Last year I was punched in the face after a night out whilst I was eating some food outside a takeaway in the middle of York. My 'crime' was the fact that two of my friends in our group were not white. Our attackers (one wearing a very fetching pink shirt) spewed racist abuse at my friends and then lashed out at me and another member of our party. Britain and the wider world are about to undergo massive changes in the next decade and the ignorant and insular nature of some sections of the British population are to be feared. Over the past 15 years or so the UK has become a moral and disciplinary vacuum. The influence of religion, community ties and the justice system have all evaporated. How can things be fixed?
First, we need a society with a decent standard of living for all with fair working hours and without a culture of celebrity and binge drinking to distract the workforce from their debt and crappy service jobs. Education must be fixed too. Target driven teaching only results in students who know how to pass exams (which are getting easier to help meet targets) and who don't have a good knowledge of the core subjects. The new national curriculum for science is a joke and being asked to teach such a distorted version of my subject (Physics) has changed my mind about becoming a Physics teacher. However, alcohol, education and the media are just three variables in a complex problem.
The most fundamental cause of the current problems in society is the staggeringly liberal slant enforced by the justice system and the PC left over the past decade. We aren't ready for this sort of liberality in the treatment of those who spoil things for everyone else because there is no restoring force; no deterrent to prevent people from doing just what they please. Such liberal attitudes to crime won't ever work in a society in which prisoners can sue prisons for denying them access to class A drugs whilst in jail. Or a society where young offenders can sue prisons for not protecting them from bullying and theft (what type of people did they expect to meet in prison? And surely being the victim of crime helps them understand what they did to to others?). Perhaps the Home office would benefit from reorganisation into more manageable chunks but the idea smacks of more tinkering. How about
1) Reducing the level of government interference in the Home office
2) Removing targets for police officers
3) Abandoning all Private Finance Initiative projects (prisons, for starters but then schools and the NHS)
4) Charging the customer AND the drinks industry more tax on alcohol to cover the cost of friday and saturday night policing in town centres
5) No tough talk and laying the blame on civil servants and police officers by politicians
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But now all the prisons are full and according to this mornings BBC News only those guilty of the most serious crimes will be jailed. It seems at the moment people have a free pass to behave badly, but there again prison doesn't seem to be much of a deterrent anyway - otherwise they wouldn't be full to bursting right? What to do? Lets all move to Canada.
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