London Bridge really is Falling down.....at least for the Brothers.....

I really had intended to discuss Tony Blair's comment about Black criminality in London myself, but I was drafted in the War on Imus (please check out our podcast) and was diverted from providing an analysis. So let's take a look at Sister Toldjah's straightforward approach:

Will Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson head to London next?

Considering what Tony Blair said about knife crime and black culture?

Tony Blair yesterday claimed the spate of knife and gun murders in London was not being caused by poverty, but a distinctive black culture. His remarks angered community leaders, who accused him of ignorance and failing to provide support for black-led efforts to tackle the problem.
One accused him of misunderstanding the advice he had been given on the issue at a Downing Street summit.

Black community leaders reacted after Mr Blair said the recent violence should not be treated as part of a general crime wave, but as specific to black youth. He said people had to drop their political correctness and recognise that the violence would not be stopped “by pretending it is not young black kids doing it”.

It needed to be addressed by a tailored counter-attack in the same way as football hooliganism was reined in by producing measures aimed at the specific problem, rather than general lawlessness.
Mr Blair’s remarks are at odds with those of the Home Office minister Lady Scotland, who told the home affairs select committee last month that the disproportionate number of black youths in the criminal justice system was a function of their disproportionate poverty, and not to do with a distinctive black culture.

Giving the Callaghan lecture in Cardiff, the prime minister admitted he had been “lurching into total frankness” in the final weeks of his premiership. He called on black people to lead the fight against knife crime. He said that “the black community - the vast majority of whom in these communities are decent, law abiding people horrified at what is happening - need to be mobilised in denunciation of this gang culture that is killing innocent young black kids”.

Mr Blair said he had been moved to make his controversial remarks after speaking to a black pastor of a London church at a Downing Street knife crime summit, who said: “When are we going to start saying this is a problem amongst a section of the black community and not, for reasons of political correctness, pretend that this is nothing to do with it?” Mr Blair said there needed to be an “intense police focus” on the minority of young black Britons behind the gun and knife attacks. The laws on knife and gun gangs needed to be toughened and the ringleaders “taken out of circulation”.

[…]

Mr Blair is known to believe the tendency for many black boys to be raised in families without a father leads to a lack of appropriate role models.

He said: “We need to stop thinking of this as a society that has gone wrong - it has not - but of specific groups that for specific reasons have gone outside of the proper lines of respect and good conduct towards others and need by specific measures to be brought back into the fold.”


According to Toldjah:

Wow.

Of course, he’s being denounced by ‘black leaders’ in the UK, as well as a host of indignant politicians and other ususal suspects, but he has nothing to lose at this point since he’s not up for re-election and, as noted in the article, is feeling rather ‘frank’ these days.



I rather like ‘frankness’ myself. But ‘frankness’ usually gets people here in the US in a whole lot of trouble with the PC police, unfortunately. Let’s not let the truth get in the way of wanting to avoid ‘hurting feelings’ or ’stigmatizing’ a group of people.

Let's kick this around a bit-is gangsterism being imported? Does Blair have a point if one were to look beyond notions of political correctness? How does this subject relate to America's notions of Black criminality?