The lives we lead

 Subject: The lives we lead





The gulf in our environment is no better illustrated than by listening to boys in a choral competition discussing the background and to the route into the choirs which they attend.

A home in which music thrives seems crucial to them and often in so far as a piano is concerned reflects a middle or upper middle class home. A large amount of time is taken up with music and the church choir is a natural home to share this passion. This collaboration of similar mindsets builds and hones a set of values far from the city estates in which only this morning we learn of two boys being stabbed to death in a frenzy of blood letting in the do dare which seems to have overtaken our city streets. Of course it’s nowhere as bad as many cities across the world where killing is endemic but it’s beginning to edge up the scale of normality and prove a corrupting influence for our young people.

There are many reasons for this acceleration in gang related crime not least the fragmentation of family life and the difficulties a single parent has in bringing up, particularly boys, in the contesting world and influence of the internet where the currency of violence is there for all to see. In my time our influences were  close to home, with the boys we played with who were from similar backgrounds. There was a commonality running through most families at that time of what the society around demanded, be it parenthood, marriage, respect for authority and particularly of the police. To do time, except in crime ridden suburbs which fostered the long term criminals in London, Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds, was to ruin your life, unlike today when it seems to have become a badge of acceptance.  

The Human Rights Act has softened our attitudes towards the wrong doer giving them lots of environmental and emotional reasons for going off the rails and instead we have a rationalising, reasoning society out bidding the old surety that crime doesn’t pay.

We have a dichotomy within society. People growing up are pressured between the individual avant-garde with choir rehearsals and piano practice or for the more robust training for a sport or putting in a stint of education to learn new skills. Alternatively in that other culture  young people gather in the street and hatch grievances with other and often under the influence of substance intake see no evidence that sticking a knife in someone is above all a moral crime from which there is no return.

These social cohorts, poles apart in lifestyle and yet sometimes living not so many miles from each other are the new fabric from which society is now made. The rude healthy individual and the rude but dangerous person is an artificial construct which, if our government cared more would be much more proactive in providing recreation and controlled outlets for unused testosterone.

The person sitting in the front and backbenches of the Tory party come, almost totally from the one section of the human supply chain enjoying the benefit of money and surpluses it brings.  Their reports and surveys tell them of the other world but their actual experience is thin. Out of sight out of earshot they are not overly concerned as their cars cut a swath through the suburbs which contain the rudely discontented and head for the leafy villages where nimbyism  is rife and self preservation their major occupation.