Where few people want to work (in serious jobs) because most people (not just the British but other citizens of wealthy EU countries) are too apathetic to learn the language either properly or at all.
The biggest mistakes the British left made....
- Thread starter Oswaldtwistle
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Where few people want to work (in serious jobs) because most people (not just the British but other citizens of wealthy EU countries) are too apathetic to learn the language either properly or at all.
Blagsta
Minimum cage, maximum cage
Fallacious argument. It is possible to be compassionate for both and not take people on holiday. Just requires a little thinking, is all.
kyser_soze
Hawking's Angry Eyebrow
Same comment as I made earlier - 'I was abused as a child, but I'm not a criminal. It doesn't make them special or give them a reason for doing what they've done.'
It may well be a completely sound argument, but to many people it looks like an excuse not to punish, rather than a reason for behaviour.
TruXta
tired
The problem is that people often don't want restorative justice, they want retributive justice, which is a model most European countries have rightly abandoned long ago. I mean, shouldn't we just go straight back to eye for an eye then, or chopping thieves' hands off? What's stopping you?
past caring
The Cathars were right
This may well be true - but I am equally convinced that LLETSA is entirely right in saying that in regards the issue of crime, the orthodox left has almost entirely lost the ear of those it supposedly seeks to represent because of its appearance (and in some cases appearance and reality do very much coincide) of putting the victim second. Yes - a social explanation of crime and its causes is important, but I think it needs to come some considerable way behind both sympathy for the victim and a practical exploration of immediate remedies.....
Statistics don't tell the full story. Still having relatives in the inner-city area where I grew up, I'd dispute the notion that crime is falling; in poor areas it seems to be rising and becoming more violent. And there is nothing anybody can do about the fact that most people react with gut feeling, particularly with regard to what they see around them.
I'm not claiming that it isn't a complex problem, nor one where proposals can please everybody.
The39thStep
Urban critical thinker
Lettsa has a point though, the liberal left including some posters on here never seem to start from the victims point of view.
Blagsta
Minimum cage, maximum cage
Which is why it's an argument that needs to be carefully backed up with reference to stats, what is known about attachment theory and infant brain development, case studies etc. Which I can do if you like, btw.
TruXta
tired
Of course stats don't tell the full story, but they tell a helluva lot better story than people's perceptions. You dispute the notion, based on what, stories told you by family? Sorry, that just won't do as the basis for a criminal justice system. Unless you're a full on populist of course.
Blagsta
Minimum cage, maximum cage
Which victim? The one who went into care at age 5, then was abused in care by a paedophile ring? That one? Or the victim of commercial burglary, when robbed by drug user after money?
Life ain't black and white.
kyser_soze
Hawking's Angry Eyebrow
It's only a fallacious argument to someone who follows your method of social analysis.
Blagsta
Minimum cage, maximum cage
No actual politics from you, as fucking usual. Silly cunt.
Blagsta
Minimum cage, maximum cage
What I'm stating happen to be facts, verifiable and proveable.
The39thStep
Urban critical thinker
Crime has generally fallen albeit disproportionately in working class areas . Violent crime though is a very mixed picture. it can be argued that Labours expansion of the prison population contributed to that fall in crime, however that isn't sustainable crime reduction .
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
Condition of membership in the EU. All nation-states (with the current exclusion of Romania and Bulgaria, IIRC) have freedom of movement and labour.
Given the current state of play, with some legitimate employers seeking to get around issues of minimum wage, or to have it abolished, I'm not so sure there'd be a significant transfer/transformation.
Far be it for me to quibble over terminology (not!), but "migrant labour" and "economic migrants"/"economic migration" are in no way synonymous.
Blagsta
Minimum cage, maximum cage
It's also an argument for improved housing, education, mental health services etc in working class areas.
TruXta
tired
Yeah, cuz clearly no-one really believes that the Earth rotates around the Sun do they? I mean, it's obvious that it's the other way around.
You ever heard of education and other means of increasing awareness and knowledge?
DownwardDog
Riding a Brompton with a power meter.
Plenty of EU countries (France and Belgium for example) didn't allow immediate access to their labour markets to citizens from the A8 when they joined in 2004. And consequently didn't get the arse knocked out of the bottom end of their employment markets. The UK could have chosen to do the same.
The39thStep
Urban critical thinker
and life isn't we are all victims either Blagsta. Unlike criminals whose defence solicitor/drug worker/ probation officer normally trots out some pathological history which tries to explain how everyone else is to blame in the offender making the decision to offend, the victims struggle against life's misfortunes remains in the background.
I watched a very good DVD about a criminal ( and drug addict) who ended up meeting one of his victims . He was ashamed of what he had done and the fact that he had never thought about his victims before and concluded that he had to take responsibility for his actions not others.
past caring
The Cathars were right
The orthodox left has spent the last century attempting to educate its (supposed) working class constituency into realising its error when it blames criminals, rather than capital, for crime.
Worked well, hasn't it?
ericjarvis
give a feck for the feckless
IMHO, getting into bed with the full-on Green lobby, and political correctness.
1) Crime plagues working class neighbourhoods, but again the Left daren't call for tougher punishments for criminals, for fear of upsetting the liberal middle class.
2) The price of petrol is at an all time high, a huge burden on low income families but the Left is so far in bed with the global warming lobby, they won't speak out over it.
3) *Economic migration is denying British unemployed people the chance to get back into work but the Left has nothing to say about it, for fear of being branded racist
In short they are too busy fighting the battles of middle class liberals and not fighting for the disadvantaged.
What are your 'top 3' mistakes the left has made?
*Just to make this crystal fucking clear. When I say economic immigration I mean economic immigration. Not asylum seekers. Not Black or Asian people. Economic immigration. Criticise me all you like, but if anyone dares to mis-represent this as racist, there'll be bother
I'd say the one basic mistake is to underestimate the sheer stupidity of people like you who believe right wing bullshit without any regard to logic or reality. Several of your completely ludicrous assertions are not only open to challenge, but are completely contrary to all the evidence or are based entirely on fallacious logic. The mistake made by too many on the left is to assume that simply pointing out your errors will eventually lead to you realising where your thinking is faulty. You won't. Because you want to believe that there are simple solutions to complex problems, and furthermore that they are solutions that involve you behaving exactly as you wish and everyone else being made to behave as you do.
What the left has to do is to take on all of these insane fallacies every single time they appear. It won't change the opinions of most on the right, but it has a good chance of making them appear as figures of fun to those who have no strong opinions.
So.
Point 1. There is absolutely no evidence that tougher punishment of criminals deters crime. That's a simple fact established for well over half a century. There is a clear correlation between the likelihood of being convicted and deterrence, but no correlation between the level of punishment (either way) and deterrence. Furthermore the harsher the punishment the less the likelihood of a conviction. So, if anything, harsher punishments for criminals are counter productive.
Which is why those of us who actually live in areas of high crime tend to be against blindly crying out for harsher punishments for criminals, and those who call for such harshness tend to be people who live safely insulated from crime so that they can concentrate on how macho they appear without having to worry about the actual effects of what they propose.
So point one is something the left has got right, unfortunately the Labour Party has spent the last two decades backing away from debating the point as it requires a modicum of intelligence to understand the point and thus doesn't appeal to Daily Mail leader writers.
Point 2.
There is no fucking global warming lobby. That's entirely a figment of the deranged imaginations of those who fall sucker to the likes of Monckton and other such con artists. Had you ANY scientific education to any reasonable standard, and the willingness to do even the merest modicum of research that would be abundantly clear to you. The left has got this one right too. However it's generally been unwilling to debate this issue with the gloves off. The simple fact is you can't be countered politely. That is because your entire case is completely moronic. The mistake the left has made is to mince their words and not point out that what is going on here is an enormously well funded lobbying campaign on behalf of the fairly small number of energy and car companies that failed to pay attention when the evidence emerged of a clear case for AGW and therefore find themselves struggling against competitors that had made the sensible decision to diversify their businesses. You are being conned. That should be pointed out on a regular basis.
Point 3 is another where the left has it right and you haven't.
The simple fact is that on the whole immigration benefits the economy. That's regardless of the motivation of the immigrant. It may harm the economy in the place the immigrant came from, but generally the effect at their destination is positive. It may well be that when one looks at a single specific job an immigrant may be working in a job that might otherwise have gone to somebody else. However there are more than two people in this country. So the relevant question is whether the overall result of economic migration leads to less or more work for others. Since there is a clear correlation between levels of immigration and overall GDP growth there's a stronger case for economic immigration leading to more work being available rather than less.
The mistake the left has made is to allow the debate to take place in over-simplified terms that value conclusions drawn from extrapolations of individual instances far too highly, whilst treating overall and objective statistical evidence as something too complex for the tiny minds of Britain's people to understand.
So. I agree that they are too busy fighting the battles of the middle classes. That's because we have allowed British politics to become wholly owned by the middle class. However in every other respect you are as wrong as a very wrong thing indeed.
past caring
The Cathars were right
It did.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
We don't live in an ideal world, so perhaps the next best thing we can hope for is that the starting point is to ask "what is the best way to achieve justice without moving beyond retribution into revenge?"
That's what, as a one-time student of criminology, intrigues me: How can we, as a society, do so without the currently-popular hunger for victim input (and it is a relatively new phenomenon) shifting the basis of justice too far toward a victim-centric rather than justice-centric POV?
Blagsta
Minimum cage, maximum cage
I don't know anyone who does that. You must know some shit drug workers.
Indeed. That sounds v interesting. Part of someone getting better from drug problems, mental health problems etc, is about learning responsbility for their own actions. I never said otherwise.
The39thStep
Urban critical thinker
What is your contribution to that agenda then Blagsta or is it just a 'come the day comrade' posture
kyser_soze
Hawking's Angry Eyebrow
You're preaching to the crowd here B. I don't disagree with your arguments about attachment theory & criminal behaviour, or the role of abuse in criminality in later life. But this isn't an argument you have to make to me, it's an argument you need to make to someone who has just had their house broken into for the 5th time. It's an argument you have to make to someone who's been raped, or is terrified to leave their house because as an old person they're an easy target.
It's also an argument you need to make as a reason for behaviour that doesn't look like it's being made as an excuse. For whatever reason, you don't seem able to see that's exactly what the social reasons argument looks like to a great many people. I also suspect that that very argument has had a role in enabling some who commit crime to justify their actions to themselves.
It's easier to win the argument the retibutive justice is wrong if results of restorative justice don't appear to favour the criminal over their proximate victim.
WRT social class & crime - rich people often commit crimes that are harder to trace & prosecute. Take insider dealing - it's a very hard crime to prove, even with huge amounts of paper evidence, and most of the cases that have been successfully prosecuted in the US (almost none in the UK) have managed it because the SEC managed to turn one of the conspirators into a supergrass or had them wearing a wire.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
A victim wanting justice is eminently sensible, and something any sensible person would, I suspect, approve of.
A victim desiring legalised revenge is not.
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