The scale of IDS’ task

Hugo Chav

New Labour left us the Lost Generation.

"Current events form future trends".

Now we are entering the Lost Economy, Brown's pre election stimulus peaked when Lloyds hit 79p last summer, today it's 32p and the 10yr Gilt is 2.5%.

We are going Japanese but it will be far worse than what the Japanese have experienced in their two lost decades.

We'll have a Lost Economy.

"Current events form future trends".

Let us deeply hope David Cameron finds his inner Conservative and repudiates his current soft left mindset. Time for the boy to become a man!!!

London Calling

mmm… Social dissection, weaning off benefits…The majority arrested were under the age of eighteen(BBC News) and therefore not eligible for unemployment benefit until aged eighteen, how do you wean these culprit’s off non- existent benefits?... Drug dealers don’t claim benefits and the illiterate are unemployable
until they are literate, respect a moral code and authority…weaning a lost generation and assimilating them into what they consider a corrupt world around them is going to be a high mountain to climb…

By the way if you hadn’t notice our world is quite a sick place…who leads the way? Who sets the example to us all, the scientist’s are ignored, Greed has caused the fall of Man and still we want to dissect a mouse that squeaks in the wind…Good luck..

I haven’t lost faith…I’m just lost for words…:)

anxiouswarrior

do we have to listen to more right wing drivel the real criminals are in the square mile

TrevorsDen

The conservatives recognised the issue some time ago and IDS commissioned several reports I think. Britain is broken and Labour are to blame.

The conservatives may not succeed but at least they are trying and we should support them.
Of course no we are slowly coming out of recession and looking at the US and Europe it will be slow. Family life has fractured in labours sink estates and billions have been wasted at a time when this social problem could have been solved.

The shame is all labours.

James de la Mare

A colossal undertaking, indeed. But IDS and Cameron must do much more than find and address the causes of the riots. The entire governmental system in this country is in a state of failure when 47% of our national income is taken (stolen?) by the state to spend (waste?) on projects of two alternating political groupings trying to attract votes to get into power.

It's pretty safe to say that it isn't just the young looters who are disaffected with how the government of Britain has been conducted during the past 50 years. Speak to any older person and likely they will say "I'm just thankful I'm not going to be around much longer" or any business person trying to overcome the complexity, obstruction, cost and over-regulation of every aspect of activity. The relatively simple worldwide process of earning a living from running an everyday business, a shop or small factory or whatever, is converted into a daily penance and an obsession with maximising profits (taking as much from others as possible).

Add all that to the grotesque misregulation and greed of certain other professional sectors - banking, property, the law and perhaps soon the health service - where a dog eats dog culture has been allowed (encouraged?) to prevail, to family breakdown and huge sections of our population which hardly understand our history and language, and there's bound to be an younger generation underclass which cannot cope and is largely alien to our society.

I am not at all surprised this has happened. I have seen many demonstrations over the past 50 years, and bad behaviour by police as well as by others. So far the government has got away very lightly. Let us encourage it to delve much more deeply and radically into the reasons for the failure of the country as a whole since 1945.

nonny mouse

Lets hope that Frasier brings a copy with him to QT tonight.

2trueblue

A huge task in front of us all as we will be paying for it. Idiot statements like 'the real criminals are in the square mile' should go a long way to fixing it.

I S

Who, in their right mind, would employ barely-literate, innumerate, surly, ungrateful, whiny, irresponsible Brit youth?

Simon Stephenson.

anxious warrior : 7.22pm

"do we have to listen to more right wing drivel"

Presumably your "we" is in the Royal sense, meaning "I". And no, you don't have to read anything you don't want to - you can leg off to another site more amenable to your views, or you can stop reading social/political comment altogether. The choice is yours.

But if you do decide to move on to pastures new, perhaps you could tell the rest of us why you consider this article to be "right wing drivel". Is it because:-

1. To accept otherwise is to accept that the Blair/Brown governments could have done better with their social policies?

or

2. That to accept otherwise is to accept that the fundamental concept of the efficacy and goodness of socialist, Big-State, authoritarian government is flawed?

or

3. That the collapse of existing social structures is seen by you as an essential staging-post on the journey to socialist nirvana, and so the more rioting and looting we get, the better?

or

4. You have definite evidence that the analysis provided in this article is factually and/or logically incorrect in a material way, and that therefore the conclusions and the recommendations given can reasonably be described as drivel.

And if you plump for 4, it would be illuminating to read the details of the factual inaccuracies which you have discovered.

Dennis Churchill

It is an impossible task and will take a generation to restore a workable culture.
The pragmatists (aka business owners) have recognised it for years; but as long as they were allowed to keep importing labour to compensate for the unemployability of the children of the previous wave of immigrants and the workshy natives who had discovered there were no financial benefits in working for the minimum wage rather than taking welfare they kept the country running.
The size of the problem has just now got so big even the majority, living as they do outside our cities, can’t ignore it.
We have a feminized education and criminal justice system that is only suitable for women and middle class women at that.
Social policy is based on sociobabble theories that deny human nature and in the words of Prof.Pinker base all policies around the nonsensical Blank Slate theory which denies even the existence of human nature.
Our political class is simply not up to the task and the type of policing we have seen in the last week will gradually become the norm in our cities as the parties try to outflank each other on law and order while continuing to implement the same failed systems on immigration and welfare.
We have destroyed the culturally homogenous society that allowed us the stability we had in the 20th century while still having that society as our yardstick.Multicultual societies look like the old Yugoslavia not the Britain of the past. Multiracial societies look like Brazil or the USA. In fact we are in a worse position than Brazil or the USA as the natives there were almost wiped out so no group has a greater claim than any other. Here the natives still dominate and look at the cities from the Shires not believing what they can see.

Viv Evans

For me, the most shameful point made by Harriet Sergeant is that about the jaw-dropping level of illiteracy amongst these young gang members, black or white.

It is an indictment of the NUJ and the teachers which no amount of hand-wringing about ill discipline can wipe away.
Reading and writing are taught in the first years in primary school, teachers must be able to cope with such young children.

I wonder if there are literacy courses in prison, and if not, why not.
I also wonder if, should there be no such courses, a charity could be set up so that ordinary people, not teachers, could teach literacy.
This circle of illiteracy-crime-prison-crime must be broken. we cannot just sigh about a lost generation and barricade ourselves in our homes fearing the next riots.

anne allan

Talking about unemployed youth.......
My sons run a small company (40+) employees. During the last month, they have been interviewing and employing extra staff. They took on two English employees; one changed his mind over the weekend, the other did one day and then went off sick. Last Friday, we had five interviewees booked; four were foreigners, one was English. Guess who didn't bother to turn up?
We have staff, both English and other nationalities who have been with us for years, but it is noticeable that the long term English employees will not see their 30th. birthdays again.

FvH

IDS is well intentioned and in theory his ideas make a lot of sense - BUT we all know they will never actually see the light of day - the enormity of the problem, the inertia and resistance in the system will make them unworkable

Augustus

There is no political agenda here, in spite of what guilt-soaked journalists and politicians might try to tell you. The truly poor do not communicate their poverty on expensive cellphones, do not steal giant TVs because they are starving. Britain enjoys free schooling, healthcare, welfare, and a plethora of public services. The recent cutbacks are minimal. Disregard the propaganda, extremist agitators were trying to take advantage of over-stretched police and social instability, the people who began all this were simply thugs. They are the offspring of broken families, who cannot control their appetite for fathering children with numerous women, who shoot rivals and innocent people with indifference, and who define themselves by how much vulgar jewelry they wear and how much fearful 'respect' they receive from law-abiding neighbours. And they are joined now by the white, petulant product of a generation told to despise authority, education and religion, and to rely on the state. Tattooed gargoyles raised on antisocial entertainment, instant gratification, socialist dogma and empty materialism. Yet, instead of genuine analysis, we hear about a man shot by the police being 'a father of four', of the rioters being 'angry at cutbacks', and of 'years of racism and police brutality'.
Welcome to the world of euphemisms.

Derek

anxiouswarrior

Even if you are right, how are you going to defeat them with that canaille of nihilist consumers who are your constituency?

I S

Augustus - Well said and astutely summarised. However, I would argue that it's not 'welcome to the world of euphemisms', but welcome to the world of bullshit,

Dimoto

The stink of defeatism and self-loathing on here is very reminiscent of 1976.

If Blair was still PM, he would have treated the riots with a tear-in-the-eye, catch-in-the-throat, speech about the "dispossessed" and how we need to love them, acompanied by a few £B (released by a glowering Brown), thrown at irrelevent targets (say, single mothers in Liverpool and Glasgow - to keep Brown sweet), and the BBC would hail it as a "great reform".

Sometimes I have the impression that that is the world that the curmudgeons on the coffee-house really preferred.

Baron

I S @ 8.38: “Who, in their right mind, would employ barely-literate, innumerate, surly, ungrateful, whiny, irresponsible Brit youth?”

exactly, and why are they barely-literate, innumerate, surly, ungrateful, whiny, irresponsible? Why didn’t they learn?

because they know, they’re certain that ‘the society’ will look after them, will not let them starve, will provide them with enough regular money that they can supplement by dealing in drugs, thieving, mugging…again knowing full well the danger of getting caught by our PC police ‘service’ is minimal, if it were to happen the punishment’s laughable.

contrary to what our angry Marxist educated anxiouswarrier thinks it has bugger all to do with the square mile, the rich anywhere.

In the Czech Republic anyone on the dole can only claim benefits if he works sixteen hours per week, the employer submits a report, bad report, no dole money.

Baron

Viv Evans @ 8.49 wonders: “I wonder if there are literacy courses in prison, and if not, why not?

listen, my blogging friend, that’s the wrong take on things, we’re spending on education over four times as we were some 40 years ago (in real money), the outcome hasn’t changed at all, still some 15% of school leavers can barely read, are totally illiterate.

on the Continent, a pupil doesn’t move to more senior class unless he can pass basic tests in literacy, numeracy, he stays in the same class, it seems to work, illiteracy runs considerably lower.

the problem, Baron suspects, are those pupils who get kicked out, excluded, what happens to them? They’re most likely allowed to roam the streets, learn the basics of mugging, thieving, rioting.

daniel maris

This problem is only going to be fixed by the state. To pretend otherwise is to be naive. At least this outbreak of rioting may quell the nonsense spouted about the "Big Society".

It's true that the focus has to be on

"school, work and home"

But this government's ideas are either non-existent or misguided.

School - The free schools will do absolutely zilch to help these kids to a better life. They will further divide our society into vigilante groups as religions use the system to develop their own schools.

Much better routes would be weekday boarding in the most deprived areas and increased personal tuition. Boarding would enable schools to develop an alternative to the streets and engage with the young people. Allied to that we need more personal tuition to help these kids overcome often multiple problems. Schools also need to be geared to offering quick vocational paths to paid work.

Work - The state should be ensuring all teenagers from 14 onwards can earn money doing part time work at weekends.

For school and college leavers the state should be ensuring that paid employment is available for all young people, for at least a year, perhaps as much as three. Where people fall unemployed all welfare payments should be worked for.

Home - The state needs to remove all incentives to teenage and single parenting. Babies born to under 18s should be made available for adoption. No 17 yr old in our society is capable of looking after a baby. Adoption must also be the only option for babies born to drug addicts and alcoholics. Single parents under 25 who need state funding for their offspring will have to share parenting with the state. The state should require them to live in supervised hostels where the mothers will have childcare and will be required to work to pay for it. Two children should be the limit for state funded children.

All these rules should be explained clearly to girls from the age of 11 and repeatedly.

That is the only way to get some return to responsible parenting.

All we've had so far from the government are proposals to curb our civil liberties further with curfews and other nonsense.

Andy JS

Unfortunately IDS will never make an impact for the simple reason that these yobs will never accept anything that IDS says or does because he's a white, middle-class man. (This is not what I think - I'm just pointing out the way the yobs think).

TomTom

"when 47% of our national income is taken"

Only 38% is taken in parliamentary levied taxes, the rest is raised by borrowing to circumvent parliamentary control just like Charles I.

Outside wartime Spending should be matched by Taxes - they used to have a basic rate of 35% and 83% at top before Parliament was sidelined and Government freed itself of accountability

Sean

Education, although important, is not the major issue here. It is the removal of respect that has caused all these problems. Teachers and police officers, or even anyone with a modicum of authority have become emancipated by rules and regulations rained down upon them by the "Rights before Responsibilities" brigade.

The world doesn't owe any citizen a life above the Bread line. The welfare state was designed to provide a "safety net" to catch a citizen and give them helping hand to get them on their feet again. Recently it seems to have turned into a "safety hammock".

Bring back useful schemes like the "YTS" and give power and respect back to occupations like teaching and policing.

An underclass has been created, the tools are there for an individual to drag themselves out of it. The will is lacking. I personally don't think that by limiting benefits to the average salary is enough. No persons benefits should exceed the value that could be earned working for minimum wage.

Realities need to be taught at schools, if you don't put the effort in, you don't get the rewards in life.

Dennis Churchill

daniel maris
August 12th, 2011 2:03am
Some very sound ideas but it will have to get much worse before any are implemented.
Hayek was right about the damage academics do with their idiot savant tendancies.They have destroyed the education and criminal justice systems and will resist to the bitter end changes that conflict with their world view. By the time our political class finishes their PPE or law degrees their minds are shut.

Raffles

Daniel Maris - no doubt your motives are admirable but at what point are you going to accept the irrefutable evidence that its the fault of the STATE, not the absence of it that has got us to this dire place?

2trueblue

daniel maris, totally agree. If the young single mothers were not enticed by the prospect of their own flat the problem would not have gained such a large following. Bliar/Brown thought it a good way to increase thier followers.

Rhoda Klapp

Augustus is right. So is Daniel, at least in part. But I kear that by examing our society for rasons and motives we are over-complicating things. By listening to excuses we are tacitly endorsing bad behaviour. Keep it simple. Catch the criminals, try them, punish them. Build more jails if we have to.

For the future, well, no politician is going to like this, but we have to make it clear that an individual must take responsibility for what happens to him. That is as pervasive as the law of gravity, but not so widely acknowledged.

Derek Pasquill

Snake-oil salesmen and carpetbaggers (Not in our Name indeed) are out in full force today to milk the crisis for all it is worth.

How long will the public put up with fake charities and bogus social commentators?

Incidentally, curious to see how the aftermath of the London bombings when earnest community leaders were greeted by Blair at the steps of No. 10 Downing Street was echoed today by the PM greeting earnest young leaders etc., etc.

rosie

The Mediaeval mind understood this one: you need a time for a boy bishop, a lord of misrule. But for that safety valve to work, you can't have open borders and population churn.

Cynic

@daniel maris "This problem is only going to be fixed by the state." This problem, Daniel, has largely been caused by the state. There is no question to which the answer is yet more state interference.