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| Macpicard |
This lunchtime's The World This Weekend was lacking the glamorous, globe-trotting Mark Mardell.
Instead of Mark reporting (Lord Brett Sinclair-like and at the BBC licence-fee payer's expense) from some sun-soaked, glamorous continental European location like Barcelona or Lisbon or Lake Como - or for that matter the even-more-glamorous British seaside - poor old grey, depressing Radio 4 SJW Matthew Price (no offence! lovely chap!) got packed off instead to the knife-crime-infested swamps of London. (Hope he wins his award!).
A The World This Weekend special on knife crime was the result.
By chance, I was wanting to hear about that very subject after reading a fascinating piece (a couple of days ago) at Spiked by Luke Gittos entitled There is no epidemic of knife crime.
Luke argued, with lots of statistical support, that the evidence just isn't there to support the contention that there's an unprecedented epidemic of knife crime. Knife Crime has been with us for decades, fluctuating up and down, spiking here and spiking there.
He also argued though that there's a nihilistic culture among young black men which is the underlying problem, especially in London, and that this is the problem that dare not speak its name, and that the "tiptoeing" around it does more harm than good.
Well, today's The World This Weekend, strongly going with the 'epidemic' contention, most certainly did tiptoe around the 'nihilistic culture among young black men' issue. We heard lots of talk about 'the community' and 'communities' but nothing about which community or communities.
Also, as noted on the Open Thread, Matthew Price avoided many other issues, such as "lone parenting and poor parenting, incentives to lone parenting, poor school discipline...and message sent by repeat offending let-offs" as well as the influence of BBC-acceptable-and-promoted musical genres like violence-friendly grime.
(Honestly, why doesn't the BBC get as worried about grime as it does about 'insensitive' tweets?)
(Honestly, why doesn't the BBC get as worried about grime as it does about 'insensitive' tweets?)
Matthew did ask one question (to the lady who thought that a 'holistic' approach was needed to tackle the issue) about some listeners possibly thinking that a 'lock 'em up' approach was needed to deal with knife crime, but that was the single concession to the idea of balance in this overwhelmingly left-liberal take on the issue.
Please listen for yourselves and see what you think (if you've a spare 25 minutes or so).
