Honestly, I leave you all to mind the country for just a while, and meantime...

... perhaps I just have a skewed picture of things as I see them from abroad, but as far as I can note in the past 48 hours in Britain:

• a search has begun for a gang who shot a motorcyclist dead as he was driving on the M40
• a young couple out for a walk in a park in Lancashire were jumped by a gang of juvenile attackers. The man has somehow survived after being left in a coma, but the girl was beaten to death
• two nightclub doormen were shot dead
• a young boy in Liverpool was shot dead by children from a different housing-estate, "because he came from a different housing-estate"
• a 23-year-old man with learning difficulties was jumped by a juvenile gang and beaten to death

... and that is just the past 48 hours??

I come back to Britain around 1-2 times per year, and over the past 9 years since I've lived abroad I had sensed that Britain had changed radically, and not for the better.  But is this now the norm?   I've been away for a couple of months so I have not regularly followed UK news...  is it always this way and we're just inured to it?   Or is random violence now just an established fact of life in Britain?

I write having experienced a bit of this first-hand...  I was waiting for a meeting with a friend of mine in a cafe in Lower Ground, SE1 (around the corner from the Old Vic) in 2005,  when four youths came into the cafe, smashed some plates on the ground, and then cornered me (I was the only customer) with the words "You're a big fat yid, we're gonna smash your face".  I smashed my plate over the head of the nearest one,  but at that point the Police arrived (who had obviously been called for something else this lot had just done) and they were carted off.  It might easily have ended very differently.

At the time I thought it was an extraordinary event - but apparently this is now just run-of-the-mill life in the UK?

Any thoughts on this from those of you who live there?

It would be appreciated if Ian Pace didn't contribute.

The examples you quote, Reiner, are from various parts of the country, but are your own observations based on what you see in London? Newspapers and television would have us all believe that the whole country is similar to the capital, largely because that’s what the media types know best and it’s where most things that are worth reporting happen. But where I live, the worst that happens is drunken behaviour on Friday and Saturday nights and I have never personally seen yobbish behaviour, at least not for a long time and I am not a recluse. You are not impressed by what you see and hear, Reiner, and yet there are plenty who are, as England is still a popular place for people to emigrate to. So my point is that we mustn't exaggerate these things, but on the other hand it does go on and I just wish we had the right people, institutions and sense of collective responsiblity to sort it out.

The incident which happened to me was definitely in London - but yes, the others are from all over the country.  What revulsed me was the nature of most of the crimes - not even for robbery, but for the pleasure to be gained from smashing another human to death   The preponderence of girls, children and mentally-restricted people in the list of victims only adds to the horror of it all.

Often these incidents in the past have been linked to hot weather, and people drinking too much on Bank Holidays etc - but as far as I know, Britain's had poor weather recently, and these weren't inter-gang rivalries (with the possible exception of the motorcyclist).

JW, I'm sorry to hear about the incident affecting your wife's family

I'm with you on that one, Mary. As a bumper sticker I saw recently summed it up:


I favour the school of psychological thought that says that violent punishment for a violent act reinforces the idea that violence is empowering.

Scary thought: perhaps it is?  I shall now run away and hide very peacefully.

A favourite quotation of mine is from W. H. Auden:

I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn -
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

I don't think it's always true, but too often it is.

As a recent returnee to the UK after thirteen years on the continent, I'm not sure what to think about all this. I do however think that a not inconsiderable factor is how the UK news media work. I have the impression that the publication of scare stories about our supposedly violent society is used far more in the UK than in other countries to sell newspapers and feed a sense of paranoia which the government, with its constant predictions of terrorist attacks (while, with its own policy of state-sponsored terrorism, recklessly trying its best to ensure that these predictions come true), does its best to fatten further. Whether this means that the UK actually is more violent than other societies I don't really know. What's certain is that it's much more talked about here, although not, it seems, such that anyone in a position of power or influence is actually interested in addressing the problem. As I say, the government with its murderous foreign policy is hardly setting a good example.

This is a complaint that so much English coursework is written under the title "Assassin". I'm sure it's an attempt by teachers to engage 15-year-old boys in lessons. (It's also why so many school history lessons are about Nazis and gas chambers.) It's easy to criticize but I don't know how teachers cope with pupils who go around in gangs in the evenings with weapons. I'm currently putting together a school magazine and one of the creative writing pieces I've been given is a graphic account of a man who is attacked and murdered on his way home one night. And it's written by a 13-year-old girl who got an A* in Latin GCSE last Thursday.

Whatever happened to "What I did in the Holidays" and "The Adventures of a Penny"?

Too many violent films, games and television programmes.

Certainly some of Shakespeare is violent, but I doubt that's the influence on the streets, somehow.