Britain's knife crime 'huge lesson for Australia'

Britain’s social discord is thin end of the knife
19th June 2008, Paul Murray
the West Australian:

I was sitting in an English country pub last week surveying the Sunday crowd and came to the conclusion that no one around me was packing a knife. The cause of my concern was two weeks of wall-to-wall media coverage on so-called knife crimes in Britain.

The newspapers, television bulletins and the endless radio chat shows reacted violently to a new spate of knife attacks which came on top of 17 stabbing murders of young people in Britain — mainly in London — in the past six months.

That alarming statistic and the heavy racial element embedded in it has caused a serious outbreak of soul-searching ...

... characterised by the tides of black and Asian immigrants and refugees which has left several generations of younger Britons who have no culture — new or old — and struggle to find their place.

This has led to the formation over the past decade of a wave of new racially based street gangs that has, in large part, been responsible for many young people arming themselves, particularly with knives.

There is a huge lesson for Australia in these gangs. Tolerant authorities, committed to multiculturalism, sat back and watched disaffected youths, many from war-torn backgrounds, gravitate to the gangs ...

We are seeing the development of similar gangs in Perth and if we don’t nip them in the bud, we are likely to face the same crisis that is now causing so much heartache in Britain’s cities.

A leaked Metropolitan Police report that surfaced last year said there were 169 gangs in London alone ...

The BBC reported that African-Caribbean gangs were the biggest group, followed by south Asian and white gangs. Religion was also a defining factor, with some gangs comprising solely Muslim or Catholic members, for example ...

Just a week before, Michael Nazir-Ali, the Church’s most senior Asian clergyman, said the decline of Christian values was destroying Britishness and had created a moral vacuum which radical Islam was filling ...

Australia still lags some way behind the social decline evident in British cities. But we would be reckless not to have a close look at what is happening there and learn from it.

However, our Labor governments are still pilfering Britain for the very social policies that are clearly failing.

Well that's a lot more honest reporting than we are used to, so Paul Murray is to be applauded for that. But he is still dreaming if he thinks tinkering with social policy will fix it. Diversity is the problem. All the "soul-searching" and "close looking" is delaying the inevitable. Stopping immigration from incompatible sources is the first step in reigning in the problem.