Sunday, February 15, 2009

BROKEN BRITAIN

The Broken Britain theory that David Cameron and his honourable, morally spotless friends at the Sun newspaper have been advancing may be right. But if it is, who broke it?

Labour may have been in power for twelve years now, but the so-called New Labour project was only ever a hypocritical, toothy reworking of Thatcherite capitalism anyway.

If you really want to understand why the streets at night are filled with illiterate child thugs stabbing grannies and impregnating overweight, spotty fifteen-year-olds look at Margaret Thatcher--if, unlike me, you can bear to do so without jumping into a hot bath and scrubbing yourself raw.

She is the one who created the culture in which such disturbing and dangerous things could occur. Though I wonder sometimes if these newspaper-led moral panics and the last acceptable prejudice, against so-called chavs, aren't just odious attacks on the working class by the very people who have taken away their power and dignity.

I'd rather live next door to that kid's parents, after all, than some banker who awards himself a multi-million pound bonus for ruining the British economy and throwing hundreds of thousands of decent, hard-working people onto the unemployment line.

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