In a rather distracted way I've been researching a small article about teenage binge-drinkers and other lost young souls in the place where I grew up. In that connection I was very struck by an article by Mary Riddell in Sunday's Observer:
"Up a flooded track, high in the Berkshire Downs, 60 teenagers are driving motorbikes through terrain as thick as porridge. There's a tea tent and a few mums with pushchairs. It looks much like any other event in the minor sporting calendar. It is also a tableau of Britain at the end of the Blair era. These competitors represent his children, or at least the cohort offered New Deals, convicted of new crimes and rebranded under a new label. They are the Neets - a lost generation of a million young Britons who are Not in Education, Employment or Training - and who cost the taxpayer £3.6bn a year...More accurately, these are Neets-in-waiting. Some are too young to qualify as members of a 16-24 age group that has swelled by 15 per cent in a decade."
She continues:
"An average annual budget for a scheme teaching 200 bikers is £220,000, or little more than the £172,300 it costs to keep one child in the secure training centre in which Adam Rickwood, whose inquest ended last week, hanged himself with his shoelace, aged 14...Some day, there may be the universal provision that criminologists such as Richard Garside rightly recommend as the route to a better society. There may be state-sector Etons, fine vocational training and glittering apprentice programmes not featuring Alan Sugar. But, for now, 45,000 16-year-olds leave school each year unable to read or write properly. Myth says they are everywhere, menacing your neighbourhood and rifling your car, but mostly they are nowhere. Pinned below the waterline of one of the richest countries on earth, they are allowed, scandalously, to keep on sinking until some disaster floats them to the surface."
Why aren't there more schemes of this kind? There are several reasons, but one that springs to mind is that the government would be scared to fund them for fear of the relentless littlejohning that would ensure: my beer money being spent on motorbike holidays for young thugs, and so on. Just goes to prove yet again that the mouthiest patriots are usually those least interested in finding serious solutions to the worst social problems faced by our country. Read the whole article here.
Comments