Blame the killer kids on the middle classes

Meddling liberals have destroyed working-class culture, writes phillip blond

What a country we have become. While City bonuses reach a record high - with boardroom pay at Britain's top companies up by a staggering 37 per cent in one year, according to yesterday's Guardian - down on the streets violent, murderous children kill, stab and shoot with reckless abandon.

Just look at the murders of 11-year-old Rhys Jones, shot last week in Liverpool, and 47-year-old Garry Newlove, kicked to death by teenagers in Warrington on Sunday. They show that British society, while getting richer, is becoming ever more primitive and savage.

Where do these killers come from? Well, they are from the abandoned reaches of the working class. Mrs Thatcher created an economic underclass in the 1980s and New Labour ensured that it became permanent.

Despite the endless targets of social programmes, it is harder now to climb up from

The welfare state and progressive 1960s attitudes unpicked the stitching that held the British working class together

the bottom than it was in the Edwardian age. Far from securing the benefits of economic growth for the working class, Labour has abandoned its original constituency for the 100,000 middle-class voters that can turn a British election. The fact that the bottom 50 per cent of the British population own less than five per cent of the wealth has not troubled Gordon Brown one bit.

However, crime and violence are not necessarily caused by economic inequality. Before the Second World War, working-class communities, though far poorer than today, lived lives largely free of violence and crime.

So what has happened in the last 50 years that has so destroyed our inner cities and council estates? In short, it is the annihilation of working-class families and their culture by the liberal middle class. The welfare state and the progressive attitudes of the 1960s unpicked the stitching that held the British working class together during two World Wars and the great depression of the 1930s.

Of course, nobody thinks we should abandon universal health care and social