A man is kicked to death

Businessman Stephen Langford was kicked to death in the early hours of Saturday 9 December on the High Street, Henley-on-Thames. Boris Johnson, Tory MP for Henley, commented in the Daily Mail of 11 December 2006:

‘It has come to something when a man can be kicked to death in one of the safest towns in England and right in front of the local police station. I hope that Stephen’s death will rally all of those who believe we have gone too far in tolerating yobbery and thuggishness in our streets. It is time for society collectively to declare that enough is enough.

We need to bring back respect for authority in schools and in the home and we need to clear these thugs off the streets.’

In the same edition of the Daily Mail, Melanie Phillips commented on the situation of ‘social injustice’ prevailing in this country. In her column entitled ‘Strong words are not enough. Only tough decisions can make Britain better’, she ascribed this to social damage being done by family breakdown.

She discusses a review published by Ian Duncan Smith, former Tory leader who heads his party’s Social Justice Commission.

‘Mr Duncan Smith’s analysis lays bare the stupendous abandonment by the welfare state of the very people it purports to protect. His review spells out the appalling scale of drug and alcohol abuse, worklessness, failed education and indebtedness.

Ms Phillips continues:

‘The sheer scale of the social damage done by family breakdown is staggering. But even more astounding is the total refusal of the political class to acknowledge or deal with a phenomenon estimated to cost the country more than £20 billion per year. On the contrary, our intellectual and political leaders have done everything in their power to accelerate the collapse of the two-parent family.’

Ms Phillips suggests that the only way to stop the rot is to uphold marriage, which ‘would mean restoring its privileged position in the tax system, removing the numerous incentives to lone parenthood…. and creating a climate in which lone parenthood is regarded as a misfortune to be avoided rather than a ‘right’ to be rewarded.’

My comments

Civilisation has broken down. But it is the Welfare State itself, with its assault on individual liberty and autonomy, that has produced the evergrowing population of demoralised criminals and dysfunctional dependents who now drain the resources, and damage the lives, of the ‘unfairly successful’ elite with above average IQs, too ‘obsessed’ with increasing their wealth and social status to give free rein to their own criminal tendencies.

We note that the appearance of this entrepreneur (who was kicked to death) was probably smart and moralised, and he looked intelligent and handsome.

That arouses enough righteous hostility in the modern world to justify lethal attack, otherwise unmotivated.