The Knives of Brixton
Michael C. Moynihan | July 8, 2008, 3:13pm
Reader Val sends along this story, which is currently dominating news cycles in both England and France, of two French students in murdered in London, who were bound, stabbed 240 times, and set alight. A man confessed to the killing today, though his motive remains unclear.
The problem of knife violence in the UK is "so serious," according to the Globe and Mail, "that the Metropolitan Police, Britain's major police force, told officers this week that their top priority had shifted from Islamic terrorism to knife crimes."
A few years back, researchers writing in the British Medical Journal called for a ban on kitchen knives, after the team "consulted 10 top chefs from around the UK, and found such knives have little practical value in the kitchen." Watch for the reintroduction of such suggestions, especially since, according to the Times, "Every initiative [taken by the police] has failed to stop the stabbings in the capital." And as the Globe and Mail reminds readers, the police are already "authorized to stop young people without cause and search them for weapons, and such searches have become commonplace in London."
But despite the breathless reporting of the British tabloid press, the paper notes that, overall, knife crime—and violent crime in general—is actually on the decline:
In some respects, Britain's knife terror is a fear without an underlying story: The number of knife crimes in Britain has not actually increased, even if this year's London stabbings are included, and violent crime across the country and in London is at its lowest level in two decades; in fact, violent crime rates dropped by another 9 per cent last year. On the whole, the country remains far safer than North America.
Full story.
bernd | July 8, 2008, 6:35pm | #
Rimfax: Air fare in Europe is ridiculously cheap and a well-played European welfare system *does* pay quite well, especially if you include all the time you have to pursue the shadow economy and a criminal career. I'm not quite sure what your point is in the first place: Exporting violent drunks is a wonderful sign of a great economy or ... huh?
I can't remember ragging on Canadians, although now that I've lived here for a while, I should probably start: things like the HRCs are a travesty, but e.g. that Marc Emery walked free was rather cool.
Regarding Americans, I only remember going after the general level of education and regard for it - especially among men where everybody who reads seems to be a "fag" to wide strata of the population. I dare you to prove me wrong. Also, the whole "global jurisdiction torture empire" thing.
As for the French, they have a huge problems with the immigrants in the cités & banlieues around the major cities, and you yourself may remember that a few cars tend to get torched there occasionally. The French themselves aren't so bad if you discount their elites, and I don't remember ragging on them as "uncultured" either. Most hold utterly idiotic economic opinions, but so what. It's Europe. When Austria held a (mostly symbolic) referendum on the welfare state as such, 99% were for it.
The Germans, well, I'm Austrian. It's pretty much what we do, much like Canadians rag on the US. Not that they're not really screwed up, with the same limp-wristed stance on Islamic violence (both Islamist terror and "honor killings") and resurgent neo-Nazis, and their economic ideas which are only surpassed by the French and Scandinavians in their idiocy.
So, yeah, I tend to talk about everybody's weaknesses (And why praise people just for keeping their shit together? To channel Chris Rock: "You're not supposed to go to jail!").
It's just that with the British lately, I'd run out of topics pretty soon if I couldn't talk about the weaknesses; that's not quite so with other countries. Oh yeah, I like the Fabric club in London, and I admire the Queen's stiff upper lip, after all the shit she's seen.
