🚀 go-pugleaf

matt@private.mail (Matt) wrote in message news:<KGDIHJTF37883.8921180556@Gilgamesh-frog.org>...
> ENGLAND: THE HELL THAT IS MULTI-RACIAL BRITAIN 
> 
> THE TIMES 
> 
> Opinion
> September 17, 2003
> Our inner cities are like prisons with no warders
> Theodore Dalrymple 
> 
> The reigning culture of impunity will lead to more gun mayhem and
> misery It has been remarked that if Edwardian laws and legal practices
> were applied to modern England, we should all be in jail; whereas if
> our laws and legal practices had been applied to Edwardian England, no
> one would have been in jail.
> 
> It is difficult to overstate the culture of impunity that now reigns
> in much of modern Britain; a culture of which the horrible murder of
> both the crack-dealer, Bertram Byfield, and his seven-year-old
> daughter, Toni-Ann, is a mature fruit. Even if the culprit is caught
> by the police, this will be far from the end of the matter: it is
> perfectly possible that no witnesses will come forward for fear of the
> associates of the accused, and therefore he will go free.
> 
> Not long ago, heavily armed police stood guard outside my office in my
> hospital. This was because the ward in which I work had just received
> a man whom the police knew to have been the perpetrator of a notorious
> gangland killing, and who himself required surgery after he had just
> been attacked by several men (associates of his victim) with machetes.
> The police knew the man to be the killer, but no one would come
> forward to testify against him, and so they had no hope of a
> conviction; on the other hand, they feared that his assailants would
> try again while he was in the hospital, this time with more high-tech
> weapons.
> 
> Both these stories are particularly dramatic, but it would be wrong to
> suppose that, in their essence, they are untypical. Nor would it be
> right to suggest that, because all the characters involved in both
> stories were black (that is to say of Jamaican descent; Africans and
> other West Indians having a far lower propensity to such crimes), that
> the impunity that is the generator of such crimes extends only to
> blacks.
> 
> It is true that gun culture is (as yet) largely confined to what I
> suppose I must call the gold-front-tooth Jamaican and Jamaican-descent
> community. But this culture and everything associated with it is much
> admired by a large number of white youths, many of whom adopt Jamaican
> styles and vocabulary as their own. Gun culture is set to spread.
> Besides, the fundamental point is that impunity, with or without guns,
> exists not only in places such as Brixton, but in effect all British
> public housing estates, and it therefore offers a grand opening for
> the spread of gun culture.
> 
> I find it difficult to convey to middle-class liberal intellectuals
> the degree to which the law's writ already does not run on such
> estates (I suspect they don't really want to know), and the extent to
> which life as a consequence has been turned into a terrible torment
> for anyone on them who is not a criminal, despite great material
> improvements in such things as access to hot running water and a
> variety of gadgets.
> 
> It is not quite impossible for people to lead decent, quiet, law-
> abiding lives in such circumstances, but it is very difficult. Not
> only are they subject to a virtual curfew when the sun goes down, but
> they dare not complain, at least unless they are prepared to face
> bricks through their windows, faeces through their letterboxes and
> assault if they are caught outside.
> 
> The mores of a British public housing estate and rundown inner-city
> areas are exactly those of a prison, but a prison in which the prison
> officers have fled or been withdrawn, that is to say the worst and
> most brutal kind of prison. The them-and-us attitude is imposed by a
> system of terrifying punishments: in prison it is razorblades melted
> into the handles of toothbrushes, on housing estates it is baseball
> bats. (It would be interesting to compare the ratio of baseballs to
> baseball bats sold in Britain with that in the United States.)
> 
> For all the similarities, the fact is that the quality of life in
> prison - provided that there are a sufficient number of prison
> officers - is better for prisoners than for most decent inhabitants of
> British inner cities. That is why, incidentally, so many prisoners
> have confessed to me that they prefer life in prison to life on the
> outside. It is safer and more secure, they are in far less danger of
> assault and other forms of violence, and the incessant pressure of
> living in a civil war of each against all is much reduced. Prison is
> brutal, but freedom is far, far worse.
> 
> Am I exaggerating? Go and ask people who know. I am distilling what
> untold thousands of my patients have told me. For example, no one
> nowadays asks his neighbour to turn his music down without fearing for
> his life. (In the days when I did home visits, I would often feel the
> vibration of music coming up my legs through the ground and I would be
> told that it was like that even at three in the morning.)
> 
> What seems a perfectly reasonable request can soon turn into a life-
> threatening situation. The British State, grossly swollen but
> extremely weak and wilfully ineffective (because effectiveness offers
> no opportunities for bureaucratic expansion), offers its citizens - at
> least those of the lower classes - no protection in day-to-day matters
> whatever.
> 
> If I sound angry, it is because I am angry: angry that so many
> millions of people have been forced to live like this. All that is
> necessary for evil to triumph, said Burke, is for good men to do
> nothing: and, one might add, for too much notice to be taken of
> intellectuals, who have consistently aided the forces of impunity.
> 
> I have lived and practised on more than one continent, but the most
> wretched existence known to me, short of outright famine, is that
> lived by the lower classes in this country. Their lives are dominated
> by crime and the justified and entirely reasonable fear of crime to an
> extent hardly met elsewhere in the Western world, and completely
> without any compensating charms.
> 
> How is it that the plain and obvious fact that the poor suffer vastly
> more from crime than the rich has never made much of an impact on the
> consciousness of British intellectuals?

FYI

Gary