If Baby P had been middle class, he'd have been taken away
Last updated at 6:34 PM on 15th November 2008
The trouble with modern Britain is that the wrong people are afraid.
Inexpressibly cruel killers are afraid of nothing, and rightly view the
criminal justice system as a feeble joke.
But the police, the courts and the social workers are increasingly
fearful of the violent, conscience-free underclass, created by 45 years
of well-intentioned but disastrous socialism.
This fear helps to explain the pathetic response of authority to the
case of ‘Baby P’. Were those who dealt directly with the child’s mother
scared either of her or of some unseen figure in the background?
Were those who dealt directly with Baby P's mother scared of either her
or some unseen figure in the background?
If so, I don’t specially blame them. Such people are very frightening
and capable - as they proved in this case - of homicidal violence.
Let us be plain. If one tenth part of the events that took place in Baby
P’s mother’s house had happened in a middle-class home, the child would
have been snatched away in minutes by haughty social workers.
In fact, if a middle-class Baby P had fallen off a swing and banged his
head in a genuine accident, the selectively vigilant social-work squads
would have been demanding his removal from the home.
They are always prone to imagine abuse among the respectable, even when
it’s not taking place.
This is partly because of the prejudice such people usually harbour
against the middle class. It is also because they know that the middle
class will co-operate with them, will obey the law, turn up at meetings
and hearings, take their authority seriously.
But things are different in the earthly hell inhabited by ‘Baby P’ -
life financed by £450 a week of other people’s money, filthy rooms and
clothes, infestations of lice, the house stinking of human waste and
overrun by smelly, aggressive dogs.
The mother, constantly watching TV or staring at rubbish on the
internet, was so unmoved by her child’s death (the little martyred
corpse was actually blue) that she asked the ambulance men to hang on
while she fetched her cigarettes.
And, of course, there’s an ever-shifting queue of serial boyfriends
lurking just out of view, hoping for a slice of the benefits.
But we cannot own up to this problem. Officially, we aren’t even allowed
to disapprove of this way of life or be ‘judgmental’ about the people
who lead such lives. Why? Mainly because the Left cannot admit that
these things are bad. Because to accept that would be to accept that it
has made a terrible mistake.
This type of misery stems mainly from decisions taken in the Sixties -
especially to begin subsidising women who got pregnant outside wedlock,
and to make the marriage bond easily breakable.
The predictable result was that we quickly saw many more households
where the child has no natural father in the home.
Worse still, we saw a substantial minority where there is a stream of
serial boyfriends, likely to view any child as a nuisance or a
plaything, or both.
Research done by the Family Education Trust shows that abuse of children
- either violent or sexual - is 33 times more likely in such households
than in homes where there is a stable marriage.
This underlines the dishonesty of a famous NSPCC advertising campaign in
which child abuse was portrayed as taking place in clean, tidy,
prosperous homes. No doubt it can and does happen there, but much less
than it does in the urine-perfumed slums of New Britain.
Britain was certainly not perfect before these changes in the Sixties.
That is not the point. Perfection is elusive. The point is that it could
be much better now. But it isn’t because in that era we chose the wrong
future, for the best of intentions. Now we have got that future, we can
see it for what it is.
Can we now admit that we were wrong, and change course? Only the pride
of the fashionable Left, and its unwillingness to admit its mistakes,
stand in the way. But until they own up to their error, expect such
cases to happen again and again.
Stalin was evil: News to no one but the BBC
Amid the necessary rage over the Ross-Brand affair at the BBC, it is
often said that the Corporation still produces a lot of high-quality
material alongside the Leftist propaganda and the low-brow dross.
I’m not so sure of this. Radio 4 has some good news and current-affairs
programmes, but much of its airtime is stuffed with dire alleged comedy,
the appalling, shameless and unchecked Leftist propaganda of ‘The News
Quiz’ and an unchanging array of chat shows presented by ancient
liberals.
Actor Alexei Petrenko as Stalin in the woeful BBC documentary
'Low-grade tripe': Actor Alexei Petrenko as Stalin in the woeful BBC
documentary
As for the TV stations, I now rarely bother switching them on. The
prospect of trimming my toenails or flossing my teeth, or reading the
labels of empty beer bottles, just seems more alluring.
But the other day I was persuaded to sample a supposedly illuminating
BBC2 documentary called World War Two - Behind Closed Doors. This, I was
assured, would be full of exciting new facts, grippingly presented.
What did I get? A portentous commentary, an actor pretending to be Joe
Stalin and various other silly reconstructions (one very lengthy one
involved a woman roaming irrelevantly round a house in Lvov, in her
underwear).
Mixed in with this was the BBC’s shocked discovery that Stalin and
Hitler signed a pact of alliance in 1939 and - amazing! - jointly
invaded Poland before co-operating against Britain.
Well spotted, BBC. Some of us have known this for decades. Presumably
the Corporation was so stuffed with communist fellow-travellers that it
couldn’t be mentioned till now. Behind closed doors indeed.
I was so dispirited by this low-grade tripe that I switched over to BBC1
to catch up with the once-excellent thriller series Spooks. But this has
become a wooden parody of itself.
What’s more, it has succumbed to the BBC’s love affair with the Tories.
As London (yet again) faced a terrorist threat, MI5 agents were ordered
to check the whereabouts not only of the Cabinet but also of the Shadow
Cabinet. They’d never have done that before David Cameron took over.
St Barack’s expensive schools and sneaky cigarettes
Still the Obama-worship continues. Scores of Americans denounced me for
suggesting last week that Mr Obama was not divine.
How do these people cope with the fact that the President-elect,
following a fine old Left-wing tradition on both sides of the Atlantic,
is seeking to send his daughters to terrifyingly expensive private
schools in Washington DC?
Surely, in between curing cancer and mending the hole in the ozone
layer, Mr Obama can fix the US capital’s atrocious state schools?
And have any of you ever seen a picture of Mr Obama, a heavy smoker,
with a cigarette in his mouth? No, nor have I. Why is that?
* By the way, what has become of the Metropolitan Police celebrity
squad? It is a criminal offence to make obscene telephone calls, and two
major stars have been caught doing just that. Yet not a word from the
Yard.
Find this story at www.dailymail.
HITCHENS-If-
Sunday, 16 November 2008
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