Alive & Twitching

I heard the news today…and it was enough to make me want to sell up and emigrate.

As usual, I listened to part of the consistently excellent Today programme on Radio Four. There were two items that particularly caught my ear. One was about a report being published today by an organisation called Race on the Agenda (ROTA) on the subject of girls being involved in gang crime in London and elsewhere. The crime appears to be largely related to drugs and is often violent. Some of this violence is sexual in nature. Reference was made to female members of gangs being raped as a punishment by rival gangs. The author of the report referred to rape “as a weapon of choice”. One female gang member, interviewed by the BBC, admitted to smoking and dealing in cannabis from the age of 13. She started selling class A drugs on leaving school. She had beaten up people and been beaten up herself and also admitted to handling a gun for a fellow gang member.

The second Today item was a debate on the effect of immigrant workers on the UK economy. One conclusion seemed to be that foreigners were happy to do work over here that British workers were not prepared to undertake. One of the participants in the debate was Frank Field, the Labour MP for Birkenhead. He mentioned that, in his constituency, about half of young people do not attain the minimum school leaving requirements and are destined for a lifetime of unemployment. Some young people in Birkenhead have told their MP that they have no intention of working unless a job offers something like three times their benefits level.

There were then two pieces in The Times that caught my attention.The first was that, despite a ten-year Government strategy costing millions of pounds, Britain still has the highest teenage pregnancy rate in western Europe. The second was about a London gang member who was involved, as a lookout, in the murder of a shop manager, whilst on police bail for murdering a youth for his mobile phone. (He was on bail because the police did not have sufficient evidence at the time to have him put in custody pending trial.)

These are just four items of news on the same morning. How can any sensible person deny the existence of an underclass in this country or that we are living in a broken society?