What’s the cause of knife crime? The government has today focused on tightening laws etc. But if Charles Murray were here today, he’d see this as a classic underclass problem.
He has three tests for an underclass: births outside marriage, jobless young men and violent crime. In 1997, 37% of children were born outside marriage – this is now projected to be 44.2% (strip out immigrants and it would be 50.1%). In 1997, 15% men were economically inactive (ie, not in work or seeking it). Now in spite of those 3m new jobs it is 16.5% – the highest in the history of these islands. Finally, violent crime was 650,330 in 1998/99 when the current data series began – it had soared to 1.2m by 2005/06.
So Murray’s three alarm warnings are flashing red. So by his definition, Britain fits the classic problem of a broken society. Unless we start to fix it, all the knife laws in the world won’t help.
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