Blair Grows a Pair

Blames black crime on blacks and their culture. Predictably, it has the egalitarian excuseologists in outrage.

However, before you get too excited, realize that he hasn’t exactly morphed into Jared Taylor.

UK Guardian:

It needed to be addressed by a tailored counter-attack in the same way as football hooliganism was reined in by producing measures aimed at the specific problem, rather than general lawlessness.

Okay, take your pick. Black thugs, or white soccer hooligans? I rest my case.

Mr Blair’s remarks are at odds with those of the Home Office minister Lady Scotland, who told the home affairs select committee last month that the disproportionate number of black youths in the criminal justice system was a function of their disproportionate poverty, and not to do with a distinctive black culture.

However, if you adjust for economic status and age, poor young blacks are still more criminally inclined than poor young whites. So “distinctive black culture” does play a role.

Giving the Callaghan lecture in Cardiff, the prime minister admitted he had been “lurching into total frankness” in the final weeks of his premiership. He called on black people to lead the fight against knife crime.

Though predictably and regrettably, Blair sinks back into the hole of saying phrases like “gun crime” and “knife crime.” Guns and knives can’t commit crimes. Not only that, England could have used some of his newfound “total frankness” earlier in his tenure.

The laws on knife and gun gangs needed to be toughened and the ringleaders “taken out of circulation”.

Again, knives and guns can’t form gangs, and certainly arresting the knives and guns won’t help.

Keith Jarrett, chair of the National Black Police Association, whose members work with vulnerable youngsters, said: “Social deprivation and delinquency go hand in hand and we need to tackle both. It is curious that the prime minister does not mention deprivation in his speech.”

It looks like black cops there are as useless as black cops here in stopping black crime.

Lee Jasper, adviser on policing to London’s mayor, said: “For years we have said this is an issue the black community has to deal with. The PM is spectacularly ill-informed if he thinks otherwise.

Keep dreaming, brother.

The Home Office has already announced it is looking at the possibility of banning membership of gangs, tougher enforcement of the supposed mandatory five-year sentences for possession of illegal firearms, and lowering the age from 21 to 18 for this mandatory sentence.

Looks like Project Exile and RICO are both coming to England. (Perhaps Boston should follow suit in using racketeering laws to bust up street gangs.) Though what I find strange is that 18-, 19-, and 20-year old men are exempt currently from the illegal gun punishment. This is coming from the same country where at 16, you can join the military, and depending on your track in the education system, be finished with your prescribed education, start work and live as an adult.

Mr Blair is known to believe the tendency for many black boys to be raised in families without a father leads to a lack of appropriate role models.

Two-parent families are better than one-parent families as a qualitative measure of central tendency, but I also think that this is a bit of a bromide. Compare young white men who had only one parent, to young black men of the same.

The Commission for Racial Equality broadly backed Mr Blair, saying people “shouldn’t be afraid to talk about this issue for fear of sounding prejudiced”.

The reason that the Equality Politburo here isn’t criticizing Blair is that he didn’t quite come out for genetic racial differences as a root cause of the social ills that he bemoans.