mere RATE of crime but the overall quantitative NUMBER of violent crimes that have declined by 50 percent, despite a population increase of 30 percent.

There's still much to be done, but the point is, violent crime is declining in the US while it's skyrocketing in "progressive" Europe.

New York City, formerly a cesspool of criminal depravity in many areas, now has crime levels not seen since John Kennedy was in the White House, and it's a LOT safer than London and I daresay, Paris.

The people who benefit the most from "zero tolerance" crime programs are the poor, who can't afford to live in the leafy, trendy suburbs that the "progressives" love to inhabit.

Needless to say, the "progressives" have fought "zero tolerance" crime programs tooth and nail, just like they fought the sexual abstinence programs in the public schools.

As for the rise of "souless" consumerism, yes, I do see a correlation between that and the welfare state. The welfare state provides a minimum decent standard of living for all people regardless of personal responsibility. Dopers, drunks, social drop-outs and slackers get "benefits" along with decent working poor. You can see the same lack of personal responsibility in consumerism. People spend, spend, spend like there's no tomorrow. Why bother to be thrifty, put something away for a rainy day, when you know the government will just bail you out in the long run anyways? So why not whoop it up with the credit cards and bring home 7 pairs of Tommy Hilfiger shoes at a time? You can always start over again with help from the all-benevolent state.

It isn't the conservatives who indulge in all this consumerism anyways. It's the "progressives" who love fads and fashions and "self-expression" and "creativity"-- in politics, in education, and in consumer goods. Most conservatives don't give two hoots for fashion and fads and "self-expression". Hyper-consumeris fashion queens like Jackie O and Princess Di were heroes of the "progressives", not of us conservatives. We pay cash for our cars (no finance charges!) and drive them until they fall apart. We recover our furniture instead of throwing it all out for something new and trendy. We work hard for our money and don't want to waste it on transitory consumer crap from Tommy Hilfiger and Prada. We take the money we save by not indulging in consumer crap and invest it in stocks and bonds, real estate, and other "real" things that increase our financial security and provide jobs and housing for the community as well.

What generates fads and fashions anyways? Hollywood, the fashion industry, the music industry. All of these industries are controlled by "progressives", lock stock and barrel. You can't express conservative ideals in Hollywood and expect to succeed there. "Progressives" love fads and fashions because they are collectivist -- it makes them feel good to belong to the "in" crowd. Conservatives are self-confident individuals and we don't need validation from "the in crowd" by wearing the "coolest" new brand of tennis shoes or sporting this seaon's "in" haircut. If a few capitalists make money off of the infantile need of collectivists to "belong to the in crowd", where's the harm in that? Blame yourselves for buying and wanting to be "cool", not the people who do the selling.

The "gun lobby" in the US (my how you love to pile on the cliches) have never heard of Tony Martin. I only know about the case because I like to read British and other foreign online media. That's not a common pursuit in the US. Nevertheless I'm rather appalled by your failure to see the ominous moral implications of the Tony Martin case. I'm sure George Orwell would have been able to see it clearly enough.

Caroline, thanks for the compliments. I enjoy your posts very much as well. There's a lot more to be said. Suffice to say, just like Melanie, I used to buy the "progressive" story hook line and sinker as well. Part of my waking up is a long story that I don't want to bore anyone here with.

Just to get us back on topic, per Rom's request, the Huntley crime reminds me of a similar crime that took place in California 10 years ago, and that prompted a severe roll-back in the "Criminal Liberation Movement" backed by the "progressives" in the 60s and early 70s.

In this case a little girl was lifted out of her own bedroom (in a rural, middle-class neighborhood), raped and murdered by a criminal with several prior violent sexual offenses on his record. At one point that night the criminal, with the body of the poor victim in the trunk of his car, was actually helped to escape by a couple of cops when his car got stuck in a ditch.

The case touched off a very deep nerve in the psyche of Californians, since it illustrated that even middle-class people were no longer safe in their own homes, and because the killer had already been convicted of violent crimes before and released on parole.

This murder prompted the over-whelming support for a "3 strikes law" which mandates that criminals convicted of certain crimes for the third time be put away for a minimum of 25 years.

10 years later, the "3 strikes law" has cut into crime in this state by a significant percentage.

Nonetheless, the "progressives" hate this law, and are constantly trying to undermine and destroy it (so much for their support for "democracy" -- the law was passed by direct referendum by 70 percent of the voters.) (I'm ashamed to say that I personally voted against "3 strikes" back in the days when I believed everything the "progressives" said -- and the "progressives" said it wouldn't work.)

I wonder if the Huntley crime will spark a similar effort among Britons to say "enough is enough" and demand the authorities do something about all this terrible crime.

First, I have never bought into the leftie Weltanschuuang. Even as a small child, I was strictly on the side of law and order and material possessions. As a teenager, my father being a small businessman, I was appalled by the notion that leftists wanted to remove our income and spread it around a little, then give some back. Even as a young, silly and self-involved adolescent, I realised this was unfair. I never went through the Kumbaya bit. I knew that the taxes we paid were distributed to people we didn't know and whose worthiness to receive the fruits of my father's labours we had had no opportunity to judge.

So the minute I was out of the womb, I was for the destruction of "socialism" (the acceptable word for communism). We gave to the charities my parents felt something for, quietly. Most people were like us. They were sincerely interested in helping 'hard cases' and giving a hand-up to people down on their luck. Thirteen-yr-old single mothers would not have been high on their list, although these girls are adored by the lefty thought police. To forestall arguments: why? Because they have been tutored that they better get out and vote (in Britain) Labour or their "benefits" will be taken away. Mmmm, large manufactured constituency.

As I got older, I saw how the leftist governments siphoned off not just money, but personal responsibility and power, from their populations. It wasn't a girl's responsibility to pay her own rent or decide what boys she slept with. After all, her acute interest in sex had been fostered by her teachers ("sex" education) and television.

On the other hand,it was no longer my responsibility to decide, to the best of my ability and willingness, out of my little salary, who I wanted to support with my money. The state was being moral in my behalf, and the state was encouraging dependency on the state.

In the US, they broke up black families with their hateful programmes of keeping a contributing male out of the house. I am astounded that so many black Americans have gone on to become middle class and conservative in the face of this twisted philosophy.

And it says volumes about human survival that so many single black mothers with no male presence in the home brought up children who found a way to get through college and get a foot on the rung of the ladder. I am full of admiration and applause. (Also for America for making it not just possible, but normal.)

Screw the leftist oppressors of the human race. The Socialists (communists) in Britain took away the one route for bright children to get out of poor circumstances: grammar schools for those of any class and any race who could sit the exam and get through. How many lively, intelligent minds that could have contributed to the technology and culture of the West have been turned into blind donkeys in the intellectual mineshaft of socialism?

Thanks Caroline, full of interesting insights as usual.

I don't really understand the difference between a "grammar" school and a "comprehensive" school. I don't think we have these in the US. Can you explain to me what the grammar schools did, and the rationale for getting rid of them?

Addendum to the discussion about grammar schools: One of the traditional "pillars of the community" institutions that the "progressives" have tried to get rid of in the US are the service clubs. They can't get rid of them legally so they try to do it by ridicule and making participation in the service clubs "uncool."

I don't know if you have service clubs in the UK? I believe some of the main ones have gone international, but they were all started up in North America.

Watch any US movie about "Middle America" and you will see that they always manage to slip in a few contemptuous digs against the service clubs. For some reason, they ("the progressives") are obsessed with the Shriners above all. There are always all these jokes and asides about drunken, sexually libertine Shriners cutting loose at their conventions. One would hardly know from watching US movies that the Shriners are a multi-million dollar organization that has funded burn research, built burn centers and burn specialist hospitals all over Canada and the US.

About black female heads of household: religion still plays a big role in the lives of most African Americans. That's the major difference between them and the British white underclass that I can see.

What does "b.s."stand for? Obviously I'm not a "
"progressive" either as I don't get this new fangled jargon.

It stands for "bullshit," rob. Now don't tell me you didn't know that.

Well you learn something every day.

I’m glad that you now talk about “progressives” rather than “socialists”. I agree wholeheartedly with your condemnation of the Hilfiger and Prada culture. Again, I’m not sure what this has to do with the left. It’s a development straight out of the heart of entrepreneurial capitalism – make them think that their life will be incomplete unless they buy X brand. As for Hollywood and the music industry – it is a seething cesspit of pretension and superficiality. I don’t believe that anyone in Hollywood has any genuine belief in the left above looking trendy and promoting “fashionable” causes.

As for the welfare state – its existence is only necessary because capitalism cannot survive without a “reserve army of labour”. It is essential to maintaining the system as a whole that there is intense competition for work to keep wages down. Capitalism cannot survive without having a certain percentage of the population unemployed. To compensate for this, we have to have some sort of safety net. Unfortunately, the net is being sold off left, right and centre by Blair.

By the way Caroline, If only your diagnosis of Blair was true. I suppose I can only dream.

Poverty is surely always relative to the general distribution of wealth in any given society. In the US, the proportion of the population with an income below 50% of the median is 17% compared to 9% in Sweden or France. Sorry for delving into the “left-wing” think-tank that is the US national census office.

We have a bit of a chicken and egg situation in trying to explain poverty by teenage pregnancy. See research on http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/journals/3325101.html. (Is this more left-wing b.s – I don’t know what isn’t on this site). Is teenage pregnancy the cause or the result of social deprivation? The same with Crime.

Overall I’m confused by your avocation of individual responsibility and your simultaneous attempt to blame everything on some mythical outside force – “progressives”, “socialists” etc.

Finally, Orwell, the good socialist, would be spinning in his grave if he knew he was being used to bolster the inexcusable actions of some right-wing loon. I see the moral implications of this case clearly – it is a victory in holding back other Daily Mail revered vigilantes from taking the law into their own hands and killing somebody when there is NO IMMIDIATE threat to their lives. Whatever you think of the little shit that was killed – he still was a human being and did not deserve to die.

I really think we should wrap this up soon.

This insight into people like Huntley is fascinating. Frankly, I had not seen him before as an intellectual tossed between assessments of Capitalism and Socialism and finally succumbing to the need for human sacrifice by shedding the blood of virgins in a blow against society.

I had looked at it on a far less ethereal plane of a dysfunctional amoral human being who needed a cage to force him to live with himself and stop roping other people into his chaotic life.

Hello, Susan. I've never heard of service clubs but they don't sound as if there is even a remote connection with the grammar school concept.

Grammar schools were (there are a few remaining, so I'll change to the present tense) are part of the state school system. It used to be that all children at age 11 took an exam to determine their interests and academic abilities. It was called the Eleven Plus. As it determined, essentially, what academic stream a child would end up in, some people thought 11 was too young and it should be changed to 13.

Nevertheless,all children sat this exam at 11. Children who had demonstrated a high capacity for intellectual rigour, and had it confirmed by the results of the Eleven Plus, went forward to a state grammar school. These are not similar to anything in the US. They are not schools for "the gifted" or any of that. They are simply schools that require more academically than regular schools. The teachers are of higher academic standards - real mathematicians, for example, rather than someone who just knows how to teach math. Real physicists. And so on.

Grammar school children are sought after by the universities because they have demonstrated high qualities of self-discipline and application as well as academic qualities.

(All towns had a grammar school, incidentally. Some cities had two or three.)

Children who hadn't passed the Eleven Plus simply continued in the regular state education system, going to a Secondary school. They were less gifted, but they still got a good education. The good thing about grammar schools is, very bright children - although studying many of the same subjects as children in Secondary schools - are not held back by slower classmates. The whole class is clever and they can move on quickly.

Equally important, none of the people marking the Eleven Plus had any idea of any child's circumstances. If an ethnic child from a miserably poor home was bright, it would show up on the Eleven Plus and that child would be given a place in a grammar school. Grammar schools allowed tens of thousands, over the years, of disadvantaged children to climb out of their circumstances and go on to a life of achievement and reward. The current leader of the Conservative Party in Britain was a grammar school boy.

Well, you knew socialism and equality of outcome would be rearing its sickening head at some point, and here it is. The socialists decided that it wasn't "fair" that children were getting an education suited to their abilities. Everyone must be the same and all must win.

So a socialist government started closing down all the grammar schools and shovelling children wholesale into the new fad: Comprehensives. These were supposed to stream children, but of course, they didn't. Everyone got the same old load of cold porridge. Bright children are held back by dull classmates with no interest in school, but who yearn to get out and learn how to be car mechanics. Or disruptive children and children who sneer at learning.

Britain used to have a very high academic achievement reputation, but no longer. As most of the grammar schools have been destroyed, ordinary middle class parents are beggaring themselves to send their children to independent (non-state-sector) schools - just to get them out of the comprehensive mess. Independent schools have proliferated since the destruction of the grammar schools. The tragedy is, only middle class families can afford private sector education (and even then, they have to take out loans); and there is no longer a route forward for bright children regardless of ability to pay. But that's socialism for you!

I don't mean that everyone who attended a grammar school went on to a life of achievement and wealth. But failure to do so certainly wasn't for lack of opportunity.

Sorry about the long post, but grammar schools were unique and completely democratic. Little arch socialist Tony Blair was, needless to say, educated in the private sector. Many socialist MPs in the British Parliament send their children to private sector schools. But there's no hypocrite like a commie hypocrite! The Soviet system had sharp, unleapable bounds between the masses and the elite. Just like Britain's socialists.

Anyone who calls someone a troll is almost allways a bully. When ever anyone puts a view forward a lot they call them a troll to shut them up. Yet if I oput there view forward suddenely i would stop be caled a troll. Is Romulus a wife beater? Is that why he hates my posts?
It is funny how if he puts forward his agenda alot that isnlt trolling.
It's funny how so many critics of the victim culture think it is wrong to complain about wife beating, rape, bullying,
But if you do a typing error or send in your view alot then suddenley it is "how dare you". Typical bullying priorities.
I hate that about bullies.

Grammar schools breed snobbery, bullying, and elitism.
Grammar schools are wrong as they breed a sort of elitist attitude. People who think 90% of the population are dumb savages who don't matter. I would have gone to secondary modern and therefore would have been regarded as a dumb savage who because i wasn't very good at english would have regarded as ripe for any sortof bullying.
Elitist grammar school bullies would bully those in their own grammar schools and regard the inferiors at secondary modern as too stupid to deserve any concern for.
Snobbery produces other evils, so remove grammar schools.

UYes Rory you are a troll. You write the same theme regardless of the thread...perhaps you cannot read.

Grammar Schools are the very best Britain ever produced...whether you are a "dumb savage" or not is hard to say, but certainly comprehensive schools do have bullying on a scale never before imagined.......I had never heard of suicides because of bullying before the collective-educational farms were created.

I don't hate your posts at all Rory. I just think they are irrelevant on the threads you post them. Did you ever get to put the shapes in the slots as a child ? That is designed to help you recognise what fits where....you are a victim of your educational opportunity apparently....maybe you can get compensation ?

Caroline, thanks for the long explanation about British grammar schools. It does indeed sound like an engine of progress for the lower classes that was destroyed by the socialists in their eternal quest for equality of outcome at all costs. What a selfish, sorry outcome for Britain! You are right, US schools never had anything like that. I was lucky to attend Catholic schools for the first 7 years, which had a higher academic requirement and which actually handed out prizes for the top students, but when I switched to a state school I was really frustrated. As a person of above-average IQ I was continually frustrated by being forced downward so that I could be "equal" to the average and below-average students. It eventually led to all sorts of emotional problems that took me years to sort out. I actually began to believe it was "bad" to excel at anything and had a hard time competing in the work world initially as a result.

In California we do have something called "charter schools" which are schools that are literally run by the parents instead of by the local, often, heavily politicized, "progressive" school boards. These charter schools receive state funding but the parents must do one heck of a lot of volunteer work to get them up and running and keep them that way. I have heard of some charter schools that are acedemically excellent; some that are bullshit.

The school my own daughter attends is quite excellent. It is not private nor a charter school, but it is a school in an affluent enough district where many of the mothers don't work outside the home (and the fathers are lucky enough to be employed in flexible work-hour jobs.) The parents have basically taken over this school too, donating lots of unpaid labor, raising funds for "extras" like music and art education that have been cut by the state budget, doing volunteer repair, building and mainetenance work. The school board for this school would never in a million years get away with forcing kids to learn "progressive" crap like invented spelling, whole language "reading", New New Math or any of the other shit that Melanie spells out so well in "All Must Have Prizes." And, needless to say, no "Free Mumia" teach-ins either.

It's the poorer school districts that are at the mercy of the "progressives." The parents in those districts are struggling to survive, often single parents, with too many other responsibilities to fight the school boards for decent education or volunteer to raise funds for music teachers, etc. Those are the ones who get whole language, invented spelling, "Ebonics" (don't ask what "Ebonics" is), "Free Mumia" teach-ins, "diversity training" etc. The children serve as living petri dishes for every single educational and poltical fad to come down the pike for the past 30 years or so. This of course means that the poor and lower-middle class students keep falling further and further behind. The "progressives" love it of course -- there's nothing a "progressive" loves more than exponentially increasing masses of angry, disadvantaged young people.

Service clubs are not for children, they are sort of like Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, but for adults (although they do have affiliated organizations for children). They are sort of a cross between the Masons, a traditional businessman's networking club, and a philanthropy. Men dress up in silly hats and attend "secret" meetings with funny handshakes and all that. Lots of harmless male bonding stuff. The real point of the service clubs is business and community networking -- say, if you are an insurance agent new in town and you want to develop some clients, you join a service club and start doing "community service" activities. The Lions Club concentrates on funding research for the blind and vision care for the poor; the Kiwanas focus on improving educational opportunities for the disadvantaged; the Shriners fund burn care research and burn care specialist hospitals. They also do a lot of run-of-the-mill community work like sponsoring 4th of July Picnics and delivering blankets to the elderly during a cold snap. That sort of thing.

At one time service clubs were extremely important "pillars of the community" all over the US, and they still are influential today, but much less so than they were. The "progressives" of course, despise them, as they despise everything that is privately endowed rather than a function of the state. In the 60s and 70s, the "progressives" started a concerted propaganda effort to discredit the service clubs which resulted in a big fall-off in membership and commitment. "Community service" was deemed uncool and "square"; if you really wanted to make a difference in your community, you needed to become an "activist" (meaning, an unpaid shill for various left-wing causes lobbying to expand the state.)

I think it was one of either Melanie's or Dalrymple's articles which mentioned how "pillars of the community" in Britain are constantly subjected to ridicule and discrediting.

When I read that I immediately thought of the North American service clubs and their similar treatment at the hands of the "progressives".

(If you've ever driven through rural and suburban America, you will often see a highway sign at the entrace of a town with the words "Welcome to Mudville, Iowa" or whatever. All around that sign you'll see various wooden emblems, like one sporting a large "L" or a "K", etc. Those are the emblems of the service clubs that have chapters in that town. And almost all towns have them.)

Okay rob, one more time. Here is my commentary on a few of your responses:

"Poverty is surely always relative to the general distribution of wealth in any given society. In the US, the proportion of the population with an income below 50% of the median is 17% compared to 9% in Sweden or France."

It's useless to compare income disparity in the US with income disparity in Sweden or even France. That's because there are many places in the US where a wage-earner can buy a modern three-bedroom, 2 bathroom house on an acre of land for $65,000. The US is a big, big land; Europe is a small, small land. The law of supply and demand means that the US has a lot of living space available in many areas for very cheap indeed, whilst Europe does not.

The cost of living is low in such places in the US and the wages are correpondingly so as well. Conversely, in San Francisco or New York, the same three bedroom, 2 bathroom house on an acre of land (if you can even find it) would cost several million dollars. Wages are correspondingly much higher in New York and San Francisco as a result. That's where you get disparity of income. But it is not necessarily disparity of standard of living. Only a lunk-headed socialist obsessed with "equality of outcome at all costs" would even think of commenting on such "disparity" without thinking through the correspondent issues. The person living in the $65,000 house in South Dakota may actually have a higher standard of living and better financial stability than the person living in the $1 million condo in Manhattan (or Stockholm, for that matter), but you would still count him as "poor" because his income is lower! I know very few middle-class Europeans who own anything like a 3-bedroom, 2-bath modern house on an acre of land, yet a "low-income" person in South Dakota, Kansas, etc. may indeed find such a bounty well within his or her financial capability.

But nevertheless, thanks for admitting that poverty is relative and that the actual standard of living enjoyed by the "poor" person is meaningless to a socialist (Mississippi, traditionally the poorest and most backward state in the Union, has a higher per-capita income than Sweden.) Therefore, "poverty" can never be eradicated in any society without artificially forcing equality of outcome for all. And a few posts ago you were actually denying that socialists value equality of outcome above everything else! Now you have just admitted that is indeed the goal. Nice going, rob, thanks for helping me prove my point.

Regarding unwed teen-age pregnancy: yes, I would expect that a socialist would reduce this like every other social problem to an issue of "financial deprivation." But if that were the case, how can you explain the fact that teen-age pregnancies have declined in the US by 35 percent in the past 9 years? According to you the US is a pandemic of financial and social deprivation, so by your logic the rate should be going up, up and more up, especially since that mean old right-wing Bush got elected and we've had a mild recession for the past three years. But the rate is going down, down, down.

Regarding the moral lessons of Tony Martin's case: the lesson here is that a harmless, eccentric old man was repeatedly attacked by criminals and the authorities couldn't -- or possibly wouldn't -- protect him. Having suffered yet another attack, with no expected help forthcoming from the police, he did what any self-respecting person would do and that was taking measures to protect himself. If he did it badly, whose fault is that? He should never have been put in that position in the first place.

And why would a burglar with 38 prior convictions be allowed to roam free to continue to victimize hamless old people like Tony Martin? Shouldn't he have been in prison?

The state is unable to protect a harmless old man (who had had no criminal charges against him prior to the shooting incident) from a vicious, career criminal who has repeatedly victimized other vulnerable innocent people. When in desperation the victim fights back, the state prefers to punish the victim more severely than the criminal.

I think the moral implications are quite clear.

As for the impact of "progressives" on social responsibility and self-reliance, how can people practice what they've never learned in the first place? In case you haven't noticed, irresponsibility and lack of self-reliance is celebrated in the media, in our schools, everywhere. The old values that have seen us through many a crisis -- self-reliance, personal responsibility, thrift, moderation, moral probity, have all been thrown out the window these past 30 years.

You must be a youngish sort of person, rob, or else you would no better than to blame all of this on "consumerism" and "capitalism." I lived through the 60s and 70s, and it definitely wasn't "right-wing Daily Mail readers" who were urging everyone, especially teen-agers and children, to "turn on, tune in and drop out." It was the left, left, left all the way. Including quite a lot of people who saw themselves as radical socialists, "one-worlders" and all the rest.

Sorry, in that last paragraph above it should obviously be "know better than" rather than "no better than."

Preview is your friend!

Hi, Susan - I'm familiar with the Shriners and Kiwanas and all that. I didn't realise that's what you were referring to.

Grammar schools - the few that are left - enabled all bright children (from middle class homes as well as impoverished homes - all testing was blind) to be educated with other bright children. Even children who couldn't go on to university because they had to contribute to the family income had a head start if they could put the name of a grammar school on their job application. It was like being stamped Pre-Approved. Maybe they never went on to great things, but they would have got a job to train to be a middle manager - white collar - a million miles from their factory worker mother and coal miner father, for example.

British children in "comprehensive" schools are subject to the same ideological crap they are in the US. They don't have Ebonics (yet)but they have as part of their coursework making Deepavali cards. It's an Indian (from India) festival that has absolutely nothing to do with Britain. We have a tiny Indian presence in Britain, but they are achievers in business and the professions and don't need (or want) this garbage. Why are indigenous British children whose roots in Britain may go back 2,000 years and who are nominally Christian, be wasting their learning years making Deepavali cards? Well, we know the answer, don't we? I had a friend who made his daughter take hers back to school and give it to her teacher, saying, "We're not Indian. We have no interest in festivals of India." Which, of course, motivated the teacher to call her a "little Englander" - too provincial (and dangerous) to see beyond Britain's borders and embrace the wonderful world of Kumbaya.

This (single) father was calumnied for wanting his daughter's time in the classroom spent learning instead of "absorbing" other cultures.

I think the problem we've all identified is, children in state schools are, by and large, being taught by vested interests. They belong to teachers' unions, and teachers' unions, as indoctrinators, are loved by the Democrats and British socialists. No cry for higher pay ever went unheeded by the British socialist party.

And they are ruthless about protecting their interests. Teach vivid "sex education" (why?) to children of 10 and whet their interest. Get them out of the education system and into their own apartments (yes, pregnant children of 15 are being given state-subsidised apartments at taxpayer expense) and capture that little voter in the socialist net for life.

It is perverse.

Caroline you are right. Education used to be local, first Church then local government; then it became national after WW2 and part of the great "we can perfect" mode along Soviet Lines...well they got "Soviet Man - the Alcoholic" and the West got "Dysfunctional Dan" as people rebelled at being programmed into some idealist's conception of living.

The aim of State education is to turn out a standard product at the lowest average-cost, and any pupil that requires a higher marginal cost is force-fitted into the standard-issue strait-jacket in the interests of conformity and ease of production.

It has become a place where the economics of crude mass-production are employed and an ideology is forced upon unbelieving children who rebel at the earliest opportunity......it is no less ideological than the systems in Nazi Germany or the USSR with doctored textbooks, party-loyalists in the classroom, and enforced conformity with the ideology of the party in power.

It has become rigid and bureaucratic and every US fad has been imported into the UK because the gibberish gets written in English and relayed to the classroom by the vacuous like David Miliband, MP.

Susan - Referring to your post, above. The US has the best prices in the world. In Europe, I pay one euro (around $1.25) for an apple. Yes. One apple. Because of price fixing. No wonder the Europeans are so poor (and will get poorer the further they fall behind in the educational leagues.)

It depresses me to learn, via your posts, that the school system in the US is sliding down the same tubes as Britain's and Europe's.

How these emotionally strangulated people slithered into power I still don't understand. Maybe they slithered in under the net, because they certainly couldn't qualify by the normal standards European and American education had reached - before it got degraded.

Socialism is evil. Sometimes it has a nice face and sometimes it has an ugly face, but the point is to steal individuality and responsibility from people and siphon it (and their earnings) into the state.

Why?

Why are such large swathes of the British and American establishment bent on destroying it? Take Teddy Kennedy ... (please!)... and dozens of others whose hearts bleed for people they have encouraged not to learn and not to be productive. Who they have encouraged to feel isolated. Britain is the same and, I fear, the Conservatives have become so intimidated by these strange parasites that they are no longer preaching the true values conservatism, capitalism and self-help.

One hundred years before, our forefathers would have been astonished at how we have limply allowed the intellectual and moral rigor of their bequeathment to be pissed away down the drain of self-seeking sanctimony and hectoring scamperers after the moral high ground. The socialists are savages.

Romulus - Yes, doctored texts. What chance do children have in the state system? None. They are allowed out of the corral, branded.

There is absolutely no point in watching TV shows like Question Time, because they invite two fanatical lefters and one weenie rightwinger and a preselected audience full of lefty rottweilers. The lefties say the lefty script and get applause. The rightist tries to present a case, but because he/she was chosen to be weak, doesn't get a chance agains the howling of the audience mob. By such means, the BBC seeks to promote the idea that Conservatives are so batty that their views are too crazy to be considered.

Caroline and Rom: great posts as usual.

Yes Rom, you are right, I'm ashamed to say that many of those stupid educational fads and fashions that have wreaked such havoc on the UK's educational system have been imported from the US. The grandfather of it all was a Marxist (of course) American named John Dewey. The goal was to destroy the US educational system and create huge, bitter social divides where none had existed before. They have succeeded quite well in that endeavor, particularly in California where the racial and ethnic mix are so diverse that emotional social faultlines are easily inflamed and exploited.

Caroline, I'm sorry to hear that apples are so prohibitively expensive in Europe. You have to be a freaking, drooling moron to go hungry in California, where fruit is so cheap that even people who have fruit trees in their own gardens often prefer to buy it at the store than pick it up off the ground.

About the California educational system: California and (to a lesser extent, New York) is today a high-stakes, cultural battleground. Twenty percent of the population of the US lives in just those two states; how they go, the rest of the nation goes. (Plus, CA and NY control most of the various media and cultural outputs of the US.)

The decent people have fought back against the cultral destructiveness of the "progressives" but it is a never-ending battle. Victory is not in any way assured. In California as in Britain, every day normal people with normal, rational opinions are presented as "far right-wing wackos" while people who crusade to make it legal for vagrants to shit and pee on the public streets are presented as "caring community activists."

Rom, you asked earlier what socialism or capitalism had to do with the moral depravity of someone like Ian Huntley. It's true that Huntley is scum who is 100 percent responsible for his own moral depravity.

But I would bet you dollars to donuts, the "progressives" will soon start filling your airwaves and publications with Huntley sob stories. His case will be presented as one that "could have been prevented by a more just, caring society." There will be calls for more social programs, more anti-poverty programs (and more taxes), more publicly sponsored psychotherapy programs, to "prevent the development of more Ian Huntleys." None of these programs will actually work, mind you, but they will suck a lot of resources away from the things that actually do work, such as better policing and tougher sentencing from the courts.

We have seen this happen in California; our newspapers are full of sob stories about poor, pathetic criminals who have been "forced" by the evil unfair capitalist system to knock over a convenience store for the third time in a row, and are thus now on their way to serve a 25-year-sentence under the "evil" California 3 strikes law. One has to search on the Internet and consult the victim's rights organizations run by "far right-wing wackos" to find out that the homicide rate in California has declined by 40 percent since the 3 strikes law went into effect. Needless to say, there are no newspaper stories about the hundreds --perhaps thousands -- of people whose lives have been saved by the 3 strikes law these past 9 years.

The scumbag who murdered the child that I wrote about a few posts above is now on death row in the California prison system, awaiting the first of many, many court appeals that will waste several million of our tax dollars; he may be executed 20 years from now, or he may not be. He has been given his own spiffily-designed webpage by a "progressive" Canadian organization that has a soft spot for US death row denizens; he posts a lot nonsense on it about how horrible the world has been to him. The little girl he raped and then murdered is still quite dead, however.

Our newspapers are full of "progressive" moral pieties about how we must spend lots of money on social programs to make our system "fairer" so that more monsters like this child murderer do not "develop" in the future.

There are no newspaper stories about the thousands of Californians who somehow, somewhere, got the same "raw deal" as this man, but who have somehow managed not to become serial child rapist-murderers.

Melanie:

You must be very proud to have prompted the hard hitting discussion that has emanated from this thread. Some real allies aboard, huh? Makes it all wortwhile, doesn't it? Great stuff. Maybe there is some hope for us all, even though a few of the other threads have attracted, from time to time, some bizarre - whadda they call 'em - moonbats?

Caroline, I can rest assured there will be as few 'sob-stories' about Ian Huntley as about Ian Brady or his female accomplice.......noone can shift deep-felt public revulsion, it was impossible over almost 40 years for Myra Hindley and it cannot be done.

Marketing and advertising can only persuade, not convert.

There a quite a few child murders in Germany too - more than you imagine, and probably more than in Britain.....but again the Politicians' Union has determined they should not be executed.......the responsibility burdens atheist politicians who believe an issue postponed is an issue solved.

Many have turned to fanatical Islam because the secular authorities in their societies have failed, proven themselves corrupt, incompetent, and humiliated their populace..........it is not a sense of frustration limited to Muslim states, but I wonder where the public in Europe will retreat as they give up increasingly on public institutions.......in the past it was Fascism......

One of the first acts on the new Reichskanzler A. H. was to order the execution of two brothers who had been highwaymen robbing motorists entering Berlin.

Another primary act was to create camps for recalcitrant teenagers to instill discipline and mete out punishment.

Law and Order was a key issue behind his support, together with jobs, nationalism, and a sense of national purpose against foreign-imposed humiliations.........it is a heady brew, and what had the Left done prior to his accession ?

Failed. The SPD had failed miserably to deal with the economic crisis, and the extreme USPD Communists did all they could to undermine the SPD, hoping to remove the soft left so the Right would triumph and pave the way for Workers' Revolution in the textbook/comicbook version of the future they held to be fact......instead they undermine all the institutions which could have resisted the rise of the Austrian Corporal as head of a coalition government, which did not crumble as the Hard Left predicted.

On a slightly different note, albeit related the England Rugby Team scored a great victory as a 'team', but the efforts of media are focussed on trying to create a split by focussing on Johnny Wilkinson who kicked the winning drop-goal....to his evident discomfort......there is an attempt to build up their own media-hero to destroy.....whereas he just wants to be a member of a successful team.......it is the need of our media to create 'cult' status which they can give and take-away that has undermined much of the team effort in public life, in politics, education, and business; and thereby corrodes institutions be making them subject to the person in charge, rather than a 'trust' to be handed from one generation to the next like the olive groves of old.

Romulus - You're confusing me with Susan - not that I mind being confused with such an incisive mind, but I am British and I would never postulate that there will ever be any sob stories about Huntley.

I am not sure that he provokes quite the degree of revulsion that Myra Hindley and Ian Brady provoke even after 40 years, but he most certainly will never be rehabilitated in any way in the public mind. Myra Hindley had a couple of moonbats on her side for her endless campaigns for release because "she'd changed" -- this went over like a lead balloon with the British public -- but I don't think Huntley, who seems to be passive-aggressive -- will even draw a couple of crazies to fight for his release.

Personally, I'd like to see him dead. But in lieu of that, imprisonment until he's in his 70s seems OK because it will be 50 years of abject misery. Already, the cells on either side of him and the cell directly below and the cell directly above have been emptied because the prison authorities are aware that there were plans to burrow a tunnel into his cell and murder him. (Yaaaaayyyy!) So he will spend the next 50 isolated from human contact except for the guards, who have their own opinions about him. Frank Pulley may want to step in here and let us know what kind of life he faces under these circumstances.

Maybe in six or seven years, he might get a moonbat to advocate a softening of his sentence, but it won't work any more than did with Hindley. The British public has been implacably revolted and no judge would dare order him released.

The one danger is if his case gets taken up by the European Court or whatever it's called. Tony Blair stupidly and greedily (he seeks his future in the pantheon of European dictators after his stint wrecking Britain is up) signed up for their Human Rights thought fascism.

BTW, I second Verity's suggestion that Frank Pulley should write a book about how the case was mishandled. Frank, you've got a rivetting writing style and you've got the insider knowledge. Why not do a two-page outline, write the first two chapters and submit them to agents? Someone will grab it, I betcha!

Sorry Caroline, I didn't mean to conflate you with Susan, and I am pleased you see it positively !

Actually, Huntley had two problems...one is the 50 year sentence, and the European Court can do nothing about that since it is in statute and not a tariff fixed by a politician overriding a judge.

The other issue for Huntley is Rampton where he had his assessment. As he deteriorates mentally over the years he will probably get transferred indefinitely to Rampton and that is almost impossible for him to leave as it would make him liable to return to a normal prison having been supposedly 'cured'....my bet is that his personality will fragment over the coming years as he falls apart

Romulus - You could be right about him fragmenting although I wouldn't count on this happening anytime soon.

Like Myra Hindley, he is an immensely manipulative person. I would guess that it was Hindley's constant attempts at manipulation that kept her going for so long. As long as she had that batty lord whose name I've forgotten conned into using his supposed influence for her, she had hope.

Huntley seems to be cut from the same cloth. He tried to manipulate the police right from the start. He had a convenient, but not fatal, suicide attempt. He chose young girls to have illegal sex with because young girls are easily dominated and manipulated by an older man. He seems to have dominated and manipulated Carr. He had her building her days and her activities around him.

I don't know whether people who are this blindly self-centred fragment easily or not. I have a feeling he'll keep going for quite some time, manipulating people to rally round him in a passive-aggressive way - in other words, have people begging to let them help him. Then he may or may not come apart. I don't know enough about this type of personality, but it would be interesting to hear from someone who does.

Actually Caroline it is the personality disorder. Often these give the perpetrator amazing insight into other person's psychology and allow them to manipulate.

You know how the idiot-savant can multiply 10 figure digits by 10-figure digits in his head, but is otherwise dysfunctional ? well in a similar way people who have Asocial Personality Disorder or BPD (www.bpdcentral.com) are highly perceptive in knowing what makes the other person tick, but have no introspection or remorse themselves........they use the other person like a musician uses an instrument, to make sounds pleasing to themselves.

Yes, I know it's a personality disorder, and I think Myra Hindley had it as well. I never bought into the claim that she was manipulated by Brady. They were a pair.

I think Huntley is the same type, except more passive aggressive - but still with an end to manipulating other people to his ends. I think he's twice "tried to kill himself" at times convenient to himself. That's why I don't agree with you that any personality fragmentation is imminent. It may happen, but it will be many a long year before it does and only after he has exhausted all avenues to manipulating the system.

Okay guys maybe you are right -- there will be no sob stories about Huntley in his present condition. But if he decides to become a Marxist crusader for "prison justice" or a convert to Islam, all bets are off. The Guardian would at the very least applaud the conversion to Islam.

Susan - My reading:

1. He would be too proud to "convert" to Islam, which I think he would consider not worthy of him. I suspect he sees himself as "true British".

2. No fellow Islamic "converts" or genuine Muslims in prison are ever going to get a chance to have a word in his ear because he is going to be isolated for the next 50 years.

Again, my reading, but I have a feeling he will wait for people (prison reformers, bleeding hearts, the usual suspects) to come to *him* and will allow himself to be reluctantly persuaded to .... don't know. Have no idea. But I think he will stick with Christianity, if anything.

And no, I don't think the Guardianistas will take up his case. Over the course of a long 40 years, only a couple of moonbats took up for Myra Hindley. Sometimes there is such universal revulsion that everyone goes really quiet.

O Carline, you sound like a women who received a Guardian subscription for Christmas !!!! LOL

O Caroline, you sound like a woman who received a Guardian subscription for Christmas !!!! LOL

Caroline, I just did a quick Google search on the Myra Hindley case and the "batty lord" who tried to get her released was none other than the late Lord Longford, socialist MP and father-in-law of lefty moonbat playwright Harold Pinter.

When he died Longford was said to be in the midst of writing a book called "Hitler -- Was He Really So Bad After All?"

I am not surprised.

Susan - Yeah, Longford! He fought Hindley's case for around 20 years ("she's really, really changed and she is so sorry for torturing those children who died in horror screaming "Mummy, mummy!" as she and Brady murdered them at their leisure and recorded their desperate shrieking for their mothers to enjoy later - yes, that Lord Longford).

Pinter's current wife is the daughter of said lord. They all roil around in a hissing vipers' nest of grudges and fury.

Yes, I know, Antonia Fraser. I've often enjoyed reading her historical biographies in the past. But now I feel kind of guilty about it, knowing what kind of a family she comes from (and to whom she's married.)

Her second marriage though.....her father was a well-meaning man well-manipulated as many are, who was humoured and ignored by sequential Home Secretaries......far worse is the ivory-towered Lady Warnock who has wrought havoc throughout Education despite being a private school Convent girl herself.....and chaos in the field of genetics

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/12/29/MNG7V3VRBU1.DTL

Rom, Caroline: Coincidentally, this article regarding a private initiative in the US to rescue poor kids from rampant state school idiocy appeared recently in my local newspaper.

Excerpt: "At every KIPP school, students wear uniforms. They must walk in quiet, single-file lines at all times, and candy is absolutely forbidden. Art and music are fundamental subjects of study in addition to math and reading. There is a contract for each student -- a document signed by parent, principal and child attesting to their commitment to education."

And: "It (the school) would teach character as well as academics until 5 p.m. College would become as common a concept as recess, and teachers would give every child their cell phone number for homework help."

Teaching character as well as academics -- wow, what an unusual concept.

Interesting article Susan, but don't you feel we are re-inventing the wheel ?

Someone sometime seems to have taken the wheels off our waggon and derailed us all.....still, it is what they call a "cycle of deprivation" unleashed by quack theorists in a madcap experiment over 40 years.......maybe KIPP can get the waggon back on track

Yes, of course in a way it's re-inventing the wheel. (Although in the US, we never had school until 5 p.m. The school days were timed to be out at 2:30 or 3 p.m., so that children could be home in time to help with the family farm chores. For the same reason we still have 3 months of summer vacation...although the old family farm is mostly a thing of the past.)

Isn't that the cycle of human history? Every generation or two, we get sloppy and careless and forget about the good stuff we used to have in "the old days." Or,more likely, the younger generations decide to throw something out just because "it's old" and adopt something else just because it's "new." Never mind the intrinsic value of the thing being thrown out just because it's "old." Never mind if the "new" thing is not really all that great. It wins out just because it is "new."

Post-war US, the nation's home construction industry threw up millions of plain boxes done up in the "modern style" of the 50s and 60s. These homes were inferior in a lot of ways to the types of houses that were being built pre-war, but they were "modern" (at the time) so people flocked to buy them.

But I've been in many a pre-war house that had a lot of amenities the post-war houses do not, not to mention being much more aesthetically pleasing.

People are just stupid sometimes, that's all.

Rob has it badly wrong if he believes that capitalism requires high levels of unemployment. Full employment is the biggest incentive to invest capital in automation that exists. This both lowers the cost of production and increases economic activity. Socialism syphons off investment capital by increasing taxation and removing incentives at all levels and destroys jobs, as can be seen currently in Scotland and Wales.

IAN HUNTLY IS 1 BITCH WHO SHUD BE TORTUDE ON EARTH AND IN HELL. CHOP HIS DICK OFF,LET HIM STARVE,BREAK HIS KNEES AND FEED HIM TO WILD PIGS. WHAT ABOUT THAT FOR TOURTURE

What greater spite can one have than to mis-spell his name; still it isn't the only literary offence you want to inflict on him....

IAN HUNTLY IS 1 BITCH WHO SHUD BE TORTUDE ON EARTH AND IN HELL. CHOP HIS DICK OFF,LET HIM STARVE,BREAK HIS KNEES AND FEED HIM TO WILD PIGS. WHAT ABOUT THAT FOR TOURTURE,

Posted by: Huntly hater at January 6, 2004 09:25 PM

Seeing that Mr blair has committed a much greater crime as Mr Huntley, you would presumibly demand the same fate for him.

Mr Blair has committed mass murder, what should his punishment be?

What made you hate Mr Huntley so much, and Mr Blair so little, even though Mr Blairs crimes are far greater?

As Bob Marley sang,"We must release ourselves from mental slavery"!

IAN HUNTLY IS 1 BITCH

What sort of expression is this.

Do you watch a lot of television? Mr huntly hater

Rob has it badly wrong if he believes that capitalism requires high levels of unemployment. Full employment is the biggest incentive to invest capital in automation that exists. This both lowers the cost of production and increases economic activity. Socialism syphons off investment capital by increasing taxation and removing incentives at all levels and destroys jobs, as can be seen currently in Scotland and Wales.

To believe in capitalism is to believe in something that does not exist.