Yesterday in Croydon there was yet another senseless and terrible murder. This time it was of a fifteen year old girl who was stabbed in the neck allegedly by a seventeen year old armed with a very large knife.

As per British law regarding Contempt of Court I have to be careful in what I write on this as I do not wish to prejudice any related trial. However, according to various press reports the motive for the murder could have been some girlfriend/boyfriend dispute that got out of hand resulting in the fifteen year old being killed.

If this explanation is correct then it is a nonsense reason to kill another person, but then many of the murders of teenagers in Sadiq Khan’s London are similarly senseless and stupid. London is plagued by the murders of teenagers by other teenagers for such baseless reasons as walking in the ‘wrong’ postcode or looking at someone in the ‘wrong’ way or associating with the ‘wrong’ individuals. London has always had senseless violence as part of its background, but in the past, as in the 1960 case of Francis Forsyth and Norman Harris, who were hanged for a killing committed during a street robbery, such violence was unusual enough to become a big media story. Today the murder of a fifteen year old girl on her way to school will garner no such headlines, the media circus will move on in a few days and will only reappear at the conclusion of any court case resulting from it. Even then the media coverage will be far less than the above-mentioned 1960 case because teenagers murdering other teenagers for nothingburger reasons is not all too common an occurrence in modern London.

Some out there are trying to link this appalling murder and also London’s spiralling violence rate with race but I don’t believe that it is. I grew up in a less than salubrious area which was quite racially mixed and although there was often low level violence involving White, Black and Brown people, either inter or intra racial, it was never as bad as it is today. Growing up I went to school with numerous kids who were Black but few of them ended up in violent street gangs or were involved in the sort of criminality of the sort that we see today. However many of the minority kids came from intact families where the adults behaved like adults, who worked hard and brought their kids up properly. I cannot help thinking that it is family breakdown, identity politics and adult infantilisation, much of which has been encouraged by the policies espoused by the middle class White Left, that has played a major part in creating the situation that we see in London today.

The encouragement of bastardy without consequence, the promotion of the idea of children’s ‘rights’, a welfare system that discourages couples from staying together, the extension of childhood into a person’s twenties, the normalisation of the sort of racial grievance mongering that some in previous generations of Black thinkers deplored and the rest of the liberal nostrums, has helped to create the disaster that we see on London’s streets. The result of these failed policies has not been to elevate people of all colours and classes, but to degrade them.

This latest murder on the streets of London is testament to decades of failed social policies. Sadly the politicians will pontificate about which knives should be banned but will I suspect not look at the policies that have brought about the family and social breakdown that creates teenage murderers by the dozen or more.

What London needs is a Mayor, who in the capital is also the police and crime commissioner, who is willing to be robust in tackling the epidemic of violence that scars the city. Sadly that necessary leader is not Sadiq Khan and all we will get from him is meaningless empty platitudes and not the step change in policing policies that London really needs.

May the memory of this latest murder victim be for a blessing and may it force those in charge of both London and the UK to wake up to the disaster that has been created in our society.