Politicians: Responsibility vs Rhetoric.

It’s becoming a matter of some concern in the UK that violent behaviour – most notably knife crime – perpetrated by young men is on the increase to an alarming degree. Murders by stabbing are sadly becoming an almost daily feature of the national news.

My generation experienced hardly any of this sort of thing, so are we to believe that today’s generation is somehow genetically different to us? It seems most unlikely. I’m fairly sure that humans throughout the ages have been constructed of the same raw material, so what’s different? I think it self evident that social conditioning is what’s different, and social conditioning comes primarily from the many aspects of life which make up the culture. And who is responsible for those many aspects? Why, politicians mostly are. And yet I’ve never yet heard a politician accept any responsibility for increasing social violence.

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The latest upshot of Mr Prigozhin’s March on Moscow comes from Mr Putin’s address to the Russian people. He refers to Wagner’s puzzlingly theatrical display as a ‘mutiny’, and says that the ‘mutineers’ wanted to see Russian society ‘drown in a river of blood.’ This is, to say the least, a somewhat amusing exaggeration, and strongly suggests that Mr Putin is either losing the plot to a major extent or has a very low opinion of the average Russian’s intelligence. Alternatively, maybe it's just the latest act of some piece of political theatre written to divert attention from the rivers of blood which Mr Putin's policy has visited on Ukrainian civilians.