I’ve been following the outrage in the media about murder rates this year in London with much finger pointing as to where the blame should be apportioned.
Comparisons are being made with murder rates in cities like New York where, this year, fewer murders have taken place compared with London.
When you look at the numbers, poverty and joblessness are part of the problem. London has always been close to the top when you chart areas in the UK with high youth unemployment.
The black youth community has twice the level of unemployment compared with the white community.
Government safety net schemes often end up trapping people in poverty and joblessness with little or no hope of migrating from schemes to proper employment.
Latest surveys help to further explain part of the problem with the rejection of God and religion, a growing phenomenon amongst the youth.
In London and Chicago, the primary and immediate cause of murder and violent assault among young adults is gang warfare financed by drug trafficking.
In London and Chicago, the primary and immediate cause of murder and violent assault among young adults is gang warfare financed by drug trafficking.
The gangs, drugs and violence happen when the police and politicians run out of ideas and just give up.
Some say the situation in London has been further exacerbated by the influx of people from the newer members of the EU from Eastern Europe.
When there is a complete breakdown of the family and the schools are increasingly failing with a nanny state substituting for the family, trouble is brewing.
The police get tired of being the whipping boys as gangs make money from crime as the laws of economics and human nature take over.
With violence spiralling out of control there are three reactions that can occur...
1. Politicians blame the police, who in turn give up. Things then get much worse. Across in the US this was Chicago a decade ago and still is and now includes Baltimore.
2. Politicians get tough on crime and encourage the police to capture the gang leaders as they flood into troubled neighbourhoods and show no mercy. The jails and courts fill up. This was New York under Mayor Giuliani and is Manila today under the rule of President Duterte.
It works if you define success as dramatically reducing violent crime but will it work in London?
The Black Lives Matter phenomenon has grown out of the US police killings of blacks and there is a media feeding frenzy every time an unarmed teen is killed by the police and worse if it is a white cop and a black teen.
Then the politicians will blame the police, who in turn will give up, and you are back to category 1 above.
3. Eventually the politicians and police give up, they and the public will focus on trying to contain the gangs and violence geographically. In the US this is what is happening in Chicago and it is what will happen next in Baltimore.
The working poor escape to the suburbs where the racial component of this is both ironic and hopeful. In the 1950s and 1960s, white urban working-class America fled to the suburbs where they avoided living with black neighbours.
Now, those white working-class suburbanites are ageing and their new neighbours are black working-class escaping from Chicago.
What next?
Many urban areas have effectively been abandoned insofar as the state is concerned.
Do these areas become the permanent home of the proles popularised by George Orwell in his 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four?
Do they eventually become re-populated by working people?
Time will tell.
Gordon is the former president and chief executive of BMMI. He can be reached at gordonboyle@hotmail.com