Bob Piper
Bob Piper










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When you get a major news item one of the problems is that almost everyone, the bloke behind the bar, the woman on the bus, the butcher, baker and bloody candlestick maker... have all got some simple solution to a complex problem. It is a black and white world to them... there are no shades of grey in between, this is what you need to do, and these are the people to blame for not doing it.

Sadly, blogs are no different.... and in many cases even worse. Take the shooting of the young lad in Liverpool. Tory bloggers seem to have decided the shooting is the fault of the Labour government. Here's an example of a couple of complete twonks over at Dizzy Thinks. First idiot up is someone who calls himself thomas b:

The BBC were even surprisingly neutral last night - pointing out some of these kids were little more than toddlers when Labour came into power.
Of course, if you just wanted to score cheap political points that require no brain power or sensible analysis, that is undoubtably one of the conclusions you would reach. The fact that you could just as easily argue that the breakdown of family discipline has been brought about under young parents brought up in the Thatcher grab-it-all-for-yourself-and-bugger-the consequences-era is an equally simplistic response, but probably not one that wee thomas b wishes to consider. Scroll on later in the same comments box we come across this muppet, john trenchard:
labour MP on c4 news tonight - turns out that a gang of thugs in that area of liverpool had been given ASBOs.

so rather than locking up the bastards and throwing away the key, they got ASBOs -

and now an 11 year is dead.

Yes... his solution to gun crime is to lock up teenagers for anti-social behaviour... for life! Well, it would certainly stop them doing it again. No doubt john trenchard is a big supporter of the Conservative Party's Taliban Tendency.

But for the King of Trite Responses, let us look no further than the Bob Beamon of the bandwagon jump himself, Lord Dale of TebbitTown. Although confessing not to knowing the answers, (invariably followed in these circumstances by the offer of a simple solution) other than the fact that children need a male role model (John Wayne, anyone), Iain suggests that at least part of the reason for Inner City gun crime in lies with the fact that...

local politicians and public service departments in inner cities have failed their communities. That's at least a large part of the reason why parts of Manchester, Liverpool, South London, Birmingham, Nottingham, Bristol and Leeds are experiencing these terrible killings and assaults.
Now, in case you don't quite get the nuances of Iain's trite response, it is not unlike the dingbat thomas b above... it is all Labour's fault, but this time, through their local councils. So, we get...
Local Labour politicians have been more interested in protecting their local inner city fiefdoms than tackling the terrible social deprivation that exists within them.
Now, does that mean we should blame the Conservative-Lib Dem fiefdom in control of Birmingham City Council for the deaths of Charlene Ellis and Letisha Shakespeare? No, of course not. But how about Leeds and Liverpool fiefdoms controlled by the Lib Dems I think... oh, and Bristol's fiefdom, wasn't that controlled by the Lib Dems until May of this year? Then there are the shootings in Letchworth on the same night that young Rhys Jones was gunned down. Shouldn't Labour bloggers be rushing to post items about the Tory fiefdom in Hertfordshire responsible for this decline in public standards in Letchworth? I wouldn't for one nano second attempt to blame the Councils in those areas for the upsurge of national gun crime, but Iain, if you are going to do so, then let's make sure you ladle out the blame evenly.

Just how fatuous can you get though in search of a few cheap political points to try score around the tragic death of a child? I wouldn't mind so much if there was some serious attempt at analysis. Something which looked at the alienation of young people from their surroundings, the obscenity of undreamed of wealth alongside crippling poverty (which seems to have continued to grow under the Blair-Brown years) and its impact on the aspirations of those who do not meet the requirements of the new widened university generation. But to trot out this sort of simplistic garbage... give it a rest.

Posted by bobpiper on August 24, 2007, 4:03 PM  |  view comments (4) or add another



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Chris Paul said:
August 24, 2007 9:11 PM | permalink

Have the Lib Dems lost Bristol? It's Lib-Con in Leeds I think. And it has been Lib Dem in Liverpool for far far too long.

You're right about the parents of course. And Thatcher. If we're playing that game. But "anecdotal evidence" is the biggest issue. As the man from ACPO pointed out on C4N the situation is now much better than in 1995 ...

Too much news. Too little quality control and proper analysis.




Chris Paul said:
August 24, 2007 11:25 PM | permalink

A few thoughts on this here.




jailhouselawyer said:
August 25, 2007 12:14 AM | permalink

I tipped Chris Paul off about this excellent post and he has blogged about it.




John Lilburne said:
August 25, 2007 9:38 AM | permalink

What the Tory lock-em-up-and-throw-away-the-key tendency seem to forget is that if we put that idea into practice we'd soon have prisons where people on the roof wouldn't be a sign of protest but a method of dealing with overcrowding.

And if we sent everyone who had committed a minor indiscretion away for some porridge they would simply learn even more ways to improve their criminal careers. After all, just think who they may meet in a prison. They could sharpen up any ideas about perjury and perverting the course of justice from the like of Archer and and Aitken, for example.

And talking of which have you noticed that in the Wikipedia article about famous lags, Tory MPs seem rather over represented compared to other professions:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Incarcerated_celebrities





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