Feeding the Underclass in Britain

Last week in Brixton, an eternally rough section of London, two teenagers were shot as they waited in line at McDonalds, according to the BBC. This week it is the turn of the pundits to tell us what it all means.

In the London Spectator Alistair Heath writes about “The Mean Streets of Britain,” the violent, lawless, and workless inhabitants of the inner cities. But the Brits seem to be resigned to it.

[I]t no longer shocks a public numbed by the regularity of it all, and disillusioned by the apparent powerlessness of the authorities to do anything about it.

And the levels of pathology are climbing into the stratosphere.

In Calton, a district of east Glasgow which epitomises the worst of underclass Britain, a boy born today can expect to live just 53.9 years, at least three decades less than someone born in London’s Kensington.

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Calton residents are seven times more likely to die a drugs-related death than the rest of the country, 61 per cent have no qualifications and 37 per cent of children grow up in workless households. Around 57 per cent of adults do not work — and with only 8 per cent registered as unemployed, most are clearly content to live on benefits.

The astonishing thing is the level of apathy over the manifest failings of the welfare state. What do you mean, “57 percent of adults do not work?” It seems that the cultural power of the liberal elite in Britain, as here, short-circuits any anger over this sort of outrage.

The thing is, we know what to do.

The problems of the underclass, while monumental, are not intractable, but would require extraordinary political will to put right, including a market-led revolution in education, a dramatic reform in welfare to make work pay, the removal of the incentives for family breakdown, a much tougher ‘broken windows’ strategy for policing, and a changed cultural message that promotes decency and respect.

Why don’t we do something? It is because anyone proposing to do something gets shot down as a racist or a fascist by the liberal elite.

So the misery of the underclass will have to get deeper.

But let us be clear. If this sort of outrage were occurring in the nineteenth century, you know, when the evil bourgeoisie was in charge, the heavens would be ringing with the bellows of outrage from our progressive friends.