Jim,
“PJ”s letter concerning rising crime in the UK seems to pin it directly on the poor, the Traveller Community and immigrants. The “Traveller Community” for example, isn’t just made up of “gypsies”, many white, middle class kids are joining it because they regard life in the UK as becoming increasingly twisted due to misplaced priorities (which is hard to argue with). By the way, I just read today that ethnic “gypsies” have asked for recognition of their own holocaust during WWII, something that is conveniently forgotten by people like PJ who need to have a foreign scapegoat to blame the ills of society on.
I also find it interesting that he speaks of “under resourced Police forces” when the U.K. has become the literal manifestation of “Big Brother”, with surveillance cameras everywhere continually peering at it’s disarmed people. I don’t know about you but I don’t want our government to use questionable statistics of rising crime to eliminate our rights to privacy. [Rant snipped.] Be very careful about these scapegoating letters as they’re invariably racist, between the lines or not. Roman immigrants to Israel were responsible for the death of Jesus, yet nowhere in his message is “blame it on the foreigners”…..unless I’ve badly misread the New Testament. Best Regards, – A Reader
JWR Replies: I don’t want this to degenerate into ranting and flame wars, but this issue needs to be addressed, and I intend to do so, with just this one reply. I suppose that if either of us lived in England, we might have a different opinion about crime. Here is a snippet on comparative crime statistics that I just found on the web: “According to Interpol, the number of crimes per 100,000 residents for the UK in 1997 was 8,576.46, for the USA that year it was 4,922.74. For 1998 in the UK it was 9,823.28. Interpol does not have USA data for that year, nor does it have 2000 data for the UK. In 2000, however, the USA saw 4,123 crimes per 100,000 residents. In other words: UK crime rate is twice as high as USA’s and rising. USA crime rate is half the UK’s and falling.” So I can see why the average Englishman might be more fearful of crime than we are. (Although, ironically, the risk of getting murdered here in the US is higher than it is there. But England clearly has higher rates for nearly all other crimes–both violent and non-violent.)
Upon re-reading PJ’s letter, I can see that there are elements of it that could be construed as racist. I’ll withhold any judgment on PJ, but there are indeed some racist tendencies in England, just as there are here in the US. Back in the 1950s England had a low crime rate. But these days it has an unacceptably and uncomfortably high crime rate. But it is criminal individuals, not racial, ethnic, or religious groups that are to blame. We don’t paint with that sort of broad brush on SurvivalBlog.