Lifted from the comments, an idea for late-night viewing. First, some context is in order, but do let me know what you think.
It began with some rumblings on common progressive attitudes regarding crime and recidivism. Not least a practised unrealism and the failure to acknowledge just how different the mental landscape of the criminal demographic can be:
Those mouthing progressive positions on crime and social disorder very often have limited personal exposure to the creatures they so ostentatiously excuse. They are unlikely to have grown up among them or to have had them living next door. And so, with little formative experience of the type, false assumptions accumulate.
Among which, these.
It’s worth noting that the field of academic criminology, in which unrealism and excuses are pretty much the default, is notoriously left-tilted, here and overseas, with liberals and radical leftists outnumbering conservative colleagues by a ratio of around 30:1.
And it occurs to me that people in high-status professions, including legal professions, are more likely to have internalised high-status opinions, mouthed as a kind of social jewellery. According to which, the creatures treating us as mere prey – suckers from whom things can be taken – are the ones most deserving of our sympathy and indulgence.
Pretentious sympathy, of course. But still.
And so, we have competitively activist legal professionals, such as Mr Clive Stafford Smith, a man who believes that the wellbeing of burglars is more important than the wellbeing of their numerous victims, especially if the burglar is a “young black person.” And who regards anger at being burgled and the subsequent sense of violation as plebeian and unsophisticated, while disdaining the victims’ expectations of justice as, and I quote, “idiotic attitudes.”
Such views passing entirely unchallenged in the inevitable, rather fawning Guardian profile. A profile in which Mr Stafford Smith chides and insults the victims of burglary, and the law-abiding generally, while offering excuses for those who break into strangers’ homes and steal their belongings, and who do this over and over again.
Mr Stafford Smith goes on to boast that he dislikes Conservative voters much more than criminals, and Ms Decca Aitkenhead, his Guardian interviewer, claps along approvingly. As if rhetorically minimising crime and its effects – say, on the elderly who find their homes violated and stripped of any valuables – were somehow a credential, proof of their own elevation. There’s a weirdly demented quality, one that’s not acknowledged as much as it should be.
At which point, I was reminded of the Guardian‘s own Zoe Williams, who scolds those who would rather not live next door to thieving, feral neighbours – say, the kinds of creatures who blast out loud music at 3am, and who hurl pets from upstairs windows:
According to Zoe, we should be “unstigmatising,” which is to say, non-judgmental. A result of which is that empathy, or feigned empathy, is shifted from the working-class victim of crime and antisocial behaviour to the working-class perpetrator of crime and antisocial behaviour, on grounds that the thug or criminal is in some way being oppressed and, unlike their neighbours, being
made to misbehave.
Presumably Ms Williams’ own neighbours have little in common with, say, the delightful Stuart Murgatroyd, a father of twelve who has never worked and boasts an extensive criminal record, not least for robbing the elderly in graveyards, and whose attempt to challenge an Anti Social Behaviour Order was cut short at the very last minute due to him being arrested for assaulting the mother of his children, herself a convicted getaway driver, on the steps of the courthouse.
And I suspect our infinitely compassionate Ms Williams has yet to experience an all-night, full-on, eleven-hour rave being hosted next door, which would doubtless give her an opportunity to practise that non-judgmental piety.
As I can tell you’re curious, here’s Mr Murgatroyd with three of his twelve children. Everyone in the photo has been subject to Antisocial Behaviour Orders for repeatedly terrorising their neighbours.
Here’s Mr Murgatroyd exchanging views with the mother of his children:
So, with the above in mind, here’s the pitch.
Imagine, if you will, a reality TV show of perhaps a dozen episodes, in which, having been banished from their current council-house digs, the Murgatroyds move in next door to Zoe Williams, our Guardian columnist and champion of the downtrodden – albeit, until now, from a safe distance. Would we be treated to heart-warming chats across the garden fence, and exchanged cups of sugar, while the families’ respective children – Zoe’s are named Thurston and Harper – have jolly times together?
As a real-world test of Zoe’s scrupulously progressive worldview, one shared widely by her peers, it would, I think, make for instructive viewing.
And as svh suggests in the comments, “She deserves no less.”
Update, via the comments:
Picturing the scenario above – Zoe Meets The Murgatroyds – does rather reveal the absurdity of her pretence. But this pretence is far from uncommon among professed egalitarians. It’s a fantasy world, quite laughable in its dishonesty. Unless we’re to believe that Zoe, dear caring Zoe, would be thrilled to have violent morons moving in next door to her.
And yet she and her colleagues tell us that any effort to remove such ‘problem families’ or to inhibit their malevolence – so that their neighbours might have some semblance of a normal life – is “dehumanising,” a “demonization of the poor,” and is merely “trying to shunt people out of society for not being rich enough.” As if the victims of the Murgatroyd family, and any number of others just like them, weren’t people whose resources were also modest. As if the law-abiding targets of their sociopathy weren’t almost always working class.
Again,
A result of which is that empathy, or feigned empathy, is shifted from the working-class victim of crime and antisocial behaviour to the working-class perpetrator of crime and antisocial behaviour, on grounds that the thug or criminal is in some way being oppressed and, unlike their neighbours, being made to misbehave.
But such is Zoe’s concern for the common man.
And do note the conspicuous flattening of values, the equalising of victims and victimiser, the quite literal demoralisation.
Apparently, we shouldn’t register any meaningful difference between that nice Mrs Wilson, who doesn’t have much but is always friendly and obliging, and the laughing ferals who trashed her tiny flat, nicked her pension, and pissed all over her carpets and furniture.
And they call this being progressive.
Guardian columnists, and progressives in general, don’t seem particularly interested in the functional working class. Their greatest enthusiasm, and their most ambitious contrivance, seems reserved for the feckless and dysfunctional, the pathologically selfish, the incorrigibly criminal. That’s when we get displays of what amounts to a perverse art form.
Part of the reason, I suspect, is that there’s little in-group status to be had in pretending to care about functional people of modest means. Instead, they pretend to care about more exotic demographics. And so, among progressives, we get pretentious compassion for unrepentant and habitual thieves, habitual burglars, habitually criminal drivers. Because needlessly endangering the lives of others is now a basis for excuses, sympathy, and applause.
Oh, and dog thieves and armed muggers. Obviously.
And once you register this pattern, this weird convolution, it does seem to crop up quite a lot.
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