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Sunday 7 September 2008

It’s the Broken Society, stupid

Britain may or may not be blighted by a feral media but many people are in no doubt, as this week’s survey from Barnardo’s reveals, that we are blighted by a feral youth, often financed and fuelled by drugs, which is out of control and beyond the law. Every day brings fresh horror stories from the frontline of the Broken Society: teenagers are shot in their beds in gangland tit-for-tat killings; a youth is chased through the streets of West London by a gang of 14-year-olds shouting ‘Kill him, kill him’ — which they do when they catch him, with a stab to the heart. This week another schoolboy was murdered in a pre-arranged mass gang brawl in Beckenham: he was beaten to a pulp with chains and baseball bats, then stabbed in the back.

Britain is now living with the consequences of allowing an underclass to take root and fester. When, as editor of the Sunday Times, I tried to highlight what was happening 20 years ago, nobody wanted to know: the Right said there was no such thing as an underclass, the Left that it was just the poorest part of the working class. Both were wrong.

That the underclass exists cannot now be doubted by those with eyes to see, though some fashionable opinion-formers still try to wish it away. Nor is it necessarily poor: quite often the underclass is reasonably cash-rich, thanks to welfare benefits, crime and the black economy; but it is increasingly severed, in attitude and cultural values, from the rest of society. And (another popular misconception) it has very little in common with even the most deprived of the old working class: the underclass does not form brass bands, go to night school or strive to find the best state schools for their children.

So far our response to a growing underclass has been containment: it has been herded into reservations we call sink estates, where the rest of us hope it will stay out of sight and out of mind. Its members speak their own variants of English (now well enough recognised for comedians to mock), wear their own style of clothes (which middle-class kids sometimes copy) and have no respect for the police or the laws that bind the rest of us. Nor do they have much regard for the world of work or educational achievement: traditional values such as thrift, endeavour and marriage are alien.

More articles from: Andrew Neil | this section

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