Tony left just in time, before the inevitable outcomes of trashing British culture top-to-bottom revealed themselves in all their viciousness. His final thumb in the eye was to leave the UK in the tender care of Gordon Brown, and Gordon Brown to take the vituperation when all fell apart.
However, with His Legacy threatened by the recent riots, he just had to speak up.
He says, says he, that talk of a general moral decline is wrong-headed. It's simply a problem of--
First, there was a legal system overwhelmed by the nature of the crime committed by these young people, buttressed as it is by gangs and organised crime.
Second, these individuals did not simply have an individual problem. They had a family problem. This is a hard thing to say and I am of course aware that this, too, is a generalisation. But many of these people are from families that are profoundly dysfunctional, operating on completely different terms from the rest of society, middle class or poor.
Most of them are shaping up that way by the time they are in primary school or even in nursery. They then grow up in circumstances where their role models are drug dealers, pimps, people with knives and guns, people who will exploit them and abuse them but with whom they feel a belonging. Hence the gang culture that is so destructive.
This is a phenomenon of the late 20th century. You find it in virtually every developed nation. Breaking it down isn't about general policy or traditional programmes of investment or treatment. The last government should take real pride in the reductions in inequality, the improvement in many inner-city schools and the big fall in overall crime. But none of these reaches this special group.
There it is, ya'll! It's not my fault! The entire essay is an attempt to distract away from the moral and ethical issues of a society that really seems to have lost its way, and the resultant crime in the streets. It's just those dysfunctional families, you know, tsk-tsk. Let's not get into any discussion of good-and-evil here.
Yo! Tony! Lissen' up, bro'!
Screwed-up families and kids are created by people operating in a moral vacuum, where no one dares use the big 'E' word, or the 'S' word ('Sinfulness'), or the 'F' word ('Failure'--as in the failed Welfare State). The families where Mom and Dad stay sober and walk with the kids to the local parish church for Sunday School and choir practice tend to not, repeat not produce gang members. The families that insist the kids do their school work tend to not produce candidates for exclusion from school.
Yet, these are the values ridiculed by the past thirty years of popular culture and official policy. Vice is excused, marriage rates have plummeted, out-of-wedlock birth is now common, and the most famous quote of 10 Downing Street during your term was 'We Don't Do God'.
Indeed, you didn't. And it shows, Tony. It's not just the cities, Tony. OS has friends with kids in good schools in small towns well away from the big cities of the UK, and those students are instructed to always walk at least in pairs, never at night, lest they be set upon by the local hoodie types. And this is in the picture-postcard, bucolic English small towns. It's not just the cities, it's everywhere.
This reminds OS of late 2001 and 2002, when Bill Clinton was at pains to convince us all that it wasn't his fault that Bin Laden ran free while Bill was busily chasing Monica Lewinsky around the Oval Office. There are reports that Osama was offered up to us on a plate, and Bill was too busy thinking with his smaller brain to pay attention.
Tony still has books to sell, a legacy to protect, a seat in Lords to possess, a university chair in his name to be awarded. Let's not connect the dots between his past performance and present outcomes.
That really would be wrong, at least in Tony's moral universe.
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