This attack took place in the former pit village of Edlington, for anyone who knows of Edlington, they may remember that the Yorkshire main colliery was once situated near here, it was one of the largest coal mining facilities in Britain, and when it was closed down following the crushing of the Great Miners’ Strike of 1984, thousands of workers had lost their jobs. This was the scene around the country in all former pit villages, as the Tory and Labour governments neglected all those who had once lived and worked in these regions unemployment remained high, alcoholism increased, suicide rates increased and so did crime rates. Council housing, schools and other public services went into a state of disrepair, after all why would the big wig politicians and business owners need to care about these people any longer?

In such a deprived area, with little or no hope for a decent education and little availability for decent enjoyment and recreation for young people, as well as poor job prospects after leaving school, are we really to be surprised when some kids feel like there is no need to respect others when they themselves have no respect shown to them, when they are treated as inferiors? Are we to be surprised when people resort to violence when we are constantly pummelled by the media showing ‘our’ successive governments committing to war, death and destruction, sending working class kids to die fighting other working class kids halfway across the world and pretending that it is all justified when we all know they are merely lying to us all?

This is not to justify at all what the two attackers did, what they did was horrific, so horrific that you have to be ill to be able to carry out those acts. Merely, if we, as a society want to see less and less of these brutal acts, we have to realise th at the problem doesn’t lie with just a few misfits, the problem lies with the way society is structured and organised in the first place. Society creates these few ‘misfits’, they are simply a translation of the extremes of Capitalism itself, and although this is said time and time again, especially by the wrong people (hypocritical politicians), we must tackle the cause of the crime. Can we expect any ‘leaders’ to do this for us, for some strange reason (well no, not really, because we’ve lived under the same system for hundreds of years now and nothing has changed) I suspect the answer to this is no. We wish the victims recover quickly and hope they do not suffer any irreparable mental or physical damage.

“The most absurd apology for authority and law is that they serve to diminish crime. Aside from the fact that the State is itself the greatest criminal, breaking every written and natural law, stealing in the form of taxes, killing in the form of war and capital punishment, it has come to an absolute standstill in coping with crime. It has failed utterly to destroy or even minimize the horrible scourge of its own creation.” — Emma Goldman, ‘What is Anarchy?’