If the liberal press is to be believed, nobody has ever been stabbed — ever

Anthony

Hey, it's that guy with the crappy furniture. He actually writes articles for a living!

Vasco de Sousa

I liked your conclusion, about closing down negligent wine bars. Perhaps the same could be done for drunk driving accidents, domestic abuse, all the other alcohol crime.

The over indulgent parent is not what's the problem. We're not afraid of a spoilt brat whose birth parents are still together and take him camping and smother him in hugs and kisses. That boy is more likely to suffer from obesity than violent tendencies.

It's the negligent parents, who don't even know that their offspring have knives (or what they're surfing on the net, or what violent games they bought for Christmas, or who their friends are), who are more likely to raise violent offenders.

It's not knife crime, it's violent crime. We don't talk about "fist crime" when some jerk punches his wife.

May I suggest that instead of prison (where they get free cable tv and PhDs from Open University) we send violent criminals to Afghanistan, or some other battlefront, where their skills could be used?

JohnA

Having discovered that knife carrying is spreading among the yoof, the urban bien pensant classes have given the debate a new twist, by suggesting that this is simply a 'cycle of violence'. You know how these people all love cycling, recycling, whatever. Cycles are OK. 'It's just the economic cycle,' they say, tolerantly, when they get mugged.
Well, today on The World at One on BBC R4, I heard some social working campaigner among the Black Yoof of Peckham explain that it's because said Yoof have no male role models at home (so gay adoption should really be promoted, in that case, assuming enough black gays could safely stand up and identify themselves in Peckham) anyway, this is why the yoof 'are forced to carry knives'. What he meant was that they 'feel compelled' to carry knives. But have you noticed: a) rational causal connections have been jettisoned: many grow up without fathers, but do not unaccountably start striking out in the street. And b) perceptions of anything - racism, sexism, harrassment, social humiliation - have replaced the actual objective conditions, so that 'being forced to' and 'feeling (however mistakenly) forced to' are now all the same thing. The premiss and conclusions of the statement went unchallenged by Martha Kearney, who should hang her head in shame.

William Wade

Rod says "If a child under the age of 18 is found with a knife, bung him in what was once called borstal" but surely it is not desirable that whoever is found to be in possession of a knife is automatically imprisoned, or indeed convicted of a criminal offence? Surely it is preferable as the law stands, so that it is a defence for a person charged to prove that he had good reason or lawful authority for having a knife with him in a public place? For example many law-abiding people carry pen knives because these are convenient tools, not because they have the slightest idea of using them as weapons. What Rod says is, dare I say, the sort of thing I'd expect to hear from a politician more concerned with his prospects in the next election than he is with thinking through the logical implications of what he prescribes.

n

Vasco de Sousa,

I have to say i hope you were serious when you said that we "send violent criminals to Afghanistan, or some other battlefront, where their skills could be used." I hope you are serious because i agree with you. You are right, most prisons today have free cable tv and other assorted things that make prison life less punishment and reptentance and more relax and be refreshed (aren't paying taxes great). I think i read that in the US there is something like 2 million people in prison. Ship them over to afghanistand and Iraq; we'd win sooner with that strategy than the strategy we have now.

Nicholas Storey

Liddle, this week, I find that I agree with you. To Vasco de Sousa I would just add that, any place with a licence to serve alcohol is breaking the law if it serves to drunks - of course, now, there is longer to get drunk in these places and, presumably, the manager's idea of what 'drunk' amounts to has changed since the object of everyone who goes to them seems to be to get totally and utterly: wasted, spliflicated, hammered, plastered, rat-arsed (which denotation is applicable depends on: their racial origin and their social class).
NJS

hysteria

Crikey Rod - you get more right leaning every time you put pen to paper.

Bloody right though! I was wandering when someone would put pen to paper to show the stupidity of the "respect" agenda.

Good Stuff !

Sharon Reid

Absolutely right. And I agreed with the previous article. I can't imagine how any normal-thinking person could not agree with you on this subject.

Austin Barry

Anthony, give us a break with the running furniture "gag". It is obscure and unfunny and I think you may be suffering from monomania which can be treated by a caring health professional. Or you could try a new joke, although the evidence suggests that invention is not your forte.

Kevyn Bodman

Nicholas Storey is right that it is aleady against the law for licensed premises to serve alcohol to a customer who is drunk.
So use the laws we have, there is no need to extend the law.

That, I think, makes it wrong for a wine bar to be shut down if it is proved a stabber and stabbee have been in there.
It is stretching responsibility too far. People are responsible for the reasonably foreseeable consequences of their actions.
It is not reasonavble to expect wine bar staff to foresee that one customer might stab another outside.
Enforce the laws we've got, don't add more.

Rob Slack

Which would be more likely to deter a potential knife attacker:
" if you are caught you will have to visit someone in hospital" (Can I eat their grapes?) or "if you are caught you will be strapped to a pole and flogged until the bones show through"? Some say that is barbaric. They never explain why it is wrong. If a deterrent works not only is there less crime but there is less punishment (win-win-win; less cost as well). Perhaps as a bonus the savings could be used to improve the socioeconomic and educational conditions in those groups which generate criminality. But first let us just worry about reducing crime. Whenever I have seen criminals say what would deter them they all say the threat of harsh punishment. I am sure the threat of real pain would work. And note it is the threat; we would hardly need to use the punishment if the threat were great enough. Trouble is, the country is full of PC's (political Christians). We need to teach them what "turn the other cheek" should really mean!

Rob Slack

Why should we close wine bars because yobs cause trouble? Punish the yobs, not the bar owners. (And closing time outside the bar is a good time to catch them).

IanW

@William Wade, Kevyn Bodman.
Quite right. We have adequate laws but they aren't enforced; responsibility lies with the stabber, not the wine bar, society etc etc.

Lawrence

There is only one solution. Emigrate. The British vote and get what they deserve.

Ray McGrath

Austin Barry clearly didn't see his heroes home on "through the keyhole" otherwise he would realise that Liddle is a man of no class or taste. Therefore he should be ignored like the nasty little chav that he is.

liamjq

Having over the last few years spent many happy months living and working in Luanda, Angola my daily drive to work took me past the capital`s prison.Every day i used to wonder what on earth it was like on the inside to make it a deterrent when you saw what the outside was like.This observation holds the answer to everything. Privatise the gaols and farm them out to Angola, Horn of Africa,Novaya Zemlaya(the special needs of your ethnicity will allow the choosing of the appropriate environment).All the psychobabble will vanish and after the damascine conversions of millions overnight the time will be right to throw criminology, sociology, psycho-this and forensic-that to history. The occams razor of punishment for one`s own actions will show these "disciplines" up for the selfserving bleeding-heart liberal crap they always were.

Rob Slack

Ray McGrath
July 18th, 2008 2:33pm

"Austin Barry clearly didn't see his heroes (sic) home"
Ray, if you are to call someone a chav, it behoves you to write properly. At least give an impression you are educated.

Bulldogbreed

A fine article but I was wondering if we are missing some opportunities here for teaching much-needed respect. There should be no need to close wine bars of emigrate as some have suggested. Teens stab other teens and adults for not showing respect. Would it be acceptable if survivors of stabbing attacks were allowed to meet the stabbers and stab them back just to help them understand what a bad thing it is to stab someone else? Perhaps not. Then how about bringing in just a teensy weeny bit of sharia law - flogging? Oh please, please, pleeeeeeease. A public smacking on the bare bum at a football stadium just before the start of a premier div match. Think of how many of us would welcome the opportunity of getting a bit of upper body exercise (remember, we must fight obesity too)administering correction while teaching erring teens about respect for others. Mind you, I don't want to put kids off football. Perhaps they could be allowed to watch the match for free after the bit of "tough love".

M McGregor

Agreed on every point. Unfortunately, the only political party which would impose the drastic remedies needed to deal effectively with our run-away social decline is the British National Party. Does Mr Liddle believe that there is any hope whatsoever that the Conservatives will not only stop their decades-long(NB)
drift to the Left, but actually go into complete reverse and undo the mess they've helped construct ?

It is inexcusible to identify what needs to be done week after week, and yet join in obstructing & abusing the only body prepared to act rather than merely talk.

Anthony

Sorry Austin.

Richard Sochacki

Liddle ado about much that is nasty yet measured agreement with the notion that England's cultural cutting edge are unaware of their inciveness.

Getting to the point, as a youth then pushing my barrow in Romford, I recall a town centre public house being renamed, ironically, 'The Bitter End', 'The White Hart' having long left the leafy suburb. Then, I quipped, "why not 'The Stab Wound'?" for this might have proved less prophetic for those seeking solace in real ale.

Nearby in up-a-rung Gidea Park, one could imbibe a Stella with Stella in Archers wine bar ,the name of which evoked the deeply-rooted yeoman tradition of grievous body piercing.

Hair then long, now gone, three decades have elapsed since these observations were lodged yet the commonplace dangers of social drinking today appear much the same. Rather than clogging A&E departments with touring becleavered, I suggest the re-introduction of a visible constabulary.

Making light of the benighted sours on thinking of mortuary identification and the onset of unquencheable bereavement.

Richard Sochacki
Perth, Western australia

John Mercer

Only halfway there Mr. Liddle.

Secretly you know that the intellectual Right (no it's not an oxymoron outside the BBC bubble) is correct and hence your piece.

Murder by knife as gang fashion is no joke, or a subject for joking, and currently is not sufficiently punished to deter, and your previous article was indeed ill judged so we should at least be thankful for this partial retraction.

So, conscience calling, this article is at least a halfway attempt at saving face for both yourself and the Left in general.

However could your article not have been entitled?

"If the liberal press is to be believed, nobody has ever been deterred by capital punishment — ever."

Then we would know the turnaround had started and it is indeed possible to correct the damage done by 40 years of Liberal idiocy.

The UK mood is turning as the hippy era troupe (Atlee's fallen heirs?) fall off centre stage.

Time for a major rethink on Crime and Punishment and justice for victims that fits the crime.

As Lord Denning said on Capital Punishment in the early fifties:

"Punishment is the way in which society expresses its denunciation of wrong doing; and, in order to maintain respect for the law, it is essential that the punishment inflicted for grave crimes should adequately reflect the revulsion felt by the great majority of citizens for them. It is a mistake to consider the object of punishment as being a deterrent or reformative or preventive and nothing else... The truth is that some crimes are so outrageous that society insists on adequate punishment, because the wrong doer deserves it, irrespective of whether it is a deterrent or not."

Amen to that. And now the rot has got to be stopped. Perhaps next week we'll see the full admission on what a lot of rot the Left has been talking over the last 40 years.

George

Writing from a degree of experience, a few years ago my son came home from a shopping trip and proudly showed me a knife he had bought, which, he assured me, was for his own protection as "all his pals have one".
I physically dragged him out of the house, into my car and took him and his knife to the local police HQ, where a burly sergeant gave him an extremely severe "talking to" and explained in no uncertain terms the possible consequences of carrying a weapon.
Perhaps I was abrigating my parental responsibility by allowing the police to deal with my son?
No matter.
To date, he's still alive, with no convictions and even works P/T as a Special Constable.
Oh, and at the time I was a single parent living on income support, so let's not venture down the "socially deprived" route so beloved by liberal apologists...

Hereford

Added recommendation. Anyone found carrying a knife, should be strapped down and have the very knife they were carrying inserted in a non-vital part of their body, without the benefit of anaesthetic.

Leave the miscreant for approximately half an hour to let the full shock set in, then treat their wounds with stiches, fine them, confiscate the knife and turn them loose.

That will connect them with the results of knife crime far more than showing the scars on someone else.

Rhory Fraser

Wriggle, squirm and mock apologise like a sulky teenager all you like Rod but the fact is that your article about whites being the most likely perpetrators of knife crime was a nasty, unfunny joke. Of the 24 knife murders committed in London, NONE have been committed by White British youths, drunken or otherwise. What is it with self-hating liberal commentators?

Liam

Ron Liddle should spell his name Ron Lidl, since all the opinions he espouses are cheap, prepackaged rubbish which probably originated in Germany several decades ago.

Dion

Mr Lidl (liked that comment above from Liam!)

I have to say that as a piece of prose, your article is extremely well-written. no doubt you have the ability to write in a structured and thought-provoking style.

so it makes it all the more infuriating that you write such drivel. have you not grown out of the "i apologise but then show i dont actually mean it" mentality. your originally article was really offensive, and as previously commented, would not have been written had a member of your family suffered from a "juking" (yoof-speak for being stabbed, thought I'd translate as you obviously know nothing about your subject matter)

now the real reason behind the increase is the growing influence of a lost section of society, those who dont believe in respect but covet RESPEC. likely to be 10-18 years old and no older than that. Believe it or not even the most irresponsible of hoodlums tend to wake up and smell the roses by the mid twenties (unless they are already kicking up the daisies). these kids (cause thats all they are) become disenfranchised from society and seek acceptance in their own inward-looking groups, hence the rise of gang culture. these gangs are then empowered by modern media culture - i dont blame facebook and bebo for the rise in stabbings but these networking sites encourage it as they offer a way to curry favour and worship from peers - would these kids be so keen to seek infamy if there wasnt the promise of "fallen soldja" tributes?

if you dont mix in these circles then its 99% less likely to happen to you. the day these stabbings start happening to average joe public on his way home from sainsburys is the day the solution will arrive, borne out of necessity. no doubt it will be a reversion to hardline ethics, curtailing civil liberties and promoting society ahead of the individual. unless the "soldjas" have completely taken over by then