Louts, chavs, and hoodies.

Demonising the young has been an adult pass-time for as long as this writer can remember. Today’s chavs have a long pedigree - remember the Mods and Rockers? And before them the Teds. And before them…

When we pointed out that human beings react to their surroundings and behaviour reflects the conditions of the world we inhabit we were told we were woolly headed dreamers. Treating society’s offenders as human beings was not an option that would do any good. The fault we were told lay in human nature.

Now who do you think said this in opposition to the human nature argument?:

“If all we have to say to those kids is that you’re feral, that you deserve an ASBO, that you should be in custody — we will simply be reacting to youth crime instead of reducing it…Tell a 16-year-old boy, abandoned by his father, neglected by his mother, on drugs, dyslexic, hyper-active . . . tell that boy it’s all his own fault when he ends up in Feltham [the young
offenders institution].”

It was in fact David Cameron the leader of the newly compassionate, formerly hang ‘em and flog ‘em, Conservative Party – as reported in The Times.

Caught seemingly on the back foot by this departure from the hymn sheet Labour has labeled this environmentally centered approach “hug-a-hoodie” and “love a lout.”

Cameron was speaking as new research on the lives of British teenagers uncovered a debauched life of drinking, fighting and underage sex among today’s 15-year-olds thus confirming the worst fear of your average Daily Mail and Sun reader. The study, conducted by the Institute for Public Policy Research, said that a serious breakdown in the relationship between children and adults in Britain was to blame, a rift not witnessed in comparable European countries (and therefore not attributable to that other popular bet noir — Britain’s membership of the Common Market.

Many teenagers, said the report, spend almost all their free time “hanging round with friends” (gasps of shock and horror). 59 per cent of boys in Scotland and 45 per cent in England spend four or more evenings with their friends (presumably instead of setting up their own thriving business — young Richard Bransons in the making).

Nick Pearce, the director of the IPPR and co-author of the report, said the key finding of the research, Freedom’s Orphans, was that children are no longer learning how to behave from adults, but from one another. “Because they don’t have that structured interaction with adults, it damages their life chances,” he said. “They are not learning how to behave — how to get on in life.”

And we all know what that means of course — knuckle down to that meaningless job, do as you are told, question nothing, churn out those profits for the owning class.

GT