Who's to blame?

No parent should have to bury a child. It goes against nature.

I can't begin to imagine how it feels to get the phone call that tells you the child you dropped off at school or saw off on the bus to visit their grandparents or sent on an adventure holiday is not coming home. Sadly, I've had to be around when a few parents were dealing with this terrible news. And none of us handled it well. It's not something we're prepared for. There is, as I often say, no handbook for dealing with death. Especially violent death.

Six days into the Manchester bombing and the politics has started. Who's to blame for the deaths and terrible injuries in Manchester on Monday night? I would say the bomber himself. And maybe IS, although we don't yet know if the bomber had links to that organisation. Theresa May has placed the Manchester bombing right in the centre of her general election campaign, and disgracefully, the right wing press has decided that the person responsible is Jeremy Corbyn.

I don't really want to get into the detail of how Theresa May as Home Secretary ran down the police force or how Liam Fox and Philip Hammond ran down the army, to the point where we didn't have enough police on the streets or enough soldiers to back them up. I'm very unimpressed by the performance of MI5 and MI6. I know Corbyn's background - anti-war - and I tend to agree with him that the adventures the UK has had in the Middle East (backing up the USA) have made us a target of many rebel groups.

But then I decided to look at things from another angle. We don't hear the French, the Belgians or the Germans bitching about atrocities in their countries. That's partly because, frankly, the Brits don't give a rat's ass about anyone in Europe so we don't hear them, but it's also - in my opinion - part of the 'heroic Britain' cult the media here push. Standing up to adversity. Dealing wonderfully with the crisis. That usually involves people who are underfunded and underpaid - step forward the NHS and the emergency services - saving the UK government's ass. Ours not to question why...ours but to do or die...

I googled 'terrorist murders in France' tonight and came up with a wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents_in_France

The article runs for page after terrible page. There have been other countries in Europe attacked by IS -  the UK, Belgium and Germany especially - but France seems to have copped a lot. No wonder they have soldiers on their streets.

Is there anything we can learn from the French? A couple of things maybe:

1 Don't let people of North African or Arab descent become an isolated group. Help them to integrate, rather than letting them rot in banlieues outside major cities - or ghettos inside cities. In particular, work at educating the young people including the young women.

2 Work at inclusion: we know that young people who have no role in society - no work, no education, low expectations - whether they are black or white - will become followers of extreme groups: the EDL, neo-Nazis or IS. The current 'welfare' approach tells these young people they mean nothing, and are worth nothing. No housing support, a jobseekers' allowance based on sanctions.

Above all, we need to approach the 'problem' of the Middle East as something we can solve.