Cause of Death: Welfare State, cont - Part II: Scotland gets Sailered

Today Steve Sailer links to this article, entitled 'Scotland tops world league for violent crime', from 'The Sunday Times'. He hasn't yet posted a permalink to his own entry. (9/19/2005 - He has now)

These bits really caught Steve's eye -

"SCOTLAND is the most violent country in the developed world, according to a United Nations report.

Excluding murder, Scots are almost three times more likely to be victims of assault than Americans. England and Wales have proportionately the second highest number of assaults.

Many experts believe Britain’s heavy-drinking culture is to blame for the frequency with which fights break out.

The study, based on phone interviews with victims of crime in 21 countries, found that more than 2,000 Scots are attacked every week — almost 10 times police figures. The crimes covered by the study include assaults, but exclude street muggings, sexual violence and murder.

Violent crime has doubled in Scotland over the past 20 years to a level comparable with crime-ridden cities such as Rio de Janeiro. [Although the murder rate in gun-controlled Scotland is not terribly high.]

The attacks have been fuelled by a “booze and blades” culture in the west of Scotland, with the worst offenders being males aged between 15 and 25...

Senior police have little doubt that alcohol-related thuggery is the main factor in violence on British streets.

Chris Allison, lead officer on licensing at the Association of Chief Police Officers and a commander in the Metropolitan police, has said that drunkenness is “all we are ever dealing with.”

According to the UN study, 3% of Scots had been victims of assault.

The second highest figure was recorded in England and Wales at 2.8%, compared with 2% in America and 0.1% in Japan.

“Our survey is more accurate than the official figures because there is a huge proportion of crimes that go unreported,” said Jan Van Dijk, head of analysis at the UN Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute.

“We have seen a trend in Scotland and the proportion has almost doubled since 1989 and risen from 1.9% in 1996. This is very significant and is a clear upward trend"

Welcome to my world, and if you're interested in more about how the youth of the west of Scotland live you can try here, here, here, here and here.

For some reason, probably perfectly understandable ignorance of Scottish social history, Steve then links to one of his own articles, 'How Much Ruin In A Nation? UK vs US White Working Class'. Steve's analysis is interesting, if tortuous and inevitably replete with racial references, and will stand the test of time if only because he has a go at impersonating Dick van Dyke in 'Mary Poppins'.

But linking to this article per se means nothing without some understanding of one of the most shameful aspects of Scottish, actually Glaswegian, social history - that this city has had a problem with knife crime for the best part of a century.

After the closure of the shipyards and the advent of the demonic entity known as the Old Firm, the worst thing that ever happened to Glasgow was the 1935 publication of a novel called 'No Mean City'. Its authors were Alexander MacArthur, a Glaswegian who subsequently committed suicide, and H. Kingsley Long, a London journalist influenced by the story of Anglo-American gangster James Spenser's time in New York and LA, told in 'Limey: An Englishman Joins the Gangs'.

'No Mean City' gave an edge of glamour to the 'razor gangs', such as the 'Norman Conks' and the 'Billy Boys', who terrorised parts of Glasgow at that time, and who were every bit as lethal in their own way as MS-13 are today.

It spawned a mass of cheap literature about crime in the city, and about its disgusting, hateful gangsters, much of it not written by Glaswegians, which continues to be published to this day, which makes a lot of money for its producers and which perpetuates the rancid, sterile self-image the young Glaswegian male possesess of himself as being a hard man, who needs to carry if only because the trouble he might run into will be likely to be carrying.

That is why so many Glaswegians are assaulted - it is a profound problem of culture; and as I've noted elsewhere, such is the extent of welfare culture in this city that if there were ever any kind of natural disaster here on the same scale as Hurricane Katrina, the same scenes of carnage would be repeated.