Imagine Britain without kids terrorising streets

I am afraid I know how many people react when they hear that another teenager has been stabbed or shot on the streets of London. For them, it is like the news of a small bomb in Albania, or a motorway pile-up in the Philippines.

It’s a tragedy, they may think, but one that has no real bearing on their lives. And if you belong, even vaguely, to that category, then I urge you to look at the map, and see how these murders are now dotted across virtually every corner of London.

Then you will see that it could be near you; it could be near me. It’s happening less than a mile from the Palace of Westminster, and it’s happening in towns and cities around Britain, too.

Then you reflect that for every death – and there have been 26 in the past year – there are thousands of less grievous injuries, and myriad assaults; and if you are like me, you start to feel a mounting sense of rage. What has caused this catastrophic collapse in values, this culture of criminality?

Continue reading Teenage Gangsters →

Playgrounds too soft, mean streets too hard

I know you may think it distasteful, but it’s time to talk about scabs. Let’s all have another seminar about those fascinating crusty objects that used to turn up on our knees. Join me in a trip back to our childhood Elysium, and remember the rapt interest with which we used to look at a graze in the process of healing.

First the outer edges would harden, leaving a raw red patch still faintly weeping in the middle. Then the whole thing dries into a miraculous integument, as firm and knobbly as the edges of a bit of cheese on toast.

You could tap it. You could stealthily probe its edges, with the connoisseurship of the man from Del Monte, to see if it was ready. Then one day it would all be gone, and we saw the skin underneath, pink and new and whole.

The scab experience was a brilliant lesson in biology, and it is in some ways sad that our children these days seem so scab-free. Please don’t get me wrong. I am not calling for more of them to have accidents.

I am not positively advocating that we encourage our children to fall out of trees or get whanged off roundabouts moving at 200 rpm. But the scabophobic measures we have taken to protect our children have had consequences we could not have intended.

Continue reading School Playgrounds →

I expect many readers will have blipped over the latest news of disaster in British classrooms. You may not have registered the importance of the revelation that our 15-year-olds are now among the worst at maths in the entire OECD, and have slipped to 17th place in reading skills.

Oh well, you may have said to yourself as you turned the page for more news of Maddy or the amnesiac canoeist; never mind. Someone else’s children. Someone else’s school. Some other set of parents who have failed to read to their kids, or who have allowed PlayStation to become a complete substitute for maths or any kind of academic effort.

Was that, roughly speaking, your reaction? If it was, and if there really are Britons out there who think they are immune from this classroom failure, then they need to think again. The educational problems of the minority can help to trigger an economic catastrophe for the whole of society. That is because mathematics – whether we like it or not – affects all of us, and our economy depends on all income groups having a basic understanding of numbers.

Continue reading Classroom Failure →

British Muslims should protest teddy lunacy

Oh come off it, I thought yesterday afternoon, when I heard that the Sudanese authorities had actually gone ahead and charged her. Surely they are out of their minds.

When the news broke yesterday teatime that poor Gillian Gibbons was facing prosecution in Khartoum for inciting hatred and showing contempt for religious beliefs, I am afraid my normal good humour momentarily deserted me.

How dare they! I spluttered, and for a brief undignified moment, I had fantasies of a return to the age of Palmerston.

Here is an innocent British citizen, a good and patently well-meaning 54-year-old British teacher. She has decided to make a new life for herself by giving instruction to children in one of the poorest countries on Earth. She has got herself into a muddle over the name of a teddy bear – and now she is facing 40 lashes or six months in jail.

Continue reading Incarceration of Gillian Gibbons in Sudan →

Alistair Darling has invented a kind of reverse National Lottery, in which the giant finger hovers over our streets. It could be you

Labour’s new lottery: You could be ripped off

In the annals of government cock-up, this is surely the single most astonishing and ludicrous episode of the past 25 years.

I cannot think of another minister who has looked as overwhelmed, as hapless, as altogether washed-up as Alistair Darling, when he announced that the intimate financial details of 25 million Britons had been lost – lost – by the ministry entrusted with their safekeeping.

Across the nation there will now be millions of families in states ranging from vague anxiety to panic. As they fight off the urge to ring their bank and verify the continued existence of their life savings, I want to console everyone with two bits of good news.

Continue reading Lost Revenue & Customs Data Discs →

Bin those plastic bags

Now don’t you come all libertarian with me. Don’t you try to pretend there is something anti-Tory about banning plastic bags.

I think I qualify as the single most rabidly freedom-loving columnist on this paper. I have sounded the alarm against bans on smoking, snacking, smacking, hunting and making jokes about religion; and I have inveighed against just about every example of nanny-statery you can think of, from booster seats for 11-year-olds to the new labels on wine bottles warning you that the contents can make you drunk.

Continue reading Plastic Bag Ban →

Health and safety did for de Menezes

It’s not good enough. It’s not good enough just to shrug our shoulders and say that Jean Charles de Menezes was an inevitable casualty of the so-called war on terror.

According to the polls I have seen, the majority of voters really seem to think we should all heave a sigh, move on, and accept that someone will always be in the wrong place at the wrong time. I say that I am afraid that will not do, because if you think about what actually happened, and you look at the real reason why an innocent Brazilian electrician had seven shots pumped into his head by the police, it is clear that we are in danger of drawing precisely the wrong conclusion.

It wasn’t too little concern for health and safety that did for that young man. The awful paradox is that it was too much.

A few years ago there was a terrible incident at Highmoor Cross in Oxfordshire, when a gunman went on a rampage and shot three women. Although the alarm was raised almost immediately, and although the police were on the scene very shortly afterwards, it took them the better part of an hour before they entered the premises to tend to the bleeding, dying women – while the gunman had long since fled.

Continue reading Common-sense Policing →

I want Hillary Clinton to be president

You know, I never thought it would come to this. Over the past 24 hours I have been trying to imagine the kind of person I want to follow George W Bush into the White House.

I have been scanning the faces of the competitors for what some have called the most open presidential race for years, and I have screwed up my eyes and tried to work out who should be in charge of us all.

Who should have their finger on the nuclear button? Who should be Commander-in-Chief of the American military, the hugest and most lethal killing machine in history?

The world may still face all kinds of economic upheavals, as the panic from the American subprime mortgage sector spreads around the world, like a kind of financial BSE. Whose brain can we rely on to protect us?

I hum and I brood and then to my amazement a face seems to form in my mind’s eye. She’s got dyed blonde hair and pouty lips, and a steely blue stare, like a sadistic nurse in a mental hospital; and as I snap out of my trance I slap my forehead in astonishment.

How can I possibly want Hillary? I mean, she represents, on the face of it, everything I came into politics to oppose: not just a general desire to raise taxes and nationalise things, but an all-round purse-lipped political correctness.

To express approval of Hillary Clinton is to invite fury from my friends in the American Republican party.

Continue reading Hillary Clinton for President →

Global over-population is the real issue

It is a tragic measure of how far the world has changed – and the infinite capacity of modern man for taking offence – that there are no two subjects that can get you more swiftly into political trouble than motherhood and apple pie.

The last time I tentatively suggested that there was something to be said in favour of apple pie, I caused a frenzy of hatred in the healthy-eating lobby. It reached such a pitch that journalists were actually pelting me with pies, and demanding a retraction, and an apology, and a formal denunciation of the role of apple pie in causing obesity.

As for motherhood – the fertility of the human race – we are getting to the point where you simply can’t discuss it, and we are thereby refusing to say anything sensible about the biggest single challenge facing the Earth; and no, whatever it may now be conventional to say, that single biggest challenge is not global warming. That is a secondary challenge. The primary challenge facing our species is the reproduction of our species itself.

Depending on how fast you read, the population of the planet is growing with every word that skitters beneath your eyeball. There are more than 211,000 people being added every day, and a population the size of Germany every year.

Continue reading Global Population Control →