Swinging Babies To Death

Peter Hitchens makes many good points about the Baby P case, not least about how the middle class (and, one might add, the working class properly so called) is much easier prey for those who supposedly have responsibility for these things, since they play by the rules, turn up for hearings, and so forth.

But he is wrong about what has caused the emergence of the underclass. After the War, there was no underclass until the Eighties, because the economy was organised in such a way that there could not possibly have been one.

The Swinging Sixties did eventually create the underclass, but in that the Swingers, who hated Old Labour but were very lucky to have only “good old Mr Wilson” to hate, caused Thatcherism. They voted for it. They, and they alone, benefited from it. And it entrenched economically their peculiar social and cultural attitudes.

Blair (and thus also Cameron and Clegg) was the logical next stage.

But the process as a whole was, and is, single and indivisible.