Could you please indicate what percentage of Conservative MPs you would guess agree with you?

It is nice to read common sense from an opposition MP. But it would be much nicer to know that I will be hearing it from the next British government.

Reply: A majority

I think that accounts for the constant initiatives – why change it if everything is all right really?

In my view the problem with most of society is a small minority of psychopaths. Amongst the inner-sity lower classes teenage psychos stab other kids.

Where I grew up they attacked other children with their fists, vandalised peoples property and burgled cars and houses.

In the grown up middle-class world they run dodgy damp-proofing firms or persuade old ladies to part with their life savings for some other reason. They might try to feed their husbands ground up glass or something.

I once had an electronics teacher who went on a rant about ‘psychopaths’ during our first lesson and how they had no place in his classroom. He referred to a pupil he had watched spend all lesson bending a piece fo copper wire so that it would fit into the live and neutral holes of a plug socket. Sure enough, at the end of the lesson he inserted it and was stopped before he could switch on the mains.

We all thought the teacher to be a bit weird at the time, but now I think I know what he meant. They exist in all walks of life, the teenage knife crime is just a symptom of the fact that some people are inherently bad and need locking away.

Jack Straw appears to be doing all he can to help the average criminal.
There is a reason most do not walk out of open prisons.

It is that left wing backwardness about who they are supposed to help that is the cause of much of the problem.

Stop and search will yet again intimidate the innocent.

But in any case the government has only a small interest in reducing crime, extra votes.

The lobby for higher crime levels is much stronger.
High crime helps justify id cards, cctv and other cameras, council surveillance and helps destroy the nasty middle class sole traders who wont vote labour.

The corelation between fatherless ness (not single parenthood) has been thouroughly proven in the US, but for reasons of PCness is little discused.

It could easily be proven here just by making a survey of a random 500 prisoners in Britain to see what proportion grew up in a fatherless home & compare it to the rest of the population. The same result applies to suicides, inability to read , homelessness & most forms of social failure.

For purely political reasons these facts go unmentioned in polite company but they almost wholly explain the high crime rate in the Anglo-American world, particularly compared to societies far poorer than us.

On this point David Cameron & IDS before him are absolutely right about society needing to encourage the family. This will not be a quick fix, it will take at least a generation, but all the more necessary because of that.

http://fathersforlife.org/fatherhood/fatherlessness_table_contents.htm

We don’t need new legislation because it is already there!!!

Having said that, you might ask why the CPS doesn’t choose to take everyone to court!

Reply: I was talking about the government’s consideration of toughening or changing the law. My piece argues that it is already against the law – that is not the issue. The issue is behaviour.

Quite apart from all those knives and guns boys used to carry about in the fifties, let us also bear in mind the Swiss law which requires all Swiss males over 18 to possess a gun – to uphold their armed neutrality; and the origin of Karate, which was imported from the Chinese mainland into that part of Japan where all weapons were banned. It is the way young men are brought up which determines what they think is manly behaviour, not the tools or weapons at their disposal.

http://lettersfromatory.wordpress.com

Of course I realise that being part of an ‘integrated’ Europe is a major handicap to implement such an approach but I suspect that our politicians use this as an excuse for not even entertaining the idea and pursuing other ineffective policies.

This society has always had problem families some of which used weapons like knives and razors, but their number and their impact on the public was managed effectively by discipline enforced by schools, police and the courts. Individuals who still transgressed were subjected to corporal punishment or approved schools or both.

This country will eventually have to ‘bite the bullet’ and accept that the behaviour of some individuals cannot be curtailed by reason alone. Can we hope that parliament will have a proper debate about crime and punishment and when necessary remind Europe that we can manage our own affairs?