Dave's in charge.....so that's alright, then.

Now that the affirmative shopping spree appears to be over, and Dave has got the Old Bill an Old Bill from the Big Bagel to help in cleaning up Broken Britain perhaps he might start with public morality.

We have plenty of historical precedent.

As a reaction, perhaps, to Cromwell’s Puritanism the English went on a 140 year bender. London was one great stew of prostitution, crime, drunkenness, and brutality, a huge whorehouse. Victoria and Albert introduced – er – Victorian values. Britain was a fairly disciplined and moral country for nearly 70 years after Victoria, although the rot probably set in during the tacky ‘60s. Maybe one reason was that for almost all the 20^th century until the ‘70s most men had military experience, and that is generally character-forming, believe me. And no, I am not suggesting a return to National Service

The media and entertainment business might be a priority.

Foul language and prurient behaviour seem to be the stock in trade of TV these days. Call me Mary Whitehouse but is it really necessary to put out a ‘contains strong language’ warning for ‘Have I got news for you’ this week? It is supposed to be an amusing mickey-take on the news of the week. Is Dirty Desmond the Top Shelf King, a ‘proper person’ to take over C5? We can see what is coming with his soap ‘Candy Bar Girls’ set in a lesbian boozer in Soho (and no, I haven’t watched it, just like M Whitehouse). His forthcoming attraction is a nude ‘Big Brother’, according to the papers. And the latest C5 blockbuster had a couple humping noisily away in the first few minutes. It was also very boring and got the off-button treatment.

SKY offers about 67 porno channels (one owned by the aforesaid Dirty Desmond). When were these legalised? I seem to recall that Maggie firmly shut them out.

The Red Tops are unspeakable. There were 23 ‘tit ‘n bum’ pictures in a single day’s edition of the Star! The advertising is substantially for porno DVDs, phone ‘chats’, and vacancies for performers in ‘adult’ films.

So we could make a start with a new Obscene Publications Act.

Drugs? It is certain that the criminalisation of drug-taking is the major cause of crime in the West. So the answer is obvious. But drug dealing needs to be treated on the same level as murder, with life sentences for dealing in Class A drugs. They have few problems in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and elsewhere. (As an aside, a young man of my acquaintance, hard working, never taken benefit, doesn’t do drugs, thumped a gatecrasher at his party in his own home and got 6 months. While he was in the slammer he was offered every kind of drug you care to name).

Booze? Well, what do you expect when closing hours are almost extinct and beer is cheaper in the supermarkets that bottled water? My local actually buys its stock from the supermarket because it is cheaper than the landlord can get it from the brewery at wholesale prices. So bring back stringent licensing laws, Dave. And put a ruddy great tax on alcopops!

But what we are probably going to get is another useless and expensive public inquiry so that they can kick the can down the road ‘to find the causes’. The cause is blindingly obvious. ‘The ‘submerged tenth’ are illiterate and unemployable and so have no incentive to lead proper lives. And who is responsible? Mostly the teaching profession, the NUT and successive governments that have tinkered with the system and banned teachers from exercising proper discipline.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

When I left school many years ago almost no school leaver had a reading/writing age of less than 14 years. A recent survey gives the appalling stats that 69% of white kids and 50% of black kids are functionally illiterate – that is, they have a reading of less than 7 years. The irony is that 50 years ago a high standard of literacy was not a prerequisite for getting a job. Manual labour was in abundant demand, and any thicko could get a job in a car factory when industry was booming and there was a shortage of labour. A, man working on the line was probably earning more than a bank manager. When my brother started his contracting business most of his employees consisted of manual labour. When he retired almost every function had become mechanised. He only needed a handful of skilled workers.

The demand for pure muscle has diminished almost to vanishing point. Education has gone from being a ‘good thing’ when I was young to being an absolute necessity. And in the face of this challenge, the county has gone backwards.

Illiteracy is easy to tackle. During my army days we had a small number of recruits who were to all intents illiterate not through any fault of the education system but probably because they were habitual truants (sons of small farmers, for example, who were frequently kept at home because their help was needed on the farm).

The Army Education Corps got them up to speed in 6 weeks flat. I have been involved in adult literacy campaigns in Africa. It only took a few weeks to teach reading and writing even to people for whom English was not their first language.

And another thing. Prison sentences for under-25s should include compulsory education for all with a reading age of less than 14, and be indeterminate so that you don’t get out of jail until you can at least read and write.

Blair and Broon created a society with no moral compass (although Broon liked to talk about it a lot), no values, no proper male role models, no discipline, no sense of worth, no hope and the sexual habits of the  farmyard.

So what was the outcome of it all, Dave?

Simple, my old pompoenkop.

Moral nihilism.