Kidnap - a middle class crime

A child aged 10 who had been kidnapped from his family home and held hostage for almost 36 hours was safe last night after being rescued by armed police from a “terrifying experience”.

... Great Peter Street in Victoria was cordoned off for the Friday night police operation, while a search of a further address in Clapham, south London, recovered three guns. Scotland Yard said that four men and a woman had been arrested for questioning on kidnap and firearm allegations.

So reads this news item in the Sunday Telegraph.  It also mentions that the dedicated squad which deals with crimes of kidnap and extortion sees, on average, one “live” or on-going case a week.  What it doesn’t mention is that there is nearer one such crime reported just to London’s Cosmopolitan Metropolitan Police every day, but the ransom has been paid and the victim released.  And it doesn’t mention what this article in The Guardian did last June: we are facing here, to quote its headline, “A kidnap a day by foreign gangs in London”.

The rate of kidnappings has risen sharply in the past seven or eight years. Half of all kidnappers and victims in the capital are foreign nationals, usually from the same ethnic group. Detective Chief Superintendent Sharon Kerr, who heads Scotland Yard’s serious and organised crime unit, said the growing number of foreign criminal networks carrying out kidnaps in the city led to increasingly complex and high risk situations.

“They are bringing their criminal enterprises with them and their different methodologies,” she said. It was vital to gain immigrant communities’ trust to help combat gangsters in their midst.

... The involvement of so many foreign nationals in kidnaps means the Met often works with police forces in several different jurisdictions. For example, someone might be kidnapped in London and a ransom demand made in Pakistan.

Kidnapping is particularly prevalent in the Chinese, Afro-Caribbean, south Asian and eastern European communities, where extreme violence and torture is common, often over relatively small amounts of money

Today’s Sunday Telegraph item reports that the flat which was stormed by police to release the young victim was owned by the Peabody Trust.  This is one of those government-favoured New-Lab charities which outreach social-scientifically to disadvantaged Londoners, delivering the services they need so very, very badly to combat the evil of social exclusion and build sustainable and, of course, vibrant, really, really equal communities.

So here are the two extemes of the progressive universe.  Moist-eyed and middle-class, university-educated outreach specialists tend to their touching illusions while vibrancy follows its own sweet path to perdition.  Entirely missing from this neat equation is the fact that London’s true people have been dispossessed of their city, and their essential world of family and friends.  They are the ones who have been “disadvantaged” by progressives and they are the ones, for all their current degredations, for whom we should feel sympathy and some sense, at least, of kinship.

Last Monday a fine article by Madeleine Bunting - a journalist I have criticised in the past for her Moslem-mad sensibilities - appeared in, yes, The Guardian.  It was headlined, “Ignored, angry and anxious: the world of the white working class”.  It was, in fact, a review of a book: “The New East End: Kinship, Race and Conflict” by Geoff Dench, Kate Gavron and Michael Young, which itself was a rare and honest study of the lives and feelings of dispossessed Londoners.

“Here is a book that will infuriate and bewilder the progressive left,” Bunting’s review began.  It was written by New-Lab types whose goal was less to understand the sociological disaster of London than figure out why the white working class’s support for the Labour Party is so weak.  In the process it managed to tell a truth which Bunting is not too coy to express with some force:-

The nub of the argument put forward by the authors, Geoff Dench, Kate Gavron and Michael Young, is that the well-intentioned policies of a rights-based welfare state in which benefits and housing were awarded on the basis of need, not past contributions, directly contributed to the ratcheting up of racial tension as poor incoming Bangladeshis were given priority for council housing. The white working-class extended families were broken up as their offspring were moved to Essex for housing. The ones who suffered most were women, left bereft of their social status as the arbiters of family and neighbourhood life. The latter both fragmented. And the blame is pinned on the welfare state (not helped by the economic decline of the docklands in the 60s and 70s).

The problem, claim the authors, was the betrayal of the working class’s vision of the welfare state as a system of mutual insurance - to tide one over a tough patch - and its transformation into a welfare state of entitlement and rights based on need. It had moral force, but to many interviewees it was unfair: anyone can live off the system, they complained.

A sense of loss and betrayal among white working-class East Enders underpins many of the interviews. A heroic second world war history, suffering the Luftwaffe’s depredations on the docklands, entitled them and their children to something better. Their world “was snatched from them - by bombs and housing policies, other people’s notions of progress and the pressures of consumerism”.

To compound the sense of injury, the dogged white racism that provides a convincing rationale to many of what has happened is treated with contempt by the “do-gooders” of the welfare state - the social workers and housing officers. Not for the first time, the professional middle classes find grounds for moral superiority over the working class.

... Meanwhile, the bitter pill to swallow for the well-intentioned liberal is that while the welfare state may have saved many from dire deprivation, it has singularly failed to engage the active participation of its clients. Instead of being the engine of social democracy once envisaged, it has proved to be an engine of resentful alienation from the state.

So postwar “progress” may have served the middle classes well, materially and socially - they’ve still got their social networks, which they use for personal advancement, status and companionship - but it has served the working class much less well. Their brightest offspring are adopted and well rewarded, but the networks and self-respect of the communities from which they come have largely been destroyed.

The destruction of real London, real Bradford, real Birmingham et al has been accomplished for the self-aggrandisement and moral satisfaction of the progressive middle class.  They may claim to survey their new joyless, self-alienated London, their Sharia-planning Moslem Bradford, their tinder-box Birmingham with egalitarian pride.  But London and Bradford and Birmingham were not theirs to give away to all humanity in the first place.  No legitimacy attaches, or will ever attach, to what they have done.  It is a geographical kidnap on a grand scale and I, for one, await the victim’s safe release with mounting impatience.

Posted by Guessedworker on Sunday, February 19, 2006 at 08:35 AM in Oh Tempora, Oh Mores
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