Self-evident, factual remarks ignite ‘firestorm of controversy’

Hey Ron, you forgot basketball!

(Black journalist) Kwasi Kwarteng writes:

Responding to a news story about two black youths who conspired to push a pregnant woman into a canal as part of a failed murder plot, [Ron Liddle] wrote that ‘the overwhelming majority of street crime, knife crime, gun crime, robbery and crimes of sexual violence in London is carried out by young men from the African-Caribbean community.’

In return for all this crime, says Liddle, the black community has given Britain ‘rap music, goat curry and a far more vibrant and diverse understanding of cultures which were once alien to us. For which, many thanks’. (…)

Liddle has touched on a very real problem – the disproportionate number of young black men who commit crime.

Ministry of Justice figures for 2007/2008 show that while only 2.2 per cent of Britons aged ten or above are black, 14 per cent of criminal cases tried in a crown court involve black suspects.

It’s no use howling ‘racism’, this is a real problem confronting our society — and despite her politically correct posturing, Diane Abbott knows it.

On her blog, Abbott writes: ‘Sadly 80 per cent of gun crime in London is “black on black”, often involving boys in their teens. As a black woman and the mother of a teenage son, this is frightening and wholly unacceptable.’

So frightening and unacceptable, indeed, that despite her hard-Left credentials, she chose to send her children to a fee-paying school, rather than to a local state secondary. In her own words, ‘too many black boys were unsuccessful within inner-city state schools’.

Why is it acceptable for Ms Abbot to raise such issues, but not Mr Liddle?