Taki's Mag

To utter such words would be construed as heresy, would be to stray from the adopted liberal-left consensus that every ill, every crime, every mishap within the black community is due to slavery and oppression by the whites. No matter slavery in Britain was abolished in 1833—we must still suffer the rage and allow plasma-screen televisions and top-of-the-range footwear to be looted from a burning store.

Welfare has institutionalized the belief in something-for-nothing, the attitude that the state will provide and pick up the pieces, the bill, and the broken glass and replace work and absent fathers with ready cash and immediate housing. No point in parenting when someone else will do it for you. It is fine to smash a shop front when insurance or the taxpayer will help the owners restock. It is fine to ruin a livelihood when you have no concept of earning. It is fine to take something that is not yours when it is on display and your gut and jungle logic tells you to possess it. This is what the sixty-year experiment in state handouts has achieved. The work is available if the indigenous black population seeks it. Indeed, Britain brings in tens of thousands of Gambians and Ghanaians and other migrants to staff hospitals and care homes and fill a “labor shortage” that does not exist. In accepting that Afro-Caribbeans have not needed to work, we have entrenched them in their postcode gangs and their ghetto. Softly, softly, the police and social services have gone. Regard the situation.

Education used to be the way up and the way out. No more. A generation of blacks feels no need, does not see the point, has no fathers or family to kick their backsides and tell them to strive. After all, it is so much easier to smoke ganja, to shoplift, to snatch a purse or bag, to hold a knife to a throat and rape a “bitch.” If all they are told is that they are the victims, the Earth’s rightful inheritors, and that cash can be generated without much effort, then they will follow their peers and the path of least resistance. The young offender institutions are full of them. Certainly there are doctors and lawyers and accountants in the black community, but they are few and scattered, and their middle class lacks depth and robustness. The knock-on is lack of aspiration.

What is left is a misplaced emphasis on street culture and the Afro-Caribbean way. Forgive me, but if what I had brought to British life was goat curry, carnival floats, crack cocaine, violence, and hip-hop, I would not be that proud. There are good people out there, people who strive and struggle and do their best. But they are undermined by both white and black apologists, by acceptance of indiscipline and of felony as occupational right, by a conspiracy of silence that prevents open debate. I have not heard a single BBC reporter say the word “black.” The situation would be absurd were it not so serious and the problems so deep.

The black American comedian Chris Rock once declared: “On one side, there’s black people. On the other, you’ve got niggers. The niggers have got to go. I love black people, but I hate niggers.” If the Afro-Caribbeans in London do not themselves confront and address the embedded flaws in their outlook and society, such things will be said with hatred and not laughter.

As for future riots—and they will come—the political class will continue to talk soothingly of “British” policing when all we really require is effective policing. Personally, I did not vote to allow London to become Jamaica’s brutal cockpit. I will thus be leaving my front door wide open and scattering a trail of glittering objects and designer wares to entice the raiders to my home. And I will be waiting for them. Then we can play.