The Malignant Effects Of Socialism In The UK

I am a rabid anglophile by any measure. I believe that Britain has, over the last millenium, had the single greatest positive impact on the world of any nation. That said, as I wrote here, Britain today sits amidst a perfect storm brought about by its near century embrace of socialism and its membership in the EU. A read through the British papers today shows some of the truly malignant effects of socialism – one on crime and policing, the other on the war against Christianity.
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Socialists are by definition anti-democratic statists. A core tenet of the socialist philosophy is to centralize control instead of allowing locals to make their own decisions on local issues. One of the areas where the deleterious effects of centralization can be easily seen is in policing.

Local police chiefs in the UK are appointed and controlled from the central government. The locals do not control their police through the ballot box. Not surprisingly, one of the biggest complaints I hear from my British friends is that the police in the UK are nowhere near as responsive to the locals they serve as they should be.

Since all is centralized, what has inevitably evolved is policing based on targets and quotas set by a government that wants to show good statistics to the people in advance of elections. Indeed, if you read the Labour crime statistics, they are inevitably impressive. But get below the statistics, and what you find is a country that has spiraled so far down in terms of law and order that a person living in Britain today is less safe from violent and serious crime than if they were living in the Balkans. Indeed, the government’s quota system is not only an incompetent and incredibly cynical game of smoke and mirrors, it is having an adverse effect on Britain’s middle class, as discussed in a report just released:

The middle classes have lost confidence in the police, a stark report has warned. They fear they have been alienated by a service which routinely targets ordinary people rather than serious criminals, simply to fill Government crime quotas.

The attitude of some officers has also led to spiralling complaints about neglect of duty and rudeness. The report from the Civitas think-tank says incidents which would once have been ignored are now treated as crimes - including a case of children chalking a pavement.

. . . The report warns that a generation of young people - the police's favourite soft targets - are being criminalised, putting their future prospects at risk.

. . . The report details how officers are expected to reach a certain number of 'sanction detections' a month by charging, cautioning or fining an 'offender'. Arresting or fining someone for a trifling offence - such as a child stealing a Mars bar - is a good way of hitting the target and pleasing the Home Office. Amazingly, the chocolate theft ranks as highly as catching a killer.

Miss Sergeant says performance-related bonuses of between £10,000 and £15,000 a year for police commanders depend partly on reaching such targets. This leads them to put pressure on frontline officers to make arrests for the most minor misdemeanours. . . .

Read the article.

Meanwhile, the socialist Labour Government continues its war on Christianity - and as the Bishop of Rochester pointed out the other day, it is a war the government is winning at perhaps existential cost to British society. Indeed, it is a war that has been going on since the inception of socialism. "It is a profound truth," declared the British Socialist Party in a 1911 manifesto, "that Socialism is the natural enemy of religion." And today, we have the story of a man who regularly rented out a castle for weddings. The state is now closing his business because he refused to make the castle available for a gay couple to be wed there. The man is a devout Christian, such unions violate his faith, and the castle is his private property. The state is using its police power to punish him for his Christian faith and to promote its socialist, anti-religious agenda.

There is finally a push-back going on in Britain. The socialist Labour government is being slaughtered in local elections and faces the abyss come the next general election. That said, the “conservative” party in Britain, the Tory party, seems little more than Labour-lite. As such, it is doubtful that even a crushing Tory victory can salvage Britain with its historical anglo-saxon values in tact. That is certainly true as long as Britain remains in the EU. Britain is just too far down the socialist / EU road to survive in even its current form beyond half a century. If the Britain of Churchill is ever to return, it will take some near disaster to move the British of today from their complacency, though I of course hope that I am proven wrong in that prognostication.