[superbam]

speaking of brazen; as for the guardian and the indy, they - the former especially - are brazenly the establishment press, being the papers of the islington set who run labour.

What happens then when the tories take power after the next general election? Will we then have a right-wing establishment?

they may have criticised labour - from the metropolitan liberal position - on the iraq war (the party, in the final analysis, needs to compromise with reality in the way it's constituent class never have to, but that is the eternal condition of all flavours of the left)

Opposition to the war on Iraq has hardly been restricted to "metropolitan liberals" as you put it. That is a fantasy.

you can rail about the sun all you like, but it's the guardian readers that run this country.

Soon to be the telegraph readers then.

what would be ridiculous would be to dismiss as coincidence the problem with black violence in london. i continue to suspect that there is indeed an ethnic dimension; namely that black boys ape the tropes of american 'gangsta' culture, presented to them via hip hop. in this i am in line with black thinkers on both sides of the pond. white liberals tend to scoff but then i suspect they're so used to living vicariously and avoiding consequences, that it's hard for them to conceive how street kids may respond to these messages.

anyway, i may be wrong, but it's one line of enquiry. but to dismiss that one section of the community clearly seems to have a problem seems to me to be a poor subsitute for critical thought.

It is not doing critical thought any service to wilfully downplay the signifigance of factors that are prevalent in all these sections of the community and are not specific to ethnicity.

As I said before, culture-specific factors must be examined, it would be daft to ignore them. But more daft is to place an emphasis on cultural factors specific to particular ethnic communities that may be contributing factors, (when we can see these problems are experienced across all sorts of ethnic groups) at the expense of the many characteristics that afflicted communities, regardless of their ethnic composition, share in common.

up here there is clearly something awry in strathclyde meanwhile; it's less clear to me what that might be; while poverty is inevitably the backdrop like you say, their is poverty on tayside, in edinburgh and so on, but our youth violence doesn't tend to be so lethal, thank goodness.

Im not really sure how much you can say its something specific to the west of scotland. There is similar youth violence in parts of edinburgh and tayside, but Glasgow has considerably higher levels of poverty and a much higher population that live in the kind of areas afflicted with these types of problems. I dont think it is therefore simply a coincidence that there is more of an issue in the weege, or that there is necessarily something specific to the weegie mentality that leads to kids paggering than other urban areas in Scotland.