The Path to Power

I had spoken to this effect at the North Atlantic Council in Turnberry in June 1990. See The Downing Street Years, p. 812.

91

J.L. Esposito, Islam and Politics (New York, 1991), p. 244.

92

I am grateful to Professor James Q. Wilson for drawing this and a number of other points in this chapter to my attention.

93

Although I refer to the rising crime and connected problems as a ‘Western’ phenomenon, I do so in full recognition that a virulent crime wave has afflicted the post-communist world. This is largely a matter of infection spread from the West which the post-communist states, lacking effective police forces and the institutions of civil society, Burke’s ‘little platoons’, have been unable to combat. By contrast, in the homogeneous and strongly group-oriented Japanese society, which in this regard is thoroughly un-Western, crime is remarkably low.

94

See Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age (London and Boston, 1984).

95

I am grateful to Professor Gary McDowell, Director of the Institute of United States Studies at London University, for letting me draw upon the proceedings of the Institute’s conference on juvenile crime, Juvenile Justice and the Limits of Social Policy, held in May 1994. I would not, however, wish to suggest that the experts who presented papers at that conference would necessarily agree with my conclusions.

96

‘Letter to a Member of the National Assembly’ (1791), Reflections on the Revolution in France and Other Essays, Everyman edition, pp. 281-2.

97

I am grateful to the contributors to a National Review Institute Conference, which I chaired in December 1993, on this theme for their insights.

98

James Q. Wilson, Thinking About Crime (New York, 1983), pp. 117-24.

99

Ernest Van Den Haag, ‘How to Cut Crime’, National Review, 30 May 1994.

100

See pp. 121-2.

101

In January 1994 the Government announced a limited but welcome tightening of the rules on local authority housing allocation to help tackle the problem of queue-jumping by single parents.

102

This research is summarized in a Centre for Policy Studies pamphlet, Divorce Dissent, by Ruth Deech (1994).

103

See The Downing Street Years, pp. 132-9.

104