Who said this to Mrs Thatcher about black people in 1985:
“The root of social malaise is not poor housing, or youth ‘alienation’, or the lack of a middle class. Lower-class, unemployed white people lived for years in appalling slums without a breakdown of public order on anything like the present scale.”
Laying out their Thatcherite interpretation that the unrest was purely due to moral decay, the document continued: “Riots, criminality and social disintegration are caused solely by individual characters and attitudes. So long as bad moral attitudes remain, all efforts to improve the inner cities will founder.
“[Lord] Young’s new [black] entrepreneurs will set up in the disco and drug trade; Kenneth Baker’s refurbished council blocks will decay through vandalism combined with neglect; and people will graduate from temporary training or employment programmes into unemployment or crime.”
Answer: West Dorset MP and friend of Cameron and Swire, Oliver Letwin – recently appointed Flooding Czar. Wonder what he thinks of Northerners!
Unfortunately, he didn’t suggest how “bad attitudes” could be changed.
East Devon Watch 