Leverhulme on the riots and looting in England ... Why can't people bring up their kiddies properly? ... "Naughty" no longer in the vocabulary ... Prisons so full no one can get in
Local difficulty in Leverhulme's parish
In the past few days, we have been experiencing a little local difficulty over here.
Looting, firebombing, rioting and the odd murder have been taking place on our tellies while those without plasma screens try to get an upgrade.
Most people are horrified. The letters to the editor say it all:
"If the police were not racists before, they have every reason to be so now ... [and] ... Enoch Powell was right."
But many sensible people saw this coming.
The behaviours (a new word that is now in vogue at the Solicitors Regulation Authority) have been copied outside of London in places like Nottingham and Brum and Manchester.
By all accounts the rioters are young, alienated and feel dispossessed. Dispossessed enough to own Blackberrys, which they use to co-ordinate their pillaging.
They got their excuse when a gangster called Mark Duggan died of lead poisoning at the hands of the fuzz last week.
The pols were on hols. Dave Cameron was busy appeasing the liberal classes by making-up with a rude Italian waitress who told him to serve himself then moaned because she hadn't received a tip.
Dave raced back to Number Ten and took charge. He has delivered two passionate and stylish performances so far.
The police have been copping a lot of flak, but this has been happening for years. The major criticism is that they care more for community relations than nabbing crooks.
They seem to know only two speeds: inertia (watching crime on CCTV in the safety of a van and form-filling) to flat-out (shooting suspects stone dead).
In between times they can always squeeze in a nice three-course nosh-up with a Murdoch executive.
But you can't blame the cops. They are as bogged down with diversity awareness, health and safety and human rights as the rest of us.
* * *
A few doors from my home is a park which contains swings and slides and topless locals who whip off their shiny footy shirts and soon as the sun peeps from behind a cloud.
The park is a microcosm of Britain today.
I was walking, on the way to the train station, behind a chubby nine year old.
He was kicking an empty bottle of Corona. That was annoying enough. Then he picked it up and threw it at some five year olds.
"Cut it out mate!" I said. "You could hurt someone."
"Fuck off," he replied delightfully. "Or I'll have you up for 'rassment."
Unwilling to suffer that terrible fate, I checked the kids were OK and moved on.
On another occasion in the park I saw a drunken, violent youth screaming at a Community Police Support Officer. She called for assistance and six colleagues arrived.
The thug threatened each of them for over 30 minutes and they tried to reason with him. He went free.
Imagine that happening in Singapore.
The third thing about my neighbourhood park is that it is frequented by school kids in the lunch hour.
I don't know about you, but we weren't allowed off the premises at all during the day.
They leave the place covered in litter. No-one says a thing.
It is as bad at school. A friend who is a teacher says that if kids are lying in the corridor she is forbidden from asking them to move; she must step over them.
* * *
The reason many feel vindicated by the riots is not because people have been put in fear or hurt or had their premises destroyed.
It's because the mayhem has frightened the bejesus out of the smug, soft-bellied, middle-class fools who have run our lives for the past 15 or 20 years.
Lax parenting is not confined to the middle class but it is the middle class who make the laws and have brought about this lack of responsibility.
You know the type: the patronisers who tell us criminals are really protestors, who should be loved not punished ("all he did was pee on the Cenotaph"); who make us fill out forms telling the world if we are gay or disabled or don't have the gender assigned to us at birth.
These are the people who drive their children 200 metres to school; who prefer the word of their kid to the teacher and who let them run wild with smart phones on the grounds that at least the child can call them at the Gastro pub if they spot a paedophile behind a tree.
England is being bitten on the bumAs long as they have a monthly direct debit to Barnardo's or Save the Children they don't have to walk into places like Hackney and Tottenham.
If the child doesn't want to give up their seat on the train to an 80 year old woman that is his right. If the brat wants to play an iPod so noisily that no-one can have a conversation, she should be free to do so.
The failure to impose discipline and limits on children is coming back to bite us all on the bum.
When the child of a friend was behaving appallingly, I told him not to be naughty.
In the presence of the little terror mother remonstrated with me.
"We don't use the 'N' word in this house."
To play cricket properly one must obey the rules. None of us would ever dream of driving on the wrong side of the road. Doesn't living in a community come with rules?
But many of these kids don't care about the rules.
A teenage rioter from Manchester was interviewed by the BBC.
"It's fun," he said, dropping his "Ts."
"If I get caught it will be my first offence. I won't go to prison; they're overcrowded. I'd only get an ASBO (Anti-Social Behaviour Order). They're nuffin'."