Who are the muggers?
Sir: So George Gale (6 May) believes 'mugging' to be 'where people of one colour attack and rob those of another'. Very per spicacious! But even here in Manchester our traditionalist super-cop, James Anderton, would hardly go the whole hog with that one. After all, if our local black (was Mr Gale referring to any other race?) community had cornered the mugging market, they would — given the amount of assaults they would have to commit and the relative paucity of their numbers — all be suffering rom advanced collective exhaustion by now. But who knows? Maybe Idi Amin takes his holidays in Collyhurst.
But I do not want to be churlish and deny totally the validity of Mr Gale's thesis, unsociological though it might be. For I dare say, even in emphatically Caucasian Glasgow, the collective might of Chinese waiters, Pakistani bus-conductors, and Italian chefs might well be responsible for the lawlessness that city is always characterised as producing. And then there's Dublin. Once the most peaceful city in western Europe, it now, alas, is also experiencing an alarming rise in crime, especially mugging. Could this be the revenge of the (green) leprechaun, an attempt on his part to regain the habitat wrested from him in antiquity by planter and Gael alike?
And what about Hang Kong, a notoriously unruly city at the best of times? As the recent BBC TV series on the colony showed, mugging is rampant. But the victims, at least on the screen, all appeared to be Chinese. According to the Gale law, that would make the small white community the culprits, since they are the only other ethnic grouping inhabiting the territory. I must say that such a realisation leaves me very uneasy. Aren't we whites supposed to be the universal victims? That, when all is said and done, is what Mr Gale is driving at. But his juicy Black Legend is in danger of producing a non-white backlash.
Dr Goebbels, as Geoffrey McDermott, the reviewer of his diaries (6 May), would probably confirm, would never have made such an elementary slip. All I can say to Mr Gale is that he makes a lousy sorcerer's apprentice.
Tom Gallagher 23 Windor Road, Levenshuime, Manchester
Previous page
