A coruscating article has appeared in the Sunday Times by Shaun Bailey,* a black community worker on the impoverished estate in London’s North Kensington where he grew up. The article is noteworthy not so much for the vivid picture he paints of systematic lawlessness, thuggery, drugs and degradation but for the people he holds responsible for this affront to civilisation -- the so-called progressive liberals whose destruction of morality and all the disciplines that hold society together has pulled it apart.
Lots of kids here, getting towards 25%, smoke weed and skunk. It’s a serious problem. Use is starting younger than it did. It affects their mental health. It undermines their schooling and their life prospects. At our local park, young schoolgirls come around and smoke, young schoolboys, too. They smoke on the way to the bus to go to school. It affects their ability to concentrate. Weed affects their brain chemistry while their brains are still forming. These kids need all the motivation they can get. The drugs rob them of it. So they move into crime and become more addicted and need to smoke more. So they get excluded, sent to a referral unit or are truanting more or less permanently.
This is one thing that middle-class adult smokers who support liberalising drugs don’t understand. As adults it may not be affecting their brain chemistry doing it once a week. They also have jobs to go to. They may control it. But these young kids don’t. When the liberal classes have the view that 'oh, we can all smoke a bit', they do not realise how it generates crime for young people here who need to finance their habit. By not making drugs seem like a big deal, by decriminalising the drug, they are criminalising the kids. This sanctioning of drugs pushes poor kids into bullying at school, then into low-level crime to get the money for drugs. This introduces them to criminality. Most children don’t begin with the desire or the confidence to rob someone. But once they bully for items at school they gradually build up and their targets become more frequent and bigger until they rob adults.
Drinking, smoking and hanging around with undesirables also leads some girls to adopt a different sexual code. They let themselves be shared by the boys. I have been told that if a girl fancies your friend, you’ll make her sleep with you first to get to your friend. Young girls are starting to accept this. They mistake sex for affection. The next step up from this is when you get girls starting to have a baby just to get real love. Many of the teenagers are the children of the first generation of single mothers to be housed here. The assumption became that it was all right for mothers to have babies on their own. So it is doubly like that for their daughters...
If you talk to young people, they all support marriage. But people with our lives, in our circles, understand you are better off if you are a single parent. It has reached the point where a lot of people who are not single parents present themselves as such because it makes financial sense. If anybody thinks that people like us don’t sit around and have these discussions, they are deluding themselves. We soon figure out which way it will make us the most money. And that’s an example of how we are trapped by government policy, which discourages us from raising our children in nuclear families.
School was where young people could have gained some moral fibre, but governments have got rid of schools that gave strong moral messages. Young people want boundaries, but school has been emasculated so it can’t give them. Removing religion and what it is to be British from school has been a disaster. Where else are young people going to learn ethics? Citizenship is not enough. That’s how we’ve had bombers here. They’ve come here and not been exposed to the good things about being British...'
Read it all, and weep for Britain. Then demand -- DEMAND -- of your MP what he or she is going to do about. And if you are a Tory, ask David Cameron whether he still supports the legalisation of drugs.
* The article is a condensed version of a pamphlet published by the Centre for Policy Studies, which can be read here.
