Wanted: a well-ordered and disciplined society
UK News Report #5
I’ve just been in Singapore, and much of this was written in my hotel room at 2.30 am while suffering from jet lag, which surprisingly is not best treated by turning to one’s phone and looking at the news from home.
I’ll write about ‘the Lion City’ at a later date: it’s an impressive place, although the culture is very different. Whatever its relative merits, it’s just nice to be in a country in which you never have to think about crime, and while there two locals mentioned that friends visiting London had recently been victims of street theft.
I think London is the best city in the world (he says, having never visited many major cities), and strolling down the riverside on a Saturday afternoon in spring is one of the best urban days out to be had. It is also true that petty and mid-level crime is a real issue, and the mayor should not be blaming anxieties on ‘misinformation’, even if there are plenty of dishonest slop merchants out there; propagandists make a living not by making things up, but by exaggerating real problems. I love my city, but I would like it to be more like the ‘well-ordered and disciplined society’ which Lee Kuan Yew famously admired when he lived here in the 1940s. This is clearly not the case today, and Britain suffers from a plague of low level crime like shoplifting, and many of the rarer and more serious crimes we read about are preventable.
Much has been written about the lengths to which Singapore goes in order to make multiculturalism work, but an underrated factor is simply having a very low crime rate. Most people otherwise get along if the authorities remove the small number of wrongdoers from each community. Incidents of violence are historically a trigger for inter-communal bloodshed across the world, most notably (and bizarrely) in 1980s Yugoslavia.
Last week a white man in the Midlands was sentenced for a brutal and sickening rape carried out specifically against a woman he believed to be a Muslim (she was in fact Sikh). The offender had been released from psychiatric care, despite 10 previous convictions for 18 offences, including carrying weapons, assault and battery, theft, drugs, harassment, and breach of a restraining order. Even with continually disturbing behaviour, he was released into the community, and three days later carried out an unspeakable crime. While relations between the communities are placid and so did not escalate, an innocent young woman had to endure hell because the authorities failed to incapacitate a clearly dangerous individual.
An absence of order can sometimes prove explosive. Britain’s worst race riot in recent years, during the summer of 2024, was triggered by the murder of three young girls by a black man incorrectly believed to be an asylum seeker. Just as with the Nottingham murders, Southport might have been prevented if the state was more effective and less captured by ideology. As I wrote last week: ‘Whenever an ideology is embedded into any sort of public service, when the aim of the institution is not just to carry out its primary function but to advance some social goal, then the ideology comes to take precedence over the service.’
Ideology, when used in a derogatory sense like this, simply means ‘sticking to a pre-ordained worldview even when the results show it is not working’. This is most true with regards to one particular area, the asylum system, which risks creating a repeat of 2024, as barely a week goes by without a fresh horror committed by interlopers. Last week, three men from Egypt were sentenced for raping a woman on Brighton Beach; one had already been convicted of murder back home. Remarkably, the men are now appealing their denial of asylum.
This system doesn’t work: it creates huge injustices against victims, and builds an air of fear about strangers in our midst. It’s downstream of a system of human rights which has become sacrosanct, which I wrote about recently on the subject of Alec Ryrie’s The Age of Hitler.
Human rights aren’t self-evident, and to most they aren’t God-given; they depend on an impartial law and a state which enjoys legitimacy, as well as reciprocal ideas of obligation and loyalty; the human rights of some inevitably clash with the human rights of others.
While the international community has a moral duty to be alert to warning signs of persecution, and to act accordingly, the idea that someone can just turn up in another country is absurd, bringing a huge cost to social tranquility and undermining political legitimacy. An absolutist belief in human rights has created a totally unfair, untenable and perverse asylum system, and tinkering around the edges only creates new incentives to game the system.
