Adults, leave them kids alone..

I must confess that I have tended to neglect Heffer since he moved to the Daily Wail.

It’s a curious rag. It has some of the best columnists in the business – apart from Heff, there’s Tom Utley, the egregious Richard Littlejohn, and Quentin Letts, the best Parliamentary Sketch writer in the business (and author of a number of very funny books, like ’50 People who buggered-up Britain’.

And yet the news and editorial is so shrill as to border on the hysterical. It’s as if the company mantra is taken from ‘Abide with Me’:

‘Change and decay in all around I see.....’ There is never, ever any good news that I can find but there is a lot that is trumped-up.

I particularly dislike the way it demonises the younger, under-25, generation, but as this seems to be a national pastime maybe the paper is only reflecting its readers’ attitudes.

Here is an example.

A couple of weeks ago it published a series of photos supporting a shock-horror spread about binge drinking amongst young women, showing them vomiting, striking crude poses, or lying dead-drunk in the street. It went on to say that such scenes are witnessed all over the UK every week-end (they have ways of knowing what happens all over Britain every week-end). Well, not on my manor, squire.

And this was just a reprise of a similar spread 2 years ago of pictures that were mostly taken 5 years ago.

So let’s see if we can get a bit of balance in this.

Sure there is misbehaviour amongst the young, ranging from booze to crime. It was ever thus. There was not much recorded juveniles crime 50 years ago for the simple reasons that there were very few 18 – 20 year olds on the streets, being mostly in the services (which the unthinking suggest should be brought back), and because the police preferred to give miscreants a good thraping rather than go to all the bother of prosecutions.

And the reason you didn’t see drunks lying in the street was because in those days the Old Bill enforced the law on ’drunk and incapable’ which they clearly fail to do now, like much else. Another reason is that there was not the affluence of modern times, but when we had the money we tied a few on. Of course, we only drank beer. This was in the days before the drinks-makers deliberately set out to foster under-age drinking through the introduction of alcopops and other vileness.

And exactly how ‘widespread’ is this behaviour. Now here’s a funny thing. It’s always someone else’s kids who are causing mayhem.

So what has the older generation gifted to the younger?

Well, for starters an education system that has been mucked about for 40 years and has as a consequence become increasingly dysfunctional to the extent that vast numbers of school-leavers are functionally illiterate, who have standards of literacy of 9-year olds, who are becoming incoherent as their spoken vocabulary is alarmingly small, and who are effectively unemployable in an economy that no longer demands sheer muscle-power. We have ‘universities’ that are a laughing stock, that run useless course such as the history of lace-making in the Shetlands and ‘football studies’. We have an acute shortage of graduates in ‘hard’ studies such as physics and maths, so that although job opportunities are there in abundance there is a massive mismatch between what business and industry need and what the educational system is prepared to supply.

At the same time we turn schools into examination mills that put enormous stress on youngsters. In my time we sat for 5 ‘O’ levels at 16, 3 ‘A’ levels at 18 plus 1 ‘S’ level for those seeking a County Scholarship to university. Now the poor little devils sit for maybe 10 or 12 ‘O’ levels.

Through our greed, fecklessness and improvidence we have bequeathed huge burdens of debt to our children and grandchildren together with declining living standards, smaller pensions and later retirement.

We have brought up our kids without any concept of discipline so that we now have the 1984’ish position whereby attempts at disciplining a child may result in a visit from the police or social workers. ‘Do what thou wilt is the whole of the law’.

In Jamaica a couple of years back I was chatting to some British army NCOs who were there for jungle training. They told me about recruitment problems and why so many ‘colonials’ get into the army. Partly it was because the standard of education of recruits was too low but also it was lack of even the most basic idea of discipline to the extent that they were totally mystified as to why they were required to get out of bed before 11 a.m. This was not defiance; it was incomprehension.

And what sort of role models have we given them? Spud-faced footballers who get £1 million a week for kicking a ball once a week for 90 minutes, who have the sexual mores of the farm yard; coke-snorting anorexics also paid large sums to wear awful clothes; untalented sluts who are famous for being famous; ‘pop’ singers who flaunt their sexual preferences but without any noticeable talent; and crooked leaders.

Parents obese to the point of obscenity feed them on junk and take-aways, never cook a meal for them and never sit down to eat with them. We encourage them in obesity, ban competitive sports, and hedge them around with ludicrous health and safety rules so that they grow up unfit, fat and risk averse.

And we have the chutzpah to criticise?

As the old song says ‘I’m glad I’m not young anymore!’