Britain is still broken. Here’s how to fix it

Nearly six years ago, in The Spectator, I explained how and why the gang culture that exploded in the 2011 riots was a ‘taste of the Britain to come.’ I also explained how the left-liberal establishment had allowed the conditions for gang crime to flourish while ignoring the solutions. Sadly, this wasn’t difficult to predict and with the 2018 killing toll in London passing 50, the same questions need to be asked again.

The good news is that we can stop the carnage on our streets within a week. But firstly it is important to draw a clearer picture of the causes. In working with gang members in Tottenham during the 2008 knife crime surge, and then on the government riots panel in 2012, I saw how our public institutions were unintentionally producing broken families and communities. Schools where there was no discipline, police too scared to do their job, social services biased against fathers and politicians too scared to talk about morals and values.