The Criminal Classes

It's the UK tabloid press' worst nightmare, isn't it?  A man drives a car into a crowd celebrating Liverpool's Premier League win, injuring scores of men, women and children and it turns out that he isn't Muslim, an immigrant, illegal or otherwise, or just foreign and non-white.  You can still feel the shock waves passing through Fleet Street as they are forced to report the news that he is actually white, British, a company director and happily married with two kids. Worst of all, he's a former Royal Marine!  The horrors of it all!  He wasn't even motivated by some wacked out religious fervour or dangerous leftist ideology - he was just off his face on drugs.  "He was a lovely family man!" say the headlines, quoting his neighbours.  The sense of incredulity that somebody respectable and middle class could do such a thing is palpable in the reporting.  It always amazes me that, despite the evidence of history, this country's press - and its citizens, the press seem to believe - still think that criminals are somehow 'different', that you can tell they are criminals just by looking at them.  The more heinous the crimes, the more 'different' they are expected to be.  It's a throwback to the Victorian notion that there was an entire 'criminal class' of society who were easily identifiable by their physical characteristics.  But the fact is that they look just like us.  Even the quietest, most respectable looking of people can turn out to be a psychopath.  That's how they get away with it - they hide in plain sight.  The only murderer I've ever met (he wasn't a murderer at the time, that came a bit later) was just about the meekest, most insignificant looking character you could imagine.  Yet, a while after I met him in the course of my then job, he murdered a woman.

Getting back to the issue in hand, you can guarantee that if the suspect in this appalling business in Liverpool hadn't been white, had been a Muslim or an immigrant, then those headlines would have been very different.  Rather than the sense of bafflement that pervades them, it would have been naked hatred, screaming for retribution and trying to implicate that every other Muslim and immigrant in the UK somehow shared responsibility for the crime.   What this reveals is the tabloids wilful refusal to try and explain criminality in any terms other than race and wealth.  Only the poor and/or non-white (which, to them, implies non-Britishness, also) can be criminals.  If you are well off, white, living in a nice house with a family and respectable job, you can't possibly be a real criminal.  Sure, you might cheat on your taxes, break the speed limit, engage in some mild fraud by falsifying your expenses claims, but those are middle class crimes.  In fact, they aren't really crimes at all, are they?  They're just misdemeanours and really shouldn't be punishable with anything other than a slap on the wrist.  Certainly not prison.  That should be reserved for real crimes.  This utter hypocrisy is why their claims about 'two tier justice' are so insidious - it's 'two tier' alright, but not in the way they like to report it.  It's instead about entitlement - if you are entitled enough, whether it be through race, social class or wealth, in the logic of the press, you shouldn't be punished too harshly and preferably should be let off altogether.  Because, of course, in their cases crime is always a one-off aberration, rather than a lifestyle choice, as it is for the oiks, the foreigners and the non-whites.