Cameron’s Care Bears

This morning, the Sun proclaimed:

“The problem for society is to catch children BEFORE they go wrong.”

Of course, it is normally dangerous to argue with the Sun, lest one be branded a terrorising, judge-loving, paedophile. But it’s important to be aware of how accurately their thoughts will be reflecting vast swathes of the nation. But then, once I realise this, I plunge into despair as, yet again, the country descends into paranoid fervour: and this time about an item of clothing no less.It pains me to read such weak logic. If you take the point to its conclusion, the next stop is to say that all children who have already gone “wrong” are therefore worthless to society. So there is no point trying to bring them back into the fold; we might as well jail them forever. In which case, why on earth would one wish to spend a fortune when we know for a fact that they have already gone “wrong” and, if the only way of solving the problem is to catch them before they have been ASBO’d, then it would make logical sense to order a mass extermination programme of such offenders.

I shouldn’t be surprised that the Sun would employ such poor thinking. But I come back to my original point: this is probably how a lot of the nation is thinking right now. I care not for David Cameron’s call to give “hoodies” more understanding. I care even less for the government’s response calling Mr Cameron “vacuous”, because I already know that the government had long ago turned its back on trying to solve the causes of crime, as soon as it realised that tackling crime requires far more effort, money and time – something the taxpayer just cannot tolerate for long – than merely talking tough on jail sentences, issuing on the spot fines, summary justice, all so that people perceive that “justice is being done”. That is much easier by comparison, and so we shouldn’t be surprised that all governments end up down that route.

It hurts me to know that tolerance is now so low in this nation, community relations so poor, that any attempt at finding a solution short of banging the offending item of clothing in the nick is derided as being not from the real world. Do we now have so little interest in our fellow humans that we are prepared to treat them like animals? The rabid dog bites, so it is destroyed. The feral hoodie happy-slaps (remember that moral panic?), so they should be jailed forever more, because they have “gone wrong”.

That’s where all this is leading. Of course there is an issue, and of course there are people suffering because of the actions of a mindless minority. I have seen it myself. I have suffered it myself. But it doesn’t make me lash out. It makes me wonder. If people have “gone wrong”, what has caused that to happen? Why did it happen? What can we do to change that? Do we need to fundamentally readdress the way we look at society?

These are enormous questions. To me, it is is not good enough to simply dismiss a certain element of society, the demoralised and downtrodden youth, as being “wrong” and so therefore beyond help. The problems are age old. Mr Cameron may have done us a favour to at least bring up this issue, but to me he is talking about it in the wrong way, and is too distant from the problem to have credibility in this field. He should not be talking about “hoodies”. He should have talked more generally in terms of the whole of youth culture. The whole of our aggressive, materialistically excessive, culture.

Yet we can do something which animals find it very difficult to do. It is obviously better to catch people before they do wrong, but we would be a weird species if we never did wrong. The key point is obvious: mistakes are made, they can be learned from, then change can be actioned. Today – wrong, and maybe still wrong tomorrow. But next month, next year? Change is a slow process, but people can improve. The answers are always the same: raising aspirations, raising standards of living, forming community bonds to tackle problems together, rather than twitching the net curtains while the poor bugger over the road gets his head kicked in for asking a few drunk kids to move on; tackling alcoholism, tackling drug addiction with proper rehabilitation for endlessly underfunded anti-drugs programmes; a robust economy, supporting those who stay at home to raise the next generation rather than be demonised as benefit scroungers… this is just the beginning.

Or you could chuck ’em in prison, hoping a stiff sentence and a stiff something-else from Big Bubba will straighten ’em out (pun intended). But if you do that, don’t be surprised if they come out and nothing has changed. After all, how does one resolve the circular argument: if you have a rising prison population, doesn’t building prisons mean you concede that prison doesn’t work? How can prison be serving its intended purpose – deterrent and rehabilitation - if you’re having to build more and more of them? When do you stop to say: enough is enough?

Because that’s what I have said. If our politicians cannot see the absurd conclusions of their twisted logic as demonstrated in newspapers like the Sun, then they will continue to be an irrelevance to providing a solution. Because, unfortunately, they are the only ones who can solve this. From the national government, striving to improve conditions for all, to the local councillors, who should be out on the streets in groups, engaging, without prejudice, local people and those who are slipping into the underclass. These people are the only ones who can provide the funding and the impetus to solving these problems. Voluntary organisations can only scratch the surface on their own. It needs complete joined-up thinking, partnerships between local government, national government, voluntary organisations and the people on every street to communicate and mobilise to begin tackling the poverty of ambition that pervades the housing estates of many corners of Britain.

The people at the bottom are the key. Cameron just looks like another liberal toff, not able to speak the language of the younger generation. He means well – or at least he appears to (and maybe that’s what’s important in this cynical media age) – but he cannot drive the solutions on the ground. They are different in every community.

Only the people who care for the plight of their fellow human, no matter how much damage they’ve done can make a difference.

Only the people who care about others throwing away their lives in the pursuit of ludicrous, arbitrarily created glorifications of (to pick one example) gangster-life which sells so many products, when there is so much to be achieved in life, can make a difference.

Only the people who still care enough to help others despite such adversity can make a difference.

Do you care?