August 26, 2007, Times Online
It is no exaggeration to say that today’s children have been betrayed by today’s adults. The killing of 11-year-old Rhys Jones in Liverpool is a direct consequence of a mass abdication of responsibility by the generations that should have been protecting him – and his murderer, too ...
I mean the agencies of state, from police officers and local authorities to those in Whitehall and Westminster who have turned their backs on adult obligations and discouraged the rest of us from taking them on.
Although we are the most spied-upon nation in Europe and although we have spent billions on social renewal schemes, we have reached a state in which children and teenagers in big cities live in terror of other children and teenagers and in despair of protection from adults. They carry knives because they are afraid.
They are afraid on their way to and from school and they learn almost nothing when they get there, partly because adults don’t protect them from bullying, thieving and disruption. Teachers have either lost or relinquished their authority and children can expect little or no guidance and protection from them, or from their parents, or from council care, or from the police ...
It is clear that violent crime among those under 18 has risen for four consecutive years. And it is increasingly clear that, like mass illiteracy and innumeracy, this is at root due to an adult flight from responsibility – a loss of a sense of proper authority, replaced by a misguided pursuit of improper authority ...
A file for a simple assault case contained 128 pieces of paper and had been handled by more than 50 people before it got to court ...
The failures of the police are only one part of a complex collection of social problems and if society is broken, the police can hardly be expected to fix it. What’s needed is a passionate backlash against irresponsibility and irresponsible, misguided waste and the terrible state sector mentality that promotes both.
It’s this mentality that has produced teachers who can’t or won’t teach, school leavers who are unemployable, students who can’t study, feckless parents, broken homes, police who are obsessed with things that don’t matter, neighbours who dare not stand up to other people’s children, jails overcrowded with the wrong people, idiotic state sector make-work, intrusive quangos imposing idiotic make-work and the divisive follies of multiculturalism and uncontrolled immigration.
Until we begin to stand up against all these things, we can probably expect more senseless killings of children.
