Tony Blair’s time as Prime Minister is running out, so he’s now lurching into total frankness by making overtly racist comments. What’s the problem? The problem is a recent uptick in gang violence involving (the peculiarly British) knife violence. And some gun violence, too. It seems it is happening in the black community. And, according to Blair, it’s all a result of ‘black culture’.
He said people had to drop their political correctness and recognise that the violence would not be stopped “by pretending it is not young black kids doing it”.
It needed to be addressed by a tailored counter-attack in the same way as football hooliganism was reined in by producing measures aimed at the specific problem, rather than general lawlessness.
There’s only one problem.
Mr Blair’s remarks are at odds with those of the Home Office minister Lady Scotland, who told the home affairs select committee last month that the disproportionate number of black youths in the criminal justice system was a function of their disproportionate poverty, and not to do with a distinctive black culture.
But Tony Blair has an excuse.
Mr Blair said he had been moved to make his controversial remarks after speaking to a black pastor of a London church at a Downing Street knife crime summit, who said: “When are we going to start saying this is a problem amongst a section of the black community and not, for reasons of political correctness, pretend that this is nothing to do with it?” Mr Blair said there needed to be an “intense police focus” on the minority of young black Britons behind the gun and knife attacks. The laws on knife and gun gangs needed to be toughened and the ringleaders “taken out of circulation”.
There’s just one problem with Blair’s alibi.
Mr Obunge, who attended the Downing Street summit chaired by Mr Blair in February, said he had been cited by the prime minister: “He makes it look like I said it’s the black community doing it. What I said is it’s making the black community more vulnerable and they need more support and funding for the work they’re doing. … He has taken what I said out of context. We came for support and he has failed and has come back with more police powers to use against our black children.”
A depressingly familiar spectacle, no?
If poor people complain about being poor, they are told it’s their own fault. It wasn’t police brutality that inspired gangsta rap, it was gangsta rap that justified police brutality. Get it?
