The duty of journalists is to tell the truth. If we don't do that, it's the equivalent of a nurse comfortably chatting over a nice cup of tea while an empty saline drip feeds air into a patient's artery. The moment that we think it's more important to protect some comfortable ideological dogma is the moment when our particular patient, truth, begins to die. I take no pleasure in what follows; but there is a job to be done, so here goes.
Perhaps the most astounding element in the British television coverage of the riots over much of England has been the steadfast refusal to mention the race of most of the rioters. They are clearly, and overwhelmingly, Afro-Caribbean, the descendants of immigrants, though such has been the utter British failure to integrate so much of the immigrant population that many have retained something of a Caribbean accent. Admittedly, not all of the rioters are "black": clearly, some white youths have joined in.
But where they have not got race is common, they probably have another feature that joins them: absent father-figures. An astonishing number of young males in London are the sons of single mothers. They have been raised without the presence of a male authority figure to impose familial order, and furthermore and most vitally, to promote the patriarchy.
Contrary to what the feminist mantra of recent decades has proposed, the patriarchy was not invented to oppress woman, but devised by Abraham to control men. Adolescent males, without an imposed order, are as feral as chimpanzees. This is why all societies have adopted rigorous means of imposing authority on teenage boys, and which always requires male authority-figures: either sergeant-majors or patriarchs or that unfashionable thing, "dads".
But Britain, like Ireland, went down the insane path of encouraging single mothers to have children: indeed, both societies actually created additional incentives for unmarried women to reproduce. It is social lunacy, delinquency turned into state policy, to encourage women to bear a population of young males without fathers. Yet that is what our two islands have been doing in a weak-minded, abject capitulation to the feminist ideological dogma that men are really redundant in the family. Yet the statistics across the world show that the single mother is far more likely to raise a criminal, a thug or rapist, than the married mother. No fewer than 70pc of young offenders in Britain are from single-parent families. It is not mere "poverty" that produces the socially dysfunctional male, so much as father-free families.
Moreover, in all societies in the world where Afro-Caribbeans have settled, there is a problem with male teenage gang culture. That being the case -- for whatever reason -- it makes no sense whatever to "reward" single mothers of that background for having boys without a father-figure to control them. The facta are known: black children of single mothers are twice as likely to commit crime as black children with two parents. Nearly 60pc of London's Afro-Caribbean mothers are single. If the allure of the male hierarchy in a gang on the street proves irresistible, then ahead awaits social disaster.
There is a third element. Immigration: not of the parents or grandparents of the young males currently dismantling London and other cities, but more recent immigration, much of it white, that prevents young natives, of any ethnic background, getting jobs. There are some 10,000 unemployed in Tottenham -- though the moronic oxymoron term "jobseeker" is now the fashionable term to describe the unemployed. No doubt many want jobs -- for every job vacancy in Tottenham there are 54 applications -- but it is surely gilding the lily to describe every single dole-taker (whether he is in Britain or here) as someone really seeking employment. But that aside, in the past 10 years under the egregious and depraved policies of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, an already overcrowded Britain took in over two million immigrants. Where have the jobs gone? That's where.
Six years ago, I wrote a column for 'The Irish Times' about the riots then erupting across immigrant areas in France and Britain. Michael D Higgins TD issued a statement in which he said: "The contents of his column today go beyond his usually crafted cowardice, staying one step on the safe side of prosecution for incitement to hatred or racism."
"Usually crafted cowardice", eh? Is cowardice really a characteristic of my journalism? And that's before we even come to the delightful implication of racist intent. So, is it remotely surprising that we never had any proper discussion about immigration, if a future presidential candidate of this Republic could feel free to use such vile and actionable language about a critic of our immigration non-policies?
Immigration did not cause our collapse, but the refusal to create an immigration policy was an intellectual companion to our populist failure to control our banks. And no one can deny this unassailable truth: our unemployment figures have been made immeasurably worse by the large numbers of immigrants who poured unchecked into the Celtic Tiger economy. Finally, if you want to know what a combination of failed immigration and social policies can produce, why, just watch the TV news from London tonight.
