When I was a kid, English heavy metal referred to Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple. It’s taken on an entirely new meaning these days, as Mark Steyn notes:

The other week, in Wednesbury in the English Midlands, an unusual crime occurred. A thief passed down a residential street and methodically stole every single front door handle and house number. The victims discovered the burglary when they tried to leave their homes and found the door no longer opened. An Englishman’s home may be his castle but if you can’t let down the drawbridge it’s indistinguishable from a dungeon.

Trying to get a, er, handle on property crime in the United Kingdom is a problematic business. Why would anyone steal door knockers? Well, there’s a construction boom in India and China. Demand for lead is higher than at any time since 1980 and the price of copper has quadrupled in two years. And in a globalized market place that hasn’t escaped the attention of Britain’s criminal gangs, for whom “scrap metal” has become a far more lucrative proposition than it might once have been. According to The Times of London, this summer 19 schools had their roofs stolen. What’s the point of locking your valuables when the lock itself – and the handle and the hinges – is suddenly valuable? Eighty manhole covers were recently stolen from the streets of Gloucester. And don’t bother warning the criminals that if they carry on like this they’ll wind up in court, because they’ve already been there: The magistrates’ court in West Bromwich now leaks because metal thieves stole the lead from the courthouse roof.

Or as Steyn writes, "The police have no leads, and the buildings have no lead."

To understand how a society can change radically within a generation, it's worth flashing back to this quote from Stanley Kubrick in 1972, when he was promoting his film version of A Clockwork Orange:

Mr. Kubrick now lives in a sprawling home in Borehamwood, 30 minutes out of London, with his third wife, Christiane, an artist, and their three daughters, together with seven cats and three golden retrievers. The house, enclosed by a brick wall, also contains the director's offices and editing facilities.

"It's very pleasant, very peaceful, very civilized, here," Mr. Kubrick said in an interview. "London is, in the best sense, the way New York must have been in about 1910."

These days, just as Burgess and Kubrick warned, England has come to resemble the out of control liberalism depicted in A Clockwork Orange, with a feckless police watching helplessly as crime throughout England (especially London) skyrockets. Meanwhile, thanks largely to Rudy Giuliani’s Broken Window policies,"New York's murder rate has dropped to its lowest level since police records first became available more than 40 years ago", as London's Telegraph notes.