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Musings on Little England
Jun. 30th, 2003 12:32 amI've been reading too many rigth wing Blogs and Usenews posts. Its bad for me.
The concensus of many I have been reading is thus: Due to the liberals and permissive society created in the 50's, the UK has been going to hell. You can tell because there are too many laws, too many criminals and everything was much better in the past because little old ladies weren't mugged and old men sent to prison for shooting burglars in their own homes.
Right.
There is a problem.
I can't speak for anything before the early 1970's, but let's take burglary. In the last century, one of these people helpfully inform me, burglary rose by 2500% while the population only rose 45%. An interesting statistic. However, one bearing closer inspection.
When I was 5, in 1973, we had the following items of easy to nick wealth in our average middle class 3 bedroom house. Nothing.
Zip, nada. The black and white telly was ancient, the big radio in the dining room needed 2 grown men to lift it and the little record player was a chunky mono thing we eventually had to give away. I think mum had a little jewelery but there wasn't much of that. A burglar at 32 Hanbury Close was going to find it pretty slim pickings, as they would, I will venture to say at any of the other 40 houses on the Close. Or, for that matter, most of the 20,000 odd properties in 1970's Cheshunt.
It's different now, much different. So, why on Earth do people think there's something odd about crime rising?
Take another datapoint. The following was suggested: "School kids were better behaved before the 1960's when the press started reporting that kids wouldn't behave. That was for the first time in history..."
There are several factors at work here and I've a few ideas. Firstly, to take schooling. Using a phrase like "history" in conjunction with "school" is a mistake. We've only had universal compulsory education in the UK for a few generations. Probably my grandfathers (1905) was the 2nd or so, and that only lasted to 11 or 12. My mother (1931) went through an education process that I recognise. So by the 1960's, we were only in the second generation of universal education to your teens.
We were also coming out of the class system.
We were also coming out of a period of 100 years marked by warfare and large standing armys. Somebody suggested to me that the Boer War was like Afganistan and fought only with professionals, as was the Crimea. Firstly, the "professional" army had some shady recruiting practises back then, secondly, by 1901 we had 250,000 soliders in South Africa. That's right. More than 5 times the current ENTIRE British army.
After that we had WW1 and WW2 and a decade of National Service.
We will ignore full employment for the time being.
So, 100 years of the instiutionalisation of the male population ends at the same time as the wealth of the individual increases dramtically. Are we surprised that, when for the first time in living memory we don't have a major war and we all get rich, that crime goes up?
I'm not.
I wish other people would learn to put things in perspective before they jerked their knees.
Sorry about the rant, but I wanted to get that off my chest.
The concensus of many I have been reading is thus: Due to the liberals and permissive society created in the 50's, the UK has been going to hell. You can tell because there are too many laws, too many criminals and everything was much better in the past because little old ladies weren't mugged and old men sent to prison for shooting burglars in their own homes.
Right.
There is a problem.
I can't speak for anything before the early 1970's, but let's take burglary. In the last century, one of these people helpfully inform me, burglary rose by 2500% while the population only rose 45%. An interesting statistic. However, one bearing closer inspection.
When I was 5, in 1973, we had the following items of easy to nick wealth in our average middle class 3 bedroom house. Nothing.
Zip, nada. The black and white telly was ancient, the big radio in the dining room needed 2 grown men to lift it and the little record player was a chunky mono thing we eventually had to give away. I think mum had a little jewelery but there wasn't much of that. A burglar at 32 Hanbury Close was going to find it pretty slim pickings, as they would, I will venture to say at any of the other 40 houses on the Close. Or, for that matter, most of the 20,000 odd properties in 1970's Cheshunt.
It's different now, much different. So, why on Earth do people think there's something odd about crime rising?
Take another datapoint. The following was suggested: "School kids were better behaved before the 1960's when the press started reporting that kids wouldn't behave. That was for the first time in history..."
There are several factors at work here and I've a few ideas. Firstly, to take schooling. Using a phrase like "history" in conjunction with "school" is a mistake. We've only had universal compulsory education in the UK for a few generations. Probably my grandfathers (1905) was the 2nd or so, and that only lasted to 11 or 12. My mother (1931) went through an education process that I recognise. So by the 1960's, we were only in the second generation of universal education to your teens.
We were also coming out of the class system.
We were also coming out of a period of 100 years marked by warfare and large standing armys. Somebody suggested to me that the Boer War was like Afganistan and fought only with professionals, as was the Crimea. Firstly, the "professional" army had some shady recruiting practises back then, secondly, by 1901 we had 250,000 soliders in South Africa. That's right. More than 5 times the current ENTIRE British army.
After that we had WW1 and WW2 and a decade of National Service.
We will ignore full employment for the time being.
So, 100 years of the instiutionalisation of the male population ends at the same time as the wealth of the individual increases dramtically. Are we surprised that, when for the first time in living memory we don't have a major war and we all get rich, that crime goes up?
I'm not.
I wish other people would learn to put things in perspective before they jerked their knees.
Sorry about the rant, but I wanted to get that off my chest.
