IWCA piece on London knife crime below:
Unlike the working class youngsters who signed up to fight ‘the Hun’ in 1918, today's knife wielders need no conditioning to kill. Still part of the working class, or the enemy of it?
The controversy over knife crime and stop and search rumbles on. Professor Green, the white rapper and television presenter, is the latest to weigh in. He states that presenting knife crime as a problem in black communities, even in London, is racist. For him and a whole regiment of other Guardian worthies it is as simple as that. Writing on Instagram after an interview with Good Morning Britain, Professor Green said there was bias in how recent stabbings had been reported. “There had been a lot of reference to a statistic that its largely black youths stabbing each other – what was left out that this was only true in certain areas. As anyone with a brain can work out in more densely populated areas the face of knife crime is white. That’s never represented in the media. The fact that the face of knife crime they project nationally is black youths implies institutional racism and criminalises a whole race, fitting their agenda to bring back racially profiled stop and search.”
He concluded: “I don’t think stop and search works to do anything apart from create more division, friction and a lack of trust of an organisation ever proven to growingly corrupt.”
Here is some data from the Mayor of London’s office for policing: last year approximately half of all knife crime victims and offenders were black or minority ethnic. Regarding knife crime that resulted in injury, 69 per cent of offenders and 55 per cent of victims were black or minority ethnic, while 64 per cent of non-domestic knife homicide came from the same racial demographic. Knife crime in London is disproportionately a young black male problem and at the very least it is deeply dishonest to pretend otherwise.
Liberal opponents of efforts to clamp down on the gangs - which are the drivers and inspiration for much of the carnage - point to the need for a more holistic approach as adopted by the successful Glaswegian model, but they side step the reality that stop and search had to be increased eight fold to provide the underpinning for the overall strategy to be effective. Even then it took a decade to fully kick in. So in resisting the use of stop and search even in the working class neighbourhoods where knife killings are rampant, there is a tacit acceptance that in order to be true to a growingly corrupt liberal ideology the loss of young black lives is a price worth paying: collateral damage at best. From that very narrow angle, not making this a black issue is where the real bias lies.
In 1914-18 when working class youngsters signed up to fight ‘the Hun’ they had to be conditioned by exasperated NCO’s to kill. That the knife wielders terrorising entire estates and even boroughs need no such conditioning points to them being representative of a different social demographic with markedly different values, instincts and interests. In truth they are the high profile representatives of a class apart and brazenly proud of it. The drill music videos (which are also defended by liberals naturally) are used as a propaganda tool by various crews to add glamour, vindication, and intricacy to their grisly trade. On the surface it is all about insults, stabbings and post codes, but deep down it is also about indoctrinating thousands of children and youngsters not directly involved into their wolf and lamb worldview. The resulting social contagion is arguably more deadly than the gangs themselves, a political dimension which is, needless to say, also totally ignored.
In short, the lawless lumpen are not in any way representative of the working class historically, not even the roughest end of it. Indeed in many black working class neighbourhoods especially in London they represent a visible enemy.
Yet as Professor Green and others would have it, blameless black youth versus institutionally racist police is what it is really about. To call this superficial is to put the kindest spin on it. Fundamentally, the unspoken (and uneven) struggle is between working class communities white and black on one hand, and their lumpen and liberal opponents on the other.
If you still doubt this analysis, ask yourself a simple question. Could the gangs ever be trusted as class allies? The answer will tell you whose side you are actually on.