In no Arab country today is there democracy, freedom of expression or security guaranteed by law impartially applied. Despite the immense wealth conferred by oil, poverty is endemic and violence systematic and customary. So says David Pryce-Jones in The Closed Circle. In Britain, by contrast, there is democracy, freedom of expression and security guaranteed by law impartially applied. Poverty is relative, violence is rare and extraordinary. This is why the riots of the past few days seem so peculiar, and so wrong.
In Syria, the repression of protesters asking for things we take for granted, such as democracy and free expression, is brutal enough to have attracted the opprobrium of other Arab countries (which takes some doing.) In Britain, where people have historically fought hard for such things, unarmed police stand and watch while looters raid shops for sportswear and TVs, and arsonists riot unchecked.
There are two kinds of people – those who make things happen, and those to whom things happen.
I have heard excuses put forward on behalf of the youthful rioters; that they are bored, that they have no money, that there is nothing for them to do – the unstated assumption being that someone should be there to give them money, to give them worthwhile activity, to give them work, to give them recreation, as if such things were manna from heaven: there is no sense that they should find the resources within themselves to do such things. If left to make their own entertainment, they cannot create, they can only destroy.
Compared with the situation in Syria, for example – or in places such as Somalia, where there is no government, no rights, no privileges, no law, and where people are starving to death – these orcs have jam on it. And if, like infants, they can’t conceive of jam tomorrow, they must have jam today. One of the most memorable soundbites of the last election campaign was David Cameron’s expression of outrage that in today’s Britain, children are treated like adults, and adults are treated like children. The consequence being, as he said only yesterday, that if you are old enough to commit these crimes, you are old enough to be punished for them.
Middle-class commentators sitting in safe places such as Cromer will be free to analyze the causes, if any, for such behaviour. In my view it stems from two things – a dependency on the welfare state, such that the infantilized underclass can suck at the tit of the state forever without ever having to grow up and take responsibility for its own fate; and the moral relativism that has for the past half century run through British society like mould through crumbling woodwork. It’s no surprise that the fruiting bodies – ugly, putrid, dripping – have now emerged.
I’d like to ask several questions, each one a girrafe elephant in the room, none of which seems to have been answered.
Where are the parents of these young rioters? Do any of these rioters have fathers? Are the parents, if any, so infantile and low in moral courage that they are actually joining in the riots? When did any of these rioters last read a book? (I notice that the targets for looting are sports shops and electronics stores – bookstores and public libraries remain untouched, except perhaps to be torched.) When did any of these rioters last sit down at a table for a meal with their families? When (now, this will make me really unpopular) did they last go to church?
Before moral relativism sank its hyphae into society, people took a long time to grow up, and enjoyed being children. Adults got married, and stayed that way for life. Bastardy and adultery were seen as shameful, unacceptable. Matters are now so arranged that one is not allowed to pass judgment on the lifestyles of others, even though we know that children of one-parent families do less well in life than those lucky enough to have both parents at home, to keep them from harm; who know where they are at night; to read them (read them) bedtime stories; who have shelves full of books; who give them love, affection, and reassurance; who know the location of the off-switch on the TV; who instruct them in the difference between right and wrong.
Nowadays, well, anything goes. If your child can’t read, it’s the fault of the school, rather than the fact that you don’t have any books in your house, or read to your children. If your child can’t use a knife and fork, that’s the kindergarten’s fault, and nothing to do with the fact that you’ve never had a meal round a dinner table rather than on the couch in front of the TV. If your child is suffering from neglect, it’s the fault of the health authorities or the hard-pressed social worker, not the fact that your own life is chaotic, that the child doesn’t have two parents at home (and always the same parents) rather than playing bingo or down the pub, or a single parent who is trying to do the impossible. What no-one is allowed to do is criticize this state of affairs – we are only asked to pay for it, and pick up the pieces when it goes wrong.
Matters have reached such a state that such moral relativism is now guaranteed by law. What finally prompted me to write this post – after some days of inchoate anger – was the discovery that the police stood back and let the looters loot, the fire-raisers burn, not for tactical reasons, nor because they were low in numbers, but because of the fear of litigation for heavy-handed tactics; for the fear of abusing the looters’ human rights. It is the mantra of human rights that now prevents teachers disciplining errant pupils; that prevents police from using any force at all to stop criminals; and even preventing parents from disciplining their own children. Therefore it is now your human right to live like a beast, and damn the consequences. It is now your human right to pillage, burn, loot and destroy, without ever having to take responsibility. If Mum and Dad are too stupid, too ill-educated, too infantilized, too absent to stop you from taking responsibility for your actions, then the creaking apparatus of the welfare state and the criminal justice system will try to do its best, which, while valiant, is no substitute for the real thing.
You (yes, you) now have two choices. The first is to rediscover the moral fibre of our grandparents. Yes, they might have been poor. Yes, they might have suffered racial and religious discrimination. But they knew the value of education, and they knew what was right, and what was wrong. To paraphrase Norman Tebbitt, they wouldn’t sit and whine like toddlers that their lot was someone else’s fault – they’d get on their bikes, go out and make things happen, for the good of everyone, not least themselves.
The second is to stay as you are. If that happens, the police will no longer be unarmed. Many people I know to be otherwise mild-mannered and liberal have called for rubber bullets and water cannon, if not tanks and live ammunition. If that happens, then we will be Syria.
The choice, friends, is yours. Which is it to be?
Go on.
Make my day.
Bravo! Excellent, Henry!
Thank you,
A very well-conceived and well-written perspective on the awful events of the last few days and the underlying reason why they happened (and, unfortunately, continue to occur). Unfortunately, the people who need to change their choices better, more moral, ones probably can’t and won’t read this. BTW, my 13-year-old daughter came to me after seeing the latest news on the riots and destruction last night and said, “People need to be like they were in WWII, working together to build things back up, not doing stuff like this.”
Thank you.
Unfortunately, the people who need to change their choices better, more moral, ones probably can’t and won’t read this
The problem is that they can’t and won’t read anything, let alone this blog. More telling is the fact that some of the people who can read, and should take such things into account – the left-leaning educationalists, politicians and policy-makers whose misguided policies have created today’s climate – will simply dismiss such arguments as reactionary, even if they are based on actual evidence. These are the people who really are at fault.
there is no sense that they should find the resources within themselves to do such things. If left to make their own entertainment, they cannot create, they can only destroy.
This. I’m not a big Nirvana fan, but in the course of a teaching/lecturing day, I sometimes find myself thinking of the line: “I feel stupid, and contagious – here we are now, entertain us.” The infantilization occurs here as well; an example is the plethora of brightly-colored snacks and drinks that seem to be necessary for most students to sit a 3-hour exam without becoming cachectic or moribund. For an 8:30 AM lecture, it’s not unusual to see students setting up a portable cereal bowl, filled with Fruit Loops or Lucky Charms, on the tabletop in front of them, and then eating it while staring into space with that blank look characteristic of toddlers woken from a nap, or of small children watching Rugrats. I once asked a grad student who’d pulled out her portable cereal bowl and milk at the beginning of a small class, whether she’d like me to put on some cartoons for her.
Those exact “excuses” you listed were trotted out last night on the BBC World radio program, to explain the spread of rioting to cities other than London. We’re told that the violence and protest are in response to government austerity measures, and to class/wealth disparities in England (as if we don’t have the latter here at all).
The infantilization occurs here as well; an example is the plethora of brightly-colored snacks and drinks that seem to be necessary for most students to sit a 3-hour exam without becoming cachectic or moribund.
I continue to be amazed by such stories. In my day, we got through genetics exams that went on all day with no sustenance at all. But then, in my day, we had to get up before we went to bed and eat freezing cold poison.
Out of curiosity, what did the student say, whom you challenged with the offer of cartoons?
As for the ‘excuses’ trotted out on the BBC: well, Gee Officer Krupke, I’m deprived. And what do you expect from the BBC, which should long ago have merged with the Guardian podcast? The BBC is increasingly leftish, increasingly metropolitan – and increasingly irrelevant.
Back in the 1930s, when conditions were far worse, people like my late Uncle Lionel walked (yes, walked, imagine that? And no trainers, neither) from South Wales to London to look for work. Thousands did the same. They didn’t sit on their arses and complain, let alone go out and trash shoe shops.
The student laughed, perhaps sheepishly, but continued to crunch and dribble the damn cereal and milk.
Maybe I’m just crabby right now because of a) the weather, b) the weather, and c) a threatening UTI, undoubtedly due to standing (and sweating – we’re on utilities austerity measures because of the prolonged and intense heat) in gross anatomy lab for 5 hours straight Monday afternoon, with no opportunity for a break to drink water or pee. I would have had to develop sudden internal bleeding or massive head trauma, to have been “allowed” to leave the lab for a few minutes’ break.
Oh and d) the weather. A camel’s rectum would be a more pleasant environment.
Are you allowed to ban eating food in class and during exams? Or is that against students’ rights?
Both are against student rights – there would be a huge outcry and backlash. Also, if I’m giving more than one lecture, I have a mug of water or herbal tea at the podium, so it wouldn’t be fair. According to several students I’ve talked to, the exam prep courses (e.g. for the MCAT) tell them which snacks to eat/drink and when, during an exam that lasts more than an hour. Of course, no one is allowed to eat or drink in the gross anatomy labs, and apparently I’m not allowed to slip outside the labs for a minute to drink from the water fountain, during a five-hour teaching stint.
‘Fairness’. Ah yes, another preoccupation of small children.
Wow!
Thank you. And I say that as the one parent at home trying to do the impossible, with a child in range of Googling age shortly, so am anonymous for this post.
It’s no better here, Henry, despite these tea-partiers with moldy butterflies for brains. My ex is, as you all, I think, know, Not All There. Could happen to — well, lots of people. When he was more in the realm of batshit, and I was trying to look after him and a baby simultaneously, and had finally resorted to telling him to find an apartment so I could look after the baby without having a breakdown myself, all of his therapists/social workers/etc. told me to divorce him.
I explained patiently to every one of them that the man was certified disabled, fresh from the mental hospital, incapable of looking after a server — or, for that matter, bathing regularly without reminders, and prone to panic attacks while folding socks — but that if I divorced him, the courts would send a defenseless pre-verbal toddler off with him routinely anyway, alone. Also that stability and love and enough money and a coherent family, however strange, were better for a child than the instability and economic chanciness and vagaries you see so often after divorce, and that, as a grownup, I could do this thing called “sucking it up” for a decade or so of my life.
Their response, each and every one: Children Are Resilient And Want To See That You’re Happy.
Which is 4000% wrong, unless by “resilient” you mean “unlikely to die”, which strikes me as rather a low standard for childrearing. What happens in childhood marks us for life, which is why the therapists have so much repeat biz in the first place, and a happy, healthy child is largely oblivious to her parents’ self-actualization. That’s because she’s busy growing up, something we’ve already had our turn at. Our job is to keep the world in which she grows up safe and dependable until she’s ready — partly because we’ve helped her get ready — for something a little less safe, less dependable, until she’s strong and grown and can manage on her own. That’s the goal. Planned obsolescence for parents. But when the kids are 20 or 25 or so, not age three.
He divorced me, in the end, and still apparently holds me responsible for his illness. Is life better for me? Christ, yes. Peace, relative stability, optimism, pleasure, what wonderful things. For the kid? You jest. It’s just wonderful for a kid, having divorced parents when one regards the other as a permanent enemy, and she has to go back and forth between the two houses, and her mother’s at a dead run all the time, and she has to go to daycare instead of coming home and pootling around in the neighborhood. The only blessing is that women seem to find him unattractive. Bad for him, unfortunately, but good for her in terms of stability.
The distressing thing about the “give them something to do” model is that — if the schools are anything to go by — it appears to be rooted in the teachers’ and administrators’ fear of unemployment. You can’t have the children pootling around finding things they want to do and learning how to do them on their own if you’ve got Tests The Children Must Pass. Instead you must fill every second with test-directed activites and train the kids to wait for the next assignment until they find it easiest to do that. Also, because the kids will be more attentive and will more likely pass the tests if you teach with a spoonful of sugar, you should commit great energy to making them feel comfortable and appreciated, molding your teaching style to their learning style. First class all the way, baby, and you can stop holding your breath the second the test scores come out.
Dear Anonymous Pootler – as a single parent you are doing a fantastic job, despite the odds always being stacked against you. As a father of two, with a wife, and both of us working, I know from experience that it’s quite hard enough.
I have been castigated on FB by a single Mom for saying things that she found offensive – she being in a similar situation as yourself and trying very, very hard to Do Th Right Thing by her child. I think this person took as a personal affront matters that I stated as general and could be supported by results rather than anecdote. And, as I am sure you appreciate, things are no less (objectively) true (in a general sense) for their being (subjectively) offensive to some (who are doing their damndest to bring up their children in difficult circumstances). In fact, it is the fear of giving offence that has made many of these topics off-limits for serious discussion.
Just a few random points……….
We live in a consumer society. By that I mean that the part of the economy that actually produce wealth, basically manufacturing and agriculture, employ less than 20% of the workforce, and that percentage is likely to fall even further. In such a situation does the country need more workers or more consumers? and what is the best way of recycling profits so that there is enough consumption to sustain these two industries?
In almost all societies, apart from ours from about the 1950s, infancy was reckoned to be from birth to about seven years old and childhood from seven to about thirteen. At that point the vast majority of children were seen to be ready to go out into the world and learn to become adults by sharing in adult work. We, in our wisdom, do exactly the opposite. We keep children in their peer groups until they are 18 or even 25 and then wonder why they seem to be stuck is some sort of permanent adolescence.
We have an education system which has not progressed since the mid nineteenth century, and still sees its purpose as supplying workers to, now no-existant, factories. The education system certainly gives the impression that it is more interested in ticking bureaucratic boxes than realising the potential of those it its charge.
As for illiteracy, my understanding is that most 12-13 year olds have enough language skills to absorb the worldview of the Sun or the Daily Mail.
Bill — all very interesting points, but I think the answer is simple – it’s all about parents. This column by Allison Pearson says it a lot better than I can.
Maybe. But in the Vancouver riot in June, most of the kids who’ve been publicly named and shamed for looting / burning police cars etc. so far were academic high schoolers or university students from “good” families (sons of doctors, etc.), involved in team sports (one was an Olympic hopeful), volunteering, air cadets etc.
Evidence: http://blog.deliciousjuice.com/2011/06/16/only-human/
http://blog.deliciousjuice.com/2011/06/18/justice-in-action/
p.s. I’m not saying that the role of parents has no influence, but that it’s extremely unlikely that that factor (or any other single factor) can explain the phenomenon as a whole.
Of course there are many factors. However, I suspect that in many cases parenting has an influence. In an article in Tuesday’s Evening Standard, Tony Thompson, a former resident of Tottenham, and author of Outlaws: Inside the Violent World of Biker Gangs writes that the loci of the riots is coextensive with places where black gangland activity is most intense. Rates of single-parenthood tend to be higher in the black community than elsewhere, and young boys without fathers look up to older gang members instead. It’s also true that youth must have its fling, and there has been a great deal of typically snide leftish snark about the youthful indiscretions of David Cameron and Boris Johnson, as if this excuses anything. But these people had good educations and presumably good parents, and a decent income (more on that below.)
Well, let’s not mistake class or income for competent parenting. If Dad’s always at the hospital and the kids are in 87 activities and Mom’s the unpaid labor for the 87 activities plus making the home presentable, the kids are essentially being raised by other kids and whoever’s been paid $12/hr to stand in front of them. You actually have to spend time with the children, and tell stories, and listen to theirs, because otherwise they won’t tell you what’s in their noggins. They think you’re not interested, and maybe they’re right. And you have to spend time in the kitchen with the friends and the friends’ parents, and see who these people are, and get a sense of whether or not what goes on in that family is any good at all. And watch the kids play, and listen, and see how they treat each other. And then listen more, and think about what you’ve seen and heard and what it meant.
The thinking part is crucial. Because then you go back to the kids and you say, “When you said X, did you actually mean Y, because of Z,” and then either they correct you or are endlessly grateful for having been understood, and then sometimes you can stop them from running right over the edge of a cliff.
I find a lot of parents don’t do that part.
You said, with your usual eloquence, what many of us are thinking…
Thank you.
I am not convinced that the absence of fathers is as clear cut an issue as you seem to think, Henry. For example this paper describes empirical evidence that while there is a tendency for poorer educational outcomes for children in single parent households, this seems to be mostly to do with the reduction in household income. When this is corrected for, the effect of having only one parent at home is no longer statistically significant.
@Anonymous Pootler, @Cath, @David. Income will of course be a factor, and this is likely to be less, overall, in single-parent households. Educational attainment, I suspect, is also important – howls of anguish from one-parent families at things I’ve written will come, of course, from people who will tend to be educated and literate, and will therefore be more likely to pass on good educational habits to their children. In fact, I’d say education is the single most important factor. In the old days, of course, teachers were allowed to teach children rather than tick boxes, and were allowed to punish children for minor malfeasance.
I’d also like to emphasize that income is not the only controlling factor. There are those who say that the main reason why rioters riot is that they are economically disadvantaged. This is patently untrue. First, it turns out that some of the rioters do not, in fact, conform to the unemployed gangsta stereotype. Second, people in our parents’ and grandparents’ day, living through the depression of the 1930s and the war years, were often dirt poor. Yet they didn’t go around looting things simply because they were there. One is entitled to ask why, I think – and I think lack of moral certainty plays a huge role.
No amount of income or education is going to restrain a child whose parents seem unconcerned that it isn’t at home in bed at night. The youngest court defendant from the riots (so far) was just 11 years old. What business had its parents letting him roam the streets in the middle of the night? These are parents without any moral compass or parenting skills, and of such low intelligence that they plainly can’t understand the consequences of their actions. Such people will, of course, have little education or income. The sad thing is that it’s very easy to have children, but bloody hard to raise them.
Thanks for the great post, Henry. I, too, was angered by reports that police stood around watching while citizens themselves defended shops from looters. (I was wondering if any of those reports were confirmed, though – I saw a lot of quotes of people saying such things, but nothing solid in any of the news outlets about it.)
Thanks Jenny. I picked this up from an item from the Telegraph live riot news ticker that Richard mentioned on his blog. There also seems to be a feeling among the police that they misread the situation, at least initially, and had been ‘instructed’ to observe and contain rather than intervene.
Hmmm. I also saw a report that a group couldn’t go after the looters because they’d been instructed to protect the fire crews.
I reckon that it had to be specific instructions. I mean, you don’t become a cop because you don’t, secretly, rather like the idea of bashing some heads together, do you? They must have been itching to take action.
The people I know who want to become cops, or who are cops, do what they do because they have an innate sense of order and justice, and want to serve their communities, not because they want to bash heads together.
The PM’s statement to the Commons acknowledges that the police were standing around doing nothing and that was wrong. The reason was, apparently, that they were treating the incidents as problems of public order (crowds to be contained) rather than mass criminality (looting shops.)
However, there is also a sense that if the police actually try to do their jobs, they get accused of racism, brutality etc etc.
It all sounds a bit Professor Higgins? “Why can’t these people be like me?”
I could be wrong, of course, but let me guess – your upbringing. Nice? Middle-class? Dad working? Mum at home, looking after you? Good background, loads of books? Encouraged to communicate, to read, to learn? Had everything going for you?
So, why you ask can’t that 16 year old black kid on the estate with the Mum who’s holding down two badly paid jobs to keep things ticking over be just like you? You know, the one without a single book in the house. The one from the failing school. The one who gets stopped by police every other day for stop and search.
I see the little ones in the street every day – 10 year old, bright eyed, bushy tailed, loving their mums, bouncing around. *Something’s* happening to those kids in the next few years and they sure as hell aren’t doing it to themselves.
Incidentally, look at the Court reports and many of those who, quite rightly, are being hauled before the Magistrates aren’t teenagers or ‘sucking on the teet’ of the state.
I have tried very hard in this discussion not to get personal. My mother was a refugee from the Nazis. She arrived in Britain aged 3, without even a nationality. My father was a working-class boy raised by a craftsman. He went to an elementary school where he was the only Jew and where antisemitism was ingrained. My parents had brains, and went to grammar schools (which socialists have always hated) and then on to universities which in those days actually meant something, rather than Labour-promoted intellectually-vapid waiting rooms for keeping young people off the dole for as long as possible.
Under the late unlamented Labour government, social mobility has been the lowest since World War II. It has run out of ideas. The reason is that all the ideas ever dreamed up by socialism, with the possible exception of the NHS, have been abject failures, and demonstrably so. The well-meaning, middle-class, liberal ‘solutions’ that have been tried for two or three generations now do nothing but produce generations of welfare dependency and create moral vacuums where before there was moral certainty.
Yes, I have the solutions, but you won’t like them, because I expect they will conflict with your liberal principles. Repeal the Human Rights Act. Remove the Independent Police Complaints Commission. Allow for decent discipline in schools. Rack up tax benefits for married couples. And that’s just for starters.
Well, for starters it isn’t really a party political issue. And Labour’s been in power for 13 years, not 18, so perhaps you should stop to think before responding. Or at least *read* what you write before posting? And I haven’t seen any actual *solutions* in your posting. Or tell me how do we “rediscover the moral fibre of our grandparents”, precisely?
What happens in a country that increases social division, or material inequality, is well established. You don’t have riots like these in Denmark, Sweden or Norway. But they always come out top in terms of satisfaction ratings.
We have a country where on the morning of the riots young people hear that the drop in the stock value is good for greed – buy now to make a killing. Where we hear that everyone’s salary drops except for CEOs of FTSE 100 companies whose income rose by 32% last year – with no concurrent increase in profit or productivity. Where we’re told by Bob Diamond that the age of contrition is over while his mates award themselves £18bn of bonuses. We have a country where Gove and Harman can waffle on about the feral youths when they helped themselves to thousands of £s of tax payers money.
We have a country where schools are under resourced and failing because income tax has become a totemic issue that mustn’t be touched; and the Tories never showed any inclination of bringing back grammar schools.
We have a country that has the highest rate of incarceration in Europe, and still this happens, so not sure where your argument about the Human Rights Act is coming in. There’s a sinister Orwellian theme here from the right wingers that suddenly ‘Human Rights’ have become a bad thing.
We haven’t tried anything liberal. If we had, for example, we would have had sex education like they have in the Netherlands with the concomitant reduction in teenage pregnancy. The Tories, incidentally, could support families more by reinstating joint tax assessments and ensuring that married couples get tax breaks. Nothing going. Instead, they are putting forward policies that will ensure that families are better off in terms of income if they split.
Society has fragmented but then we do have Maggie’s famous quote and this has been the policy of any UK government since her. But a return to the ‘good old days’, to beating up kids, you know the “moral fibre of our grandparents” when you could call a Paki a Paki, refuse to serve a black man, beat up a poofter without anyone raising a stink, where we had back street abortions, you know, them good old days, certainly isn’t the answer.
Hmmm, bit unfortunate that you manage to *change* your responses in mid-discussion. Bit of a peculiar practice for a discussion board, I’d say.
Labour’s been in power for 13 years, not 18, so perhaps you should stop to think before responding
Only 13? Seemed a lot longer.
And I haven’t seen any actual *solutions* in your posting … Or tell me how do we “rediscover the moral fibre of our grandparents”, precisely?
I wish I knew.
What happens in a country that increases social division, or material inequality, is well established. You don’t have riots like these in Denmark, Sweden or Norway. But they always come out top in terms of satisfaction ratings.
These societies are very different from ours. They are much smaller and more socially homogeneous. And they have their own problems.
We have a country where on the morning of the riots young people hear that the drop in the stock value is good for greed – buy now to make a killing. Where we hear that everyone’s salary drops except for CEOs of FTSE 100 companies whose income rose by 32% last year – with no concurrent increase in profit or productivity. Where we’re told by Bob Diamond that the age of contrition is over while his mates award themselves £18bn of bonuses. We have a country where Gove and Harman can waffle on about the feral youths when they helped themselves to thousands of £s of tax payers money.
Well, quite. But they weren’t rioting.
We have a country where schools are under resourced and failing because income tax has become a totemic issue that mustn’t be touched
The under-resourcing of schools cannot be a simple equation with income tax. We have schools that are failing because the staff are unable to teach the pupils, and unable to discipline them because these pupils now have ‘human rights’, and where, if you do try to discipline the children, their parents (once the allies of teachers) will sue you. If they don’t come in to school and thump you. In my kids’ school – a rather rough comp – the biggest problem is that the staff consistently fail to raise the aspirations of the pupils above grunt level.
the Tories never showed any inclination of bringing back grammar schools
They did under Major, but dropped the policy, which I think was a shame.
We have a country that has the highest rate of incarceration in Europe
Your point is ….? If people commit crimes that would normally command jail terms they should be put in prison. End of.
There’s a sinister Orwellian theme here from the right wingers that suddenly ‘Human Rights’ have become a bad thing
Tosh. When the Human Rights Act came in we were assured that it wouldn’t be used for trivial purposes. Now it is used by anyone who is seeking a licence to do what they want without sanction.
We haven’t tried anything liberal. If we had, for example, we would have had sex education like they have in the Netherlands with the concomitant reduction in teenage pregnancy.
We already do have sex education (do you have children of school age? If you did, you would know this). It is very frank, very free, and very good indeed. But our society is rather different from that of the Netherlands.
The Tories, incidentally, could support families more by reinstating joint tax assessments and ensuring that married couples get tax breaks. Nothing going. Instead, they are putting forward policies that will ensure that families are better off in terms of income if they split.
I can’t comment on that.
But a return to the ‘good old days’, to beating up kids, you know the “moral fibre of our grandparents” when you could call a Paki a Paki, refuse to serve a black man, beat up a poofter without anyone raising a stink, where we had back street abortions, you know, them good old days, certainly isn’t the answer.
To equate the reassertion of moral fibre with that kind of discrimination is specious, mischievous and not what I meant, and you know it. It’s the kind of cheap assertion of spurious moral equivalence to which Lefties turn when their ridiculous pseudo-policies are criticized.
There is no magical solutions to how the educational system should be constructed, how a child should be raised, to what good parenting is. Each person has a responsibility for its own life, each parent has some responsibility for the life of their children. Most people would be more well put together in happy homes filled with books and discussions, but this is not how the world looks, or will ever look.
These young people rioting, do they understand that there is potential within them? You can only come that far with discipline and punishment, if the way out, the alternative actions are not in the realm of possibility for a person, then that person will not pursue them. Now I’m sounding all left-wing, granted. We live in a world where we are immensely spoiled. Which is a good think. We also live in a world with a lot of problems, especially within the educational system, and in my view, especially within the sense of responsibility that a person feels for his or hers own life. But we all do live up to the expectation of surrounding people, and in a poor put after environment nobody expect you to do well. So you will not, you will not see that possibility. I think that is a very important mission for the school system. If you gave rise the motivation of kids you will most definitely change their lives.
(Disclaimer: My insights into the riots, or rather society, in the UK are limited, I’m Swedish.)
I agree. In the school system these days there is what I would call ‘poverty of expectation’. The teachers do not expect their pupils to do well – so, of course, they don’t. They like to give the illusion that they are doing well — the ongoing grade inflation of exam results, year after year, is evidence enough for that — but that is a dreadful self-deception. If a pupil in our local school stood up and said they wanted to go to Oxford or Cambridge, the teachers, frankly, wouldn’t know what to do.
This just in: us, as (some) others see us. It’s not pleasant reading.
All the while Graham slept on, dreaming of a world where he could do just what he wanted to.
~ XTC, “No Thugs in Our House”