'What's going on at Westminster (re Gordon Brown) barely qualifies as tragedy even in the dramatic sense, let alone on the human register,' writes Mary Riddell in today's Telegraph. 'For real tragedy, look elsewhere. Today's doomed youth are dying not in the trenches of the Somme but in the streets of Britain. Robert Knox, the young actor stabbed to death last weekend, was the 14th teenager fatally stabbed in the capital this year. They are not dying for their country, like (Wilfred) Owen's compatriots. Most are not even dying for their iPods. They are dying because they're in the wrong postcode, or the wrong gang, or on the wrong side of an argument about nothing. Their killers are often those for whom a knife in the heart means little more than a casual goodbye.'
Such are the fruits of the social and cultural revolution which happened during the post-war period.
When I did some brief voluntary work at a youth correction facility in Los Angeles, the principal told me that one of the most depressing aspects of his work, compared to when he first started thirty years earlier, was the fact that there were never any problems in keeping order amongst the teenagers in his control. No mini-uprisings, few breaches of the rules. And why did this make him unhappy? It was simply the realisation that because life outside for most of these gangland boys has become so anarchic, and so lacking in any kind of structure, the institution they were now banged up in offered a welcome sense of order and set of guidelines. They were better off in than out.
Some people still do not quite get it, but the truth is that authority - from parental through to legal - has broken down in the UK. If the wheels are not to come off our society altogether, there has to be drastic action. No more initiatives or attempts to understand.
Some form of compulsory national service is now the only real way left. Not voluntary, not just a few months, and no self-serving gap-year style stints in Ghana, but an obligatory period of disciplined service which will genuinely empower young people and bring out their inner resources in a way which they probably simply cannot imagine now.
This used to be the call of Disgusted, Tunbridge Wells, and always raised a good laugh. The fact that there's less and less mockery of such a position is proof that people are indeed genuinely frightened at what is happening. Surely there must be at least one politician with enough nerve to raise the subject.
