Broken society nonsense

The Tories insist that "Britain is Broken" and that everything used to be better before the permissive society and the welfare state interfered. This of course is absolute rubbish as a recent Economist article (6/2/10) points out: "the broken-Britain myth is worse than scaremongering - it glosses over those who need help most……..Nevertheless it is an idea that resonates. Every week serves up a new tragedy or outrage to be added to the pile of evidence” A few months after this article was written a man went on a rampage with a couple of guns through Cumbria shooting family members, acquaintances and total strangers alike. Interestingly this was one occurrence when the usual rubbish about a broken society was not trundled out again. Why? Because this carnage did not happen in an inner city area amongst the “feral youngsters” and “welfare scroungers” who are the usual denizens of this mythical Tory dystopia. Instead another myth, of a “quiet rural community” where “nothing like this had ever happened before”, came into play. Virtually every single observer was said to be shocked that this “could happen around here” in such a “quiet and close-knit community”. Actually, if one looks at the last major shooting spree occurrences in mainland Britain – Dunblane (1987), Monkseaton (1989), Hungerford (1996), and now Whitehaven – it is precisely these rural villages or suburban small town “tight-knit communities” where such dreadful outrages do seem to occur. Of course this may be partly because there are relatively few controls on rural gun ownership as opposed to urban gun crime. But I suspect it is not just this. The sense of a tightly bound and restrictive community where everyone knows everyone else’s business and where the pressures of status and respectability are far more extreme than those in Britain’s cities, seem to me to be precisely the kind of place where men will sometimes lose their bearings and lash out in this crazy way. Certainly we should stop being so surprised that it is in these picturesque and quiet “communities” that occasional eruptions of such dreadful anger and madness sometimes occur.