The mean streets of Britain
The shootings in a Brixton McDonald’s were a terrible metaphor for the way we live now, writes Allister Heath. A whole section of society, raised on violence and fast food, is drifting away from the rest of the nation: nutrition is destinyInstead of the heavy police presence I had expected to find at Brixton’s underground station, I was greeted by a canned rendition of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony. To cool tempers in the notoriously volatile south London hotspot, classical music is being pumped through the ticket hall’s sound system; unfortunately, like the flower power ‘make love, not war’ ideology of the 1960s, this latest gimmick is straight out of the politically correct rulebook.