Before the stats Merchants arrive, no matter how you dress it up, people running around fighting each other with machetes and giant knives in broad daylight is not and more importantly shouldn't be normal. Yes London is mostly safe but we shouldn't be seeing this in a functioning society.
by tylerthe-theatre
25 comments
Bring back stop and search, more police on foot patrol.
Pretending we don’t talk about the ethnicities of those involved or the role single parent families is hilarious to me. As someone who fits into both demographics it’s all I’ve heard about this topic since I was a kid. Nobody gives a fuck about sorting it out BECAUSE of who many people think the main demographics involved are, look at the response to the Idris Elba documentary. It’s apparently a “black” problem so why were so many people on it white when he even kinda explained that in the documentary.
Gutting the police force over the last 15 years has consequences
[a video of the attack. it’s absolutely savage](https://www.instagram.com/london_ukcrime/reel/DHrKOdfiTmD/)
I don’t think it is hard to identify what the problem is, it is hard to identify what to do about it, or find the political will to do it.
If you try and take something solid from this article about what can be done, it is mainly suggesting stopping social breakdown by dealing with fatherless families and lost kids. Youth clubs are mentioned.
I don’t disagree both are good goals, but this is from a newspaper which is pretty solidly Tory, and let’s remember they cut the funding for things like youth clubs. As for keeping families together, I would like to understand a bit better what the author thinks can be done? Since she is someone who has written op eds supporting benefit cuts and complaining about mental health diagnoses before, I doubt it is anything that would involve taxpayer money helping/treating people?
The core idea seems to be that we need to “talk openly” about the fact a lot of the violence is young teenage men disproportionately from single parent families, poverty, and disproportionately black.
Do we really not talk about that? Seems like we talk about knife crime a lot and these points are generally agreed by commentators from most political persuasions.
Face coverings really do present an issue, surely.
Especially if you’re talking kids.
Allow everyone to carry swords at this point. This is bullshit
Bring back things for kids to do, and don’t just say, ‘Youth Club’ where some happy clappy ‘I’m down with the kids’ idiot hands out johnnies and pamphlets on how you’re all in danger of becoming future Unabombers.
And don’t tell me it’s ‘racial’ there’s plenty of white chavvy kids doing this crap too. They’ve got nothing to do, no hope and no future, unless they’re in a private school and their parents can afford Mandarin and violin lessons. Get them into acting, dance, music, arts, crafts and volunteering, with the BS that goes along with Prince of Wales, or out of the city to experience rural life. Yes it costs, but you can’t just keep giving kids just enough education to work fixing your nans boiler or working the tills in Asda and expect them to have a well rounded personality.
The problem is not that we ignore the causes. The problem is that the causes aren’t illegal and can’t be banned. You can’t criminalise men who abandon their families. You can’t ban bad parenting.
Historically social shame was the incentive to be a better parent. If your kids were out of control or troublemakers that *would* reflect badly on you, and you cared about other people’s opinions.
Now, no-one gives a shit about their neighbours opinions, and people are unwilling to blame parents anyway. If we continue to waffle about schools and youth clubs and budget cuts we won’t get anywhere.
We need to find new incentives for people to raise their kids properly. Yes we have to make it easier once the incentive is there, but it’s the incentive that’s lacking.
It happens because they have zero fear of any consequences of their actions.
Drugs are the problem. Most stabbings are beefs between rival dealers or customers. Random stabbings are very rare. Address the illegal drug trade. Hint: more crackdowns, longer sentences and bans won’t solve anything.
So when you say “the stats merchants” you mean “the reality that I don’t like being true”, right?
It’s not normal. That’s why it’s a news story.
someone needs to supply and deliver drugs , someone needs to run criminal industry in the city, someone needs to fund criminal syndicate of thieves and illegal businesses
machetes is a symptom of allowing crime run freely this way, if all the knives and machetes suddenly vanished, we would see a spike in forks, pepper sprays or anything that can be weaponized
Guys another knife ban will do the trick! perhaps if we make stabbing people to death illigal too it’ll stop!
Poverty, austerity, cutting services, jobs that pay appallingly. Under the previous Labour gov they did a lot to tackle these issues and I saw massive changes in my own area. Then the Tories came and now we’re worse than back to square one. We’ve replaced the TOries with worse Tories that are continuing the same policies so there is no fucking hope unless people form grassroots movements and oust every single thatcherite fuckwit from parliament
Just saw the news about labour planing to make cuts to education including funding for music, arts and after school clubs… It is all a cycle. When young people grow up without healthy outlets and spaces they can decompress in and when their own families are struggling to get by people just grow up to be like this. Young boys are very heavily unsupported in our society.
I’m sorry but I’m from a poor working class background and the lack of a youth club and boredom never led me to brandish machetes in public and enter a postcode gang. Poverty isn’t the problem, it’s the families these kids are part of.
I don’t know what the point of this post is. It’s not normal, everyone is horrified by it (seriously, show me one person who heard of this story and wasn’t horrified), and no one is ignoring the causes but if it were easy to solve then we would have done it by now. The person who solves knife crime in London would win the fecking Nobel peace prize and historical notoriety, you think no one wants to solve this?? Maybe you think the solutions are easy and simple and everyone is complicit in not implementing them but if so, respectfully, I think you’re wrong
“We need to talk about the perpetrators being ethnic minority” Do we even talk about anything else? You cut everything children use and need, safety, sports, arts, community centres, after school clubs, breakfast clubs, teacher/student ratios, job prospects, and none of these are mentioned or discussed half as regularly as race.
this sort of behaviour always occurs when people are in gangs and the gangs want to fight. It is not new to London either, here’s a case I pulled up at random from 1716
[t17161010-1 | The Proceedings of the Old Bailey](https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/record/t17161010-1)
up to 100 people involved and someones house got pulled down. Some of the guys were executed for it.
It’s not a coincidence that these kids would have been born just as austerity started hitting working class families.
Ban face coverings.
Stop and search anyone with a face covering.
Coalition shut down funding to bunch anti-knife schemes some were run by community locals who lost their children and friends to knife crime.
Cuts to EMA and youth centre and parenting classes also were lost 10 years ago.
This is generation austerity that Cameron and clegg started
These are mostly children who are walking the streets of london brandishing bladed articles. Children often from very similar social classes, living in very similar homes. Yes there’s nothing for them to do, their playgrounds are being turned into apartments, their social clubs no longer exist, they are city kids living in this urban concrete jungle. But amongs thousands of issues these children are faced with which contributes to them walking the streets with knifes. There is just a total lack of discipline.
Parents are prioritising making sure their children “fit in” by buying the latest fashionable item, or latest electronic devices. Instead of putting that funding to very cheap after school activities like Cadets, and Scouts even boxing and football. Where there are mentors out there for these young men and women. I went to a boxing club offering 2 hours on a Saturday training for £2 a week. There were about 4 kids there.
Parents who neglect their children and leaving it to the state to look after them. 10 and 11pm at night and they don’t even know where their 13 year old is. Parents who have 5/6 children in a 2 bed flat living off the government. Doing nothing all day. I know I lived in the estates. Parents buying drugs off of their own children. Parents not supervising their children at home, not putting discipline first. Not doing the homework, not even getting them properly bathed and dressed for school.
On top of that we have a society profiteering off of this nonsense behaviour. Hours of vidoes on YouTube of gangs going back and forth in diss tracks about how they killed their “ops”. YouTube allowing this nonsense to continue. Fuelling gang wars while earning a revenue from the ads streamed on the channel. This has to stop. Music studios earning a living from the hours spend recording songs glorifying the violence.
It’s not just about banning a knife or a crossbow. This is a deep societal problem. We do not enforce discipline in our youth. We need to address all issues I’ve only scratched the surface. I’ve been a victim of knife crime. Enough it enough.
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