The left never actually admit they are wrong on anything. It's one of the features of left wing thinking that any real world evidence which falsifies a wide held left wing belief is either wrong or can be reinterpreted to demonstrate that their belief is correct. Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) - very much a left wing belief system - being a prime example of that technique.
However, they frequently admit their failings by accident. Or, to be more precise, by their incoherent thought processes. For example, it is a long held belief of the left that poverty causes crime. Is this true?
Well, if it is true then it is obvious that fifty years of progressive liberalism have failed - because crime is considerably worse than it was fifty years ago when there was far more poverty than there is now. But the left counter that by adjusting the way we measure poverty so it appears that there are more poor people today than there really is - in which case, fifty years of progressive liberalism and the welfare state has failed again.
To prove their theory - that poverty causes crime - they have to demonstrate that there are plenty of poor people which is why crime is so much higher today than it was fifty years ago, but by doing that they admit the failure of another left wing plank. It's an implicit admission of the failure of the left - but one they will never own up to.
It's a similar thing with education. According to the left, comprehensive education has been a great success. It is fairer and delivering higher standards than ever before - so they say.
But then comes the admission of failure again. You see, another one of their theories on crime is that it is caused by poor education. Time and again I hear someone from the left saying that "prison doesn't work" - what is needed, they insist, is education to stop people falling into crime.
This stark admission ignores the fact that everyone has access to a state education from the age of 5 until they are 16. If it is true that poor education is more likely to result in a rise in crime then it is demonstrable evidence that comprehensive education has been an abject failure because - as we know - crime was considerably lower before comprehensive education.
So, either the theory is bunkum or the policy is failing? Which is it lefties?
Of course, both theories - that poor education and poverty cause crime - are rubbish. A century ago we had considerably more poverty and poorer education, but far less crime - but a century before that we had even poorer education and even more poverty - and crime was rife.
What causes crime? The absence of morality is what.
4 comments:
"So, either the theory is bunkum or the policy is failing? Which is it lefties?"
I can't see them rushing to answer that one, but I guess that 'decades of Tory underinvestment' will figure somewhere.
Hi, Mark - lol, no I wouldn't expect them to answer it, but they can't blame "Tory underinvestment" either. Both Tory and Labour governments have used statistical "evidence" to demonstrate that education standards have improved over the last 50 years, but still crime rose massively over the same period.
The left and poverty is always a bizarre relationship. There are more people in deep poverty now than there were in 1997, yet the Government claims success.
Depends on how you define poverty, LFAT. Real poverty is pretty rare in this country - in fact I'd venture to suggest it doesn't exist. What we're talking about is relative poverty - and as we use the median wage as a baseline for relative povety it ensures that there will always be a significant proportion of the people who are classified as living in poverty (it has to due to the very nature of an "average" - it's all part of the incoherent thought processes of the left). I don't travel much these days, but when I was younger I got to see a fair bit of the world and saw real poverty at first hand. It is completely different to the sort of thing we class as poverty in this country.
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