Glancing through the news feeds over coffee this morning, this UK story caught my eye.
Police should be harassing badly behaved youths by openly filming them and hounding them at home to make their lives as uncomfortable as possible, the home secretary will say today.
It seems to me that there are so many things wrong with this idea that it is difficult to know where to begin to point them all out.
To begin with police harassment is illegal in the UK. This is a simple indisputable fact. Yet here is a Home Secretary, the de-facto boss of the police in Britain, encouraging the breaking of the law by the police in a desperate attempt to help save her drowning political party by attracting votes via ‘addressing the concerns of the common man on the street’.
It will not work.
Putting aside for now the fact that the British people are not so gullible as the British government likes to think that they are – as was clearly demonstrated by the trouncing NuLab got at the polls last week – has Jacqui Smith stopped for even a second to consider the message that she is sending out to the kids that she is intending to use as her political cannon-fodder? She is to all intents and purposes declaring war on them and in that declaration is clearly stating that ‘her side’ will use any means to achieve an end, legal or not. But what end is she trying to achieve? Just how much more confused, desperate and grasping at straws can this woman become?
Adults, everywhere, but particularly in the UK, need get a whole lot more realistic about this entire ‘youth problem’ and ‘yob culture’ thing that is supposedly going on today. It is not new, nor worse than ever before, nor some terrible ‘sign of the times’, nor does it show that all kids are half-human half-psycho-killers from hell and nor is it, by a very long way, some dark precursor to the end of law and order, structured society and civilisation as we know it.
Many adults, particularly in Britain, wrongly perceive that young people are somehow ‘out to get them’. This is a myth propagated by people with hidden agendas – newspaper editors use it to sell papers, politicians use it to create a mythical problem that they can demonstrate that they have solved. Not difficult when the problem did not exist before they ‘solved’ it. The truth is, young people today are no different from young people of the past and they are far more likely to not notice you at all than spend precious dressing-up and posing time plotting your adult downfall. Unless young people today have radically changed from the time when I was a young person, and they have not, then if you are not in their peer group you are not even on their radar. So quit worrying about them, you were one once, remember?
Even worse nonsense is the tabloid and politician driven notion that these days most ‘kids are dangerous and go around stabbing people!”. The reality is that violent crime has fallen by 41% since its peak in 1995.
So, if you were mod or a rocker in the fifties or sixties, a punk-rocker in the seventies, a skinhead in the seventies or eighties, or a member of any other youth-cult, aside from the hippies, at just about any time in the past, hold your head high with dubious pride in the knowledge that you were far more dangerous and violent than today’s young people will ever be.
The simple fact is that a very few young people create a problem for a few adult people. There are already plenty of ways for dealing with these ‘proper’ bad kids, from using the police to catch them and the courts to fine them, to fining their parents, to slapping them around a little as long as you are not going to get caught doing it, to locking the worst of them up in detention centres and prisons. Nobody needs a UK Home Secretary blatantly announcing that illegal hounding of people just for being young is acceptable. It is not.
Her true motive in this is purely political, it is not to ‘address the concerns’ of the man on the street, but to trick a vote out of him.
Don’t fall for her announcement expected later today as it is not what it appears to be.
And, as Pink Floyd once famously mentioned, “Leave them kids alone”.
Note: If you are a young person and get illegally harassed due to this new initiative, call Liberty.
