When is Political Correctness Gone Mad not to blame for society's ills?

When the welfare state is, of course! Do keep up. In today's (20 March) edition, the Mail shows 'Why the welfare state is to blame for a generation of lost boys'.

Of course, it doesn't really. You'll not find any explanations here about how having a universal healthcare system leads young men into a life of despondency and violence or anything like that. What you will get is some old, stale, borderline racist nonsense warmed up and made to look fresh. The article doesn't even mention the welfare state until well over halfway through, unless you count the gripe about 80% of teachers in state schools being women.

So here are all the article's arguments about how the welfare state is 'to blame for a generation of lost boys' in full:

The journalist's son started being a little shit about his female teahcers. He then switched to a school with mostly male teachers and was transformed! Apparently, the moral of the story is not that her son needed to learn anything about treating women with respect, but to be taken away from any situation when he might have to do so. 80% of teachers in state schools are female, so the welfare state is clearly to blame for young boys not respecting women in positions of authority. It's not really clear why the welfare state is to blame for so many teachers being women. It just is.

Apparently, some black parents think teachers are too scared to punish black pupils for fear of being accused of racism. This is despite study after study that shows that black kids are punished far more harshly than anyone else. Like the one in today's Independant. Again, it's unclear why the welfare state is to blame for this. Notice the shift though. We're no longer talking about a generation of lost boys. We're talking about black boys. Remember that.

The journalist's son does two hours of sport most days and has a match most weekends so he's too knackered to stab anyone. State schools do one hour a week. Clearly, this is the fault of the welfare state. Being publicly funded means that there's some law of nature that prevents the scheduling of more than one hour of sports.

The benefits system has destroyed the family because young women deliberately get pregnant and chuck the fathers so they can get housing benefit. This stuff was laughed out of town decades ago when Norman Tebbit said it, but it gets another airing here. The spurious reasoning is that a study shows that the UK has higher benefits than France or Germany and a higher level of teenage pregnances. The parlous state of sex education in schools doesn't get a mention. It's curious as to why, because that would provide another stick to bash the welfare state with. But then, a Mail journalist would have to advocate better sex education, which is clearly out, so maybe it's not so curious.

Apparently:

One gang leader even recalled his father letting him play with his gun as a six-year-old.

I'll just leave that one without comment.

It's possible to cheat the system and claim incapacity benefit rather than work.

So that's it. Just think of how nasty and grasping and violent this journalist clearly thinks people are. Especially young men. The image she paints is of angry, cruel monsters, barely able to contain their violent rage. She says this:

As a mother of a 14-year-old boy and a 17-year-old girl, I know that young men are a different species to the rest of us.

In time of war, we value their aggression, their sense of immortality, their loyalty to each other. But in peace-time, they are at best a nuisance, at worst a threat.

She seems to think that they'll decide to stab people if they have female teachers. She seems to think it's necessary to make them physically exhausted or they'll stab people. She seems to think that if they don't join sporting teams, they'll join gangs and stab people. Stab stab stab. That's all young men think about in her world. Unless of course they're thinking about shooting people and showing their gun to their six year old sons. She also thinks that if you give them any opportunity to get out of work, they'll jump at it. Presumably so they can spend their time stabbing people. It's not a pretty image.

Young women don't fare much better. Give them an opportunity for a bit of housing benefit and a flat and they'll get themselves knocked up by the nearest bloke not busy stabbing people and then dump him to get their greedy mitts on that lovely benefit money.

I'm a bit uneasy with the effortless shift from talking about young men in general to talking about young black men in particular, which she does by saying, "Compare his experience to what happens to black boys at a state school in the inner cities", and then emphasising what she thinks is different for black boys before saying, "This absence of discipline has serious implications for all of us." Remember, she's only talking about absence of discipline for black boys. Despite study after study showing that black boys are in fact more harshly punished than anyone else.

She says:

We have managed to find jobs for half a million immigrants that come to this country every year but not for the children of former immigrants in Brixton.

She's explained why this might be by implying that if young men can cheat the benefits system to claim incapacity benefit, they'll jump at the chance. This is all in the context of talking about black people in Brixton. She reminds us that she's really only talking about black people when she goes on to finish up with:

We ignore this situation at our peril. Various radical Muslim groups are already recruiting young black men in their war against the West, supplying them with drugs, weapons, in some cases even somewhere to live and - most importantly - a cause.

Meanwhile, a number of middle-class blacks from Brixton have told me they are seriously concerned about another Brixton riot. A riot where the participants are politicised and armed.

Truly, the black communities in our inner cities face a serious crisis - and it is one which, unless action is taken, could spill over to affect every one of us.

It's not ot an entire generation of young men she's talking about after all, just the poor black ones. They're the ones who need to be strongly disciplined, forced into exhaustion and put into a system of belongning to some kind of school group to avoid armed rioting and stabbings.

Nice article. Hits so many Daily Mail erogenous zones in one go. Young black men are violent animals who are not kept in check by the welfare state that should be providing strong discipline for the poor, helpless monsters who can't be blamed for their situations because their mothers deliberately got pregnant for housing benefit and chucked their dads so grasping at benefits and joining violent gangs and showing their six year old sons their guns and shifting ever closer to violent armed rioting is not their fault.

It could almost be satire.