Lowest Class - Vicious, Semi-criminal

Always with us

The Major has long believed in the criminal class. That is to say, he believes there is a criminal class, and it carries out most of our crimes. As you may imagine, this week's headlines have given him the opportunity to remind us all of his bracing views:

"You do realise the scumbag who robbed Mr Hussain had 50 previous convictions. 50 for God's sake! And they still haven't locked the bastard away! We should have banged him up years ago - permanently. Three strikes and you're out - that's it! And as for those two little savages who tortured the kiddies in Doncaster, it is beyond belief that the so-called authorities hadn't locked them up in an approved school. I mean, everyone seems to have known they were out of control and dangerous, and yet bugger all was done. Why the hell do we put up with it? The only way of dealing with the criminal class is to lock them away."

"But Major," I said, "this is 21st Century equal opportunities Britain, not Victorian London. They can't help being criminals... they haven't had the chances you've had. What about rehabilitation? What about re-educating these people to be productive members of society?"

The Major snarled. "Are you trying to wind me up? For one thing, I've had to make my own opportunities in life. And for another, nobody has the faintest idea how to rehabilitate the criminal classes. It simply can't be done - or at least it can't be done with enough certainty to make the rest of us safe. Locking them up is all we can do, and I'm just amazed we don't insist on it."

"But Major - even if I agree with you about adult criminals - these two appalling boys in Doncaster are kids themselves. It's not their fault."

"Well, you can say that if you like, but dangerous wild animals still have to be locked up. Anyway, it's the parents we need to focus on. According to the papers, the mother was a drug addict, the father a violent alcoholic, and they lived entirely on benefits - benefits, I might add, that have been hugely boosted by this brainless socialist government of yours. It is literally insane that we actually pay the criminal classes to have kids. Is it any wonder we get things like this happening?" He fixed me intently with his good eye. "I've said it before - we need to stop them breeding... by all means at our disposal."

*****

In 1898-99 the businessman and philanthropist Charles Booth published his famous poverty map of London. It mapped the city's streets in terms of their social composition, identifying seven separate classes.

At the top were the Upper Middle and Upper Classes, described a "wealthy" and marked on the map in yellow. Right at the bottom - below the Comfortable, and the Poor, and the Very Poor, were the Lowest Class, marked in black and described as "vicious, semi-criminal".

Has anything changed?

Yes, sure, the material poverty has long since disappeared - swept away by Beveridge. But if there's one thing the last 50 years should have have taught us, all the socialist largesse in the world cannot make people live better lives. In fact, it all too often tends to deprave and corrupt (we've blogged before- eg here -how things came seriously unglued when the 1950s Prog Con extended the welfare state way beyond Beveridge's minimalist safety net).

As we saw when we looked at Shannon Matthews' council estate in Dewsbury (see this blog), there are now whole areas of the country plagued by high crime, poor education, high unemployment/incapacity/lone parent welfare dependency, and family dysfunction. Booth could doubtless produce some very striking maps.

But what to do about it?

Indeed, can we do anything?

According to the Major's theory, we ultimately have to stop these people breeding, by all means at our disposal.

But for those of a more sensitive disposition, there is a gentler approach we should try first - the one we hope Mr BrokenBritain Cam has in mind.

According to the Charles Murray underclass theory, the essential problem is that over-generous welfare benefits have encouraged the growth of a jobless criminal underclass, especially through the creation of single parent families with no male role model in the household. We could reverse all this simply by cutting back on benefits, especially child benefits. In particular, we need to stop rewarding single women for having kids.

Ah, you say, but that wouldn't have stopped those yobs in Doncaster, because the parents were married, and there was a male role model on the premises. It's just that he was the wrong type of model.

And you're right. Changing the welfare system would not necessarily have helped in that particular case. Maybe they really are members of the irreducible criminal class, the ones identified by Booth long before the welfare state.

And for cases like that there may be no alternative to the Major.

PS It was sickening to see the abominable Balls slithering around on Newsnight, trying to explain why his published summary of the Edlington serious case review is so grossly misleading. According to Newsnight, who have a leaked copy of the full review, details of the child protection system's most catastrophic failings have been deliberately suppressed. Our expensive childcare service gives every appearance of being a dangerous shambles, and taxpayers have a right to know the facts.

PPS As it happens, almost all Tyler's Victorian forebears were poor or very poor - just like yours probably. But Tyler likes to think his great great grandparents were the respectable working class, and even when they were struck down by illness and job loss, they stayed honest. Well, that's what he likes to believe anyway.

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Victims Of High Taxation

2am: 8 September 2009 - thieving scum help themselves from a shop in Huntingdon

The Village Postmaster and his family are still recovering from their 1am encounter with the robbers who smashed into their shop. Needless to say, the police have yet to apprehend anyone.

The gang were after cigarettes, and it turns out this was one of a huge number of such robberies taking place right across the country. Just in the last few months, small shopkeepers have been hit in Croydon, Oxfordshire, Glasgow, Sussex, Devon, Gloucestershire, Liverpool, Yorkshire, and back in Sussex again. AND THAT'S JUST THE FIRST PAGE FROM HUNDREDS OF GOOGLE RESULTS.

This is a massive crime wave.

WTF is going on?

The VP has already blogged his own highly plausible theory. Just like back in the eighteenth century, extraordinarily high taxes on tobacco have nurtured an extensive black market. And as before, this market has been supplied principally by smugglers bringing in untaxed stock from overseas.

It is a highly organised business. As described here, it has progressed way beyond a few amateurs loading up their white vans in Calais. Indeed, it is no longer driven by the difference in duty between the UK and our EU "partners", such differences having been largely eliminated (tax now accounts for 70-80% or more of the retail price right across the EU).

No, what's driving this is that organised criminal gangs have found ways of obtaining large quantities of cigarettes and tobacco without paying duty at all.

Of course, some is counterfeit. But much is the genuine article, manufactured and branded by the big international tobacco companies, and reportedly sourced from their legitimate factories in countries such as Ukraine. Here's a graphic summarising one estimate:

Obviously, the customs authorities all over the EU are working to clamp down, and over the last few years, HM Revenue and Customs have stepped up their efforts significantly. Quite right too.

But every success means that black market distributors in pub carparks and bootsales across the country find themselves short of product. So as the VP points out, the market has come up with a neat solution - stealing from legitimate suppliers here in the UK.

We've blogged the black market in tobacco before (eg here and here). Fundamentally, with tax now accounting for three-quarters of the price of cigarettes, even normally law abiding folk like the parson and the clerk can convince themselves such taxes are onerous and unnatural, and that it's reasonable to resort to the black market. After all, it isn't as if the black market is real crime, like murder or something.

We have moved beyond the realms of workable taxation. High taxes become the excuse for criminality.

And tobacco is such a great product for criminals. It's both light and high value (cf the mobile phones used in VAT carousel fraud). In one recent case, customs officers "found 74,000 cigarettes in the luggage of a Newcastle couple travelling from the Canary Islands". Something that easy to smuggle is very difficult to stop.

So what to do?

Well, since Tyler doesn't himself smoke, he strongly supports taxing smokers to buggery. Let 'em pay, says Tyler - less taxes for the rest of us to stump up.

But as we can see, that approach has opened the gates to a crimewave. And whatever the buyers of black market ciggies may tell themselves, it's not a victimless crimewave - just ask the VP and his family.

Worse, the black market in tobacco is just one part of Britain's burgeoning black economy. As we blogged here, most serious estimates have put the size of our black economy at 10% of GDP or more. But those estimates were made pre-recession and pre-Polish plumbers. Our guess is that it's now much bigger, and our forthcoming tax hikes will make it bigger still.

Which is very worrying.

High taxes fuel the black economy.

And the black economy fuels crime.

Yet another reason why Cam and Oz need to get a lot more serious about cutting spending rather than raising taxes yet further.

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www.gudanggrosiran.com Categories: crime, fraud, tax

More Cost Ineffective Justice

Violent crime now even worse than unthinkably thought in 2000*

Returning from a couple of days sans broadband, we've been catching up with the Village Postmaster.

He and his family have suffered what's officially categorised as a high trauma crime - robbery in their own home. But we're pleased to see they're back up and running, and they've clearly had huge support from their customers and the local community. After 50 years of soft criminal justice and corrosive welfare dependency, it's reassuring to know some bits of Britain remain unbroken.

At least the police do seem to be taking it seriously. They told the VP that the raid on his store was one of many - the night after his own raid, three more retailers in the county suffered the same fate, quite likely at the hands of the same gang. They really do need to hunt down these scum before somebody gets hurt.

But then what? We return to the same question we asked initially - why do we have to tolerate people like this among us? Why can't we just lock them away for good?

As we've blogged many times, the Home Office has previously estimated* that half of all serious crime is committed by around 100,000 persistent offenders. Each one commits an average of 90 serious crimes every year. Yes, that's right - 90 (see here).

But of those 100,000, only 20,000 are in prison at any one time. The rest are out among us, free to crack on - robbing the VP in his own home, raping, pillaging, whatever takes their fancy.

The obvious solution is to build another 80,000 prison places (doubling the current number) and keep these persistent offenders inside. Permanently.

At the current average £40 grand per place, that would cost us £3.2bn pa, £1bn of which we could get by abolishing the useless probation service (eg see this blog). And by using a little imagination, we could substantially reduce the cost (Tyler Senior favours doing a deal with the Russians for some of their underutilised correctional facilities).

It all seems so obvious to Tyler, the Major, and a host of ordinary people out here in the real world. So why don't we do it?

We know why: our wibbly Prog Con elite - who rarely experience serious high trauma crime themselves - persistently block any such moves. People like Aaronovitch, Finkelstein, and Easton, are forever telling us we are Daily Mail moral panickers, and we are in denial about the true facts (eg see here and here). For is it not the case that the government's official crime statistics show a continuing fall in serious crime?

To which our response has always been that the published official crime stats are so massaged and manipulated that they're not worth the eco-friendly recycled paper they're printed on. And in the last couple of days we've had yet more proof.

First, Denis O’Connor, Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Constabulary, has confirmed something we've blogged before - namely that the police are systematically under-recording crimes of violence:

"The plight of battered wives and other incidences of violence are being ignored by police. A third of the violent offences which were not recorded as crimes should have been...

Among the cases was that of one force which recorded that “no crime” had taken place when a woman’s partner slapped her, grabbed her by the neck and threw her on the floor, leaving her battered and bruised. The officers wrote that the victim would say that she had injured herself and that her partner’s account was “more accurate”...

In another incident, a man was knocked to the ground by a blow behind his ear. He was then kicked in the body. He needed six stitches in his head. The officer said he found the circumstances unusual and that the man might have been under the influence of alcohol when he fell. Mr O’Connor’s report said the incident should have been recorded as grievous bodily harm."

According to O’Connor, "the drive to meet government targets could be one reason why officers were failing to record offences".

You don't say.

Second, Policy Exchange have unearthed some unpublished Home Office research showing that the number of hardened offenders has increased alarmingly since the data summarised above:

This new study identifies 350,000 high-rate persistent criminals, who each commit around 260 crimes a year on average. That compares to the 155,000 identified in the earlier Home Office report* - a massive increase. And the number of active offenders overall now stands at an estimated 1.6 million (compared to 1.2 million earlier).

Alarmingly, it is in crimes of violence that the situation has deteriorated most.

The chart above is taken from a confidential crime report produced by Lord Birt for Tony Bliar in 2000. It shows what Birt thought would happen to violent crime by 2010 if the historic trend continued.

But although the chart was designed to shock, Birt was too optimistic. Even though we haven't yet reached 2010, according to the latest HO stats, recorded offences of violence against the person are already running well above the three-quarters of a million extrapolated by Birt. And that's despite the police fiddling the numbers.

But forget hopeless Labour - despite their neat slogans, they've always been useless on crime, and surely we all knew that really. The key question now is what is hug-a-hoodie Cam going to do about it?

I'm afraid I know. And it's not good news.

He's going to say, yes all this crime is a terrible indictment of 13 years of Labour misrule. Yes, indeed. And I'd like to help - I really would. But unfortunately there's no money. Cuh! What can you do?

Which is simply not good enough.

Because quite apart from the high trauma regularly inflicted on innocent hard-working families like the VP's, the Home Office itself reckons the loss and damage to property is now running at well over £100bn pa. Which makes the prison bill look like peanuts.

It's time. Broken Britain or not, we demand some proper cost effective justice.

*Footnote The earlier Home Office research was summarised in Lord Birt's thinking the unthinkable 2000 report for Bliar's Strategy Unit "A new vision for the Criminal Justice System" (see here). Including those 100,000 active persistent offenders who commit 50% of all serious crime, it said there were 1.2 million "active offenders". 155,000 of them were "high rate" offenders each carrying out an average of 250 - yes, 250 - crimes a year.

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www.gudanggrosiran.com Categories: crime, crime stats, Criminal Justice

Village Postmaster Meets The Scumbags

We still need a lot more of these

As we know, sub-postmasters are in the frontline against violent crime.

Last January, we blogged the shocking murder of Craig Hodson-Walker during an armed robbery on his family's post office/general store in the Midlands. Later the same month we blogged another armed robbery on a post office in Berkshire during which the postmaster was badly beaten.

Now today, BOM's old friend the Village Postmaster has been robbed by three thugs who broke into his shop in the early hours of this morning. He and his wife were woken by the shop's alarm system and actually interrupted the raid. But far from fleeing, the robbers responded with threats and violence.

The VP will doubtless blog this grim experience himself, once he's got his shop back in operation (itself no small matter), but we are feeling very angry.

Why should responsible law-abiding citizens have to tolerate violent scumbags smashing down the door and helping themselves? Why should they have to accept being threatened in their own homes?

We demand a criminal justice system that protects us against this. We demand a justice system where punishment for serious crime is far more severe.

The reason is very simple: with low detection rates (25% or less), unless the punishment for those who do get caught is severe, there is no deterrence.

And we also want three-strikes-and-you're-out. As we blogged here, the evidence is that, once anyone has been convicted three times, there's a greater than 50% chance of him reoffending within two years of release. Indeed, for released prisoners, the reoffending rate is 65%. It is outrageous that the law-abiding majority have to accept a risk like that in the name of... well, what?

We'll be following the police investigation into the Postmaster's robbery very closely, and let's hope the police can track down those responsible before they do it again (you can bet this was not a first offence).

Also, the trial of those accused of murdering Craig Hodson-Walker is currently underway. If there are convictions, we will expect these people to be locked away for ever.

No ifs, no buts.

PS The latest outburst by Keir Starmer, the Director of Public Prosecutions, precisely illustrates why we've got into this mess. He reckons the Tories' plan to replace the notorious European Human Rights Act with a British Bill of Rights will bring "shame" on Britain. WTF? We'd always imagined the DPP's job was banging up bad guys, not politicking for "human rights". Anyone would think Starmer was a former Human Rights Lawyer of the Year. Why can't we have prosecutors who actually want to prosecute?

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www.gudanggrosiran.com Categories: crime, Criminal Justice

Your Life In Their Hands

Just thank God they weren't waiting outside your local shop

As we've blogged many times, the Major and I do not believe our criminal "justice" system does nearly enough to deter violent crime. We believe it risks the safety of millions of innocent people who don't have the good fortune to live in Hampstead or the leafy glades of Surrey.

But for decades now, people like us have been over-ruled by those in charge of our affairs. First, they abolished the ultimate deterrent we don't blog any more, and then they watered down its replacement so far that its deterrent effect was completely undermined.

Frankly, we try not to blog this too often because it makes us so angry.

But here we go again, with another set of totally inadequate sentences imposed on two thugs responsible for the brutal murder of Michael Eccles:

"The 43-year-old father of five had popped down the road to buy a bottle of wine when he encountered Jordan Carroll and Carl Keatley, who had been drinking vodka all day. They attacked him, kicking, punching and stamping on him, and leaving him with a burst eye socket, 10 broken ribs and broken bones in his neck."

And the sentences?

Both got "life", but in Carroll's case that actually means a "minimum" sentence of just 11 years, while Keatley will be out and about again in 13 years.

Michael Eccles' family are very angry:

"We were promised a life sentence. The only people receiving a life sentence are the family.

These evil people have been found guilty of murder and shown no remorse at all. Until there are some serious consequences to their actions, the anti-social element will continue their reign of terror.

True justice should be an eye for an eye, and at the very least, life should mean life. These people should not be free to inflict evil ways upon society again."

Who could possibly disagree?

Except for those in charge of criminal "justice" of course. The very same people who had allowed these two animals to remain on the streets even though they were both well known to police, one had 15 previous court appearances, and the other was out on bail in connection with an earlier attack.

Which brings us to another of this week's cases:

"A serial sex offender once described as "appallingly evil" was handed a life sentence for a second time on Friday.

David McMillan, 33, admitted trying to lure a 14-year-old girl to his flat - 12 years after he was jailed for breaking into the home of an elderly spinster and raping her."

But despite the fact that he's "appallingly evil", and despite the fact that this is his second life sentence, his minimum sentence has been set at just 18 months.

Yup. 18 months.

Ah, you say, maybe he's not absolutely appallingly evil. After all, he's not a murderer. Yet. And he didn't actually succeed in luring this 14-year-old to his flat.

Yeah. Right.

The real point is that, these days, life sentences just don't do what it says on the tin. It is the maximum penalty the law can impose, and yet nobody believes it will amount to much more than what you'd get for putting the wrong stuff in your recycling bin.

As we've noted before, when capital punishment was abolished (against the wishes of 75% of us), we punters were promised a deal: henceforth, life would mean life. But these days, even for murder, "life" has actually come to mean an average of just 14 years. Our parole system releases convicted murderers sentenced to life imprisonment after an average of just 14 years.

14 years.

It just isn't good enough.

Lives are being put at risk. Maybe not round your way, or down here in leafy Surrey, or next door to the Major. But out on those problem estates people need some protection. And if they don't get it from our mainstream politicos, they're going to look elsewhere.

PS There are places that make much wider use of life sentences. In California, one Enrique Gonzalez risks a life sentence, being "charged with aggravated mayhem after he tattooed a paw print onto his son’s hip". A life sentence for a tattoo? "Gonzalez is a member of a local gang called the Bulldogs, and the paw print is considered a symbol of membership." Ah, gangs. Although it still sounds a little harsh to British ears, and if you can get life for tattooing your son, WTF do you get for murder? Er... yes... that's right... that thing we don't blog any more. Although we might just mention that the California homicide rate trebled in the years following its abolition, and then more than halved again following reinstatement. But that's probably a pure coincidence, as many commenters have insisted before.

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www.gudanggrosiran.com Categories: crime, Criminal Justice