English riots? The good and bad news

These are bothersome times, especially if your thoughts float back home to a favourite place in your heart or a special memory that might harbour in connection to London. One could get violently ill watching the thugs kick in the glass doors and looting the boxes of merchandise.

“They are not English” you scream in the recesses of your mind, but of course, you don’t utter it out loud. Well, not until the third G&T! Then, “let the devils be damned. Bang their heads together and put them in the army for a few months”.

Unfortunately the crisis runs much deeper than quick fixes. And, just bringing an American police specialist over to help guide in controlling “gangs” is a start to corralling the snake, pushing it into a corner and chopping off its head.

But in reality, that cannot happen either as England herself, is now held bound and fettered by the new popular rule of old propriety, as worn as a cobblestone street; “political correctness”.

Now it’s bad enough that someone from one of the secret M branches has brought in a yank, flown him over the pond but will anyone actually listen? No one did before!

What? You ask. These tragic circumstances have not occurred before. Well back in 2006 London’s Sunday Times published a series of articles by American anthropologist Charles Murray concerning the growing and threatening problem of England’s “underclass”.

What he said was pretty much the same bar conversation you hear from Expats out here relaxed enough to say it out loud and have drunk just enough to not worry about polite political correctness. Well, more than 6,000 letters poured in highly critical of the Yank for the audacity of his comments. He proved prophetically correct and hence he’s getting honourable mention in my column.

Murray suggests “By underclass, I do not mean people who are merely poor, but people at the margins of society, unsocialized and often violent.  The chronic criminal is part of the underclass, especially the violent chronic criminal… Over the past two decades, larger and larger numbers of British children have not been socialized to norms of self-control.   Consideration for others and the concept that actions have consequences.   One of the leading reasons is that larger and larger numbers of British children are not being raised by two mature married adults.”

Well, that said I rest my case, wishing that someone from the Isles of Scilly had penned it and not a fellow countryman. But the current government (now back from hollies) seems to also have tapped in to what should be the new mantra for the next ‘educational years’ ahead: RESPONSIBLE for YOUR actions – you reap the consequences of what you have sown.

Oh, and ‘political correctness’ is the hob-goblin of little minds! With it society never changes, transforms or evolves with the times but rather swings around in circles—endlessly.