We have stripped our young people of the means to fight the barbarism engulfing them

Do we, inhabitants of these small islands, distinguish the events of 7 July from the failed bomb attempts in London only a fortnight later? From the vile, Stephen Lawrence-type execution of Anthony Walker, a black boy who was left with an axe embedded in his brain only because of the colour of his skin; from the two young women mown down in a machine-gun attack outside a New Year party in Birmingham; from the fratricide taking place among young black men?

Are these jets of extreme violence not part of an alarming degeneration among post-Thatcherite youth trapped in a dark legacy of greed, as international capital, armies in tow, rampages across the globe? Must we simply leave the Muslim clerics, Caribbean and African evangelical priests, and the established Christian churches, too, to rescue our population of working-class youth from despair?

Never in my 44 years in this country have I experienced such a torrent of brutal violence as has been unleashed in the past few years. Only this past Monday night I witnessed, on BBC2's Newsnight, a bunch of so-called Muslim ideologues interpreting our world through the darkness of an old civilisation that has been dragged into the modern world, armed with a barrel of oil in one hand, an AK-47 in the other and a Koran between clenched teeth. One would have thought it impossible for these bearded jihadists to capture the minds of young men bred in a deeply irreligious society and brought up in a post-feminist world.

We have stripped our young people of all the tools they might need to fight off the barbarism which has engulfed them. Thirty years ago, among Asians, there existed in every city an Asian Youth Movement. Parents joined the Pakistani Workers Association or the Indian Workers Association. Later, trade unions with white and Asian members joined with the Labour left to breathe life into an anti-Thatcher struggle. In the Caribbean community, scores of similar alliances thrived, and out of them came the Black Sections of the Labour Party, which agitated and won seats in parliament. Yet all these were defeated by rampant Thatcherism and its successors.

In the Asian community the landscape has changed. As the mosques and temples sprang up, those who led them stamped on the Asian Youth Movement. What was fine and secular in these movements was replaced with an often-bearded nationalism. And so now we witness an army of religious barons, with government ministers in tow, seeking to pacify the very phenomenon that they created.

It would be a joke if it weren't so tragic. And Britain's white youths are left with little other than the National Front, alcohol and Asbos. Somewhere out of this mess, new land has to be charted. A precondition has to be the demilitarisation of Iraq - followed by a similar demilitarisation of Britain's Asian and Caribbean communities.

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