Does Katy Perry understand rhythm?

The song had been out and on the radio for a while before I heard it and week or two ago.  'Unconditionally', by Katy Perry, had only being playing for about twenty seconds when I noticed something odd.  It's not that Miss Perry's voice is hard on the ear - I find it quite nice actually.  It was the very odd pronunciation of the title word which caught my attention.  For some reason, she pronounced it repeatedly (thirteen times in fact) with the stress on fifth syllable, rather than the third, making it sound like: 'un-CON-dish-OWN-ally'.  

Why she would choose to write and sing the word this way appears to be unexplained, and seems to have created very little buzz over the internet or on the radio.  Yet, who pronounces the word 'unconditionally' like this?  No-one, in my experience.

This leads me to question the writer's ability with English.  Now, English is Katy Perry's first language, so how could she get this so wrong?  Either she has a poor understanding of the normal ways of stressing words in English, or she lacks the ability to match the syllabic pattern of the words she uses with the beat of the tune she chooses to put them to.  

Her performance in interviews would lead the observer to conclude that she has no problem with getting her pronunciation right when speaking.  Therefore we must conclude that she is an incompetent when it comes of writing words which fit the tunes she comes up with (or perhaps the other way around).  What I find worrying though, is that despite such a blaring mistake, she was happy to sing it that way, no-one in the recording or producing process intervened to get it right and no-one much since seems to have found it worth commenting on.  Most blog comments seem to express admiration for the power of the song or the strength of the lyrics.  Yes - she does sing it powerfully and perhaps many people do find the lyrics stirring, but that does not stop it from ending up sounding ridiculous.  

A poor grasp of rhythm is not something a musician should be ever be proud of, and the listening public should be awake enough to notice when something does not work.  Is it too soon to start despairing?

Un con dish OWL ally

Birmingham City Council's barmy economics

29th November

Yesterday Birmingham City Council announced that in order to reduce its spending it intends to close nine public swimming baths, which it says lose money, then rebuild six of them and finally, when they are finished, pass the running of them over to private firms who will then manage them for a profit.

This is utterly crazy.   Even if the various pools were not popular and well used (which most of them are), the idea that it is cheaper to spend money demolishing them, only to spend even more money rebuilding some of them seems devoid of all logic.  Further than that, if they acknowledge that private firms could run the rebuilt baths at a profit, why could the council not run them itself at the same level of profit and in doing so, defray some of the expense it had already incurred? 
As it is, the council plans to spend huge sums of money on this scheme, believing that in doing so it is somehow making a saving.  Having spent the money, it then appears not to have considered the fact that it will have paid for facilities it has no intention of making any money back on.

In a radio interview this morning, deputy council leader Ian Ward said that people these days wanted integrated facilities with gyms and cafes.  Maybe this is true.  Perhaps he is right, but if so, it is equally true that the existing facilities are popular and heavily used - perhaps he and his staff have not visited any recently.  Perhaps, in the light of his comments, they have also failed to notice the plethora of well filled gyms which already exist across the city.  They also seem not to have considered the fact that some of these swimming pools (and this applies particularly to the ones they do not intend to rebuild) are in socially deprived areas and constitute one of the main opportunities for a positive and healthy diversion from poverty.  Without the opportunity to spend time swimming, far more young people will be likely to fill their free time with petty crime and gang activity.

Of course, people in deprived areas do not pay much to go swimming.  Most are eligible for the 'Passport to Leisure' scheme which allows holders free access to council owned gyms, pools and other facilities.  It is hardly a wonder then, that the council loses money on swimming pools.  Did it ever really expect to draw a profit from them when it also has a scheme which allows those who use them most to use them for free?  Of course not, but that does not make the passport scheme in any way wrongheaded.  Free use of swimming pools for those who need them most but cannot afford them is surely one of the reasons public baths were originally built.  They are a service the council should provide for those of its citizenry who lack the means to use private pools, of which there are a number.

In planning to remove these public facilities from areas where they are most needed, one might begin to suspect that the council has decided that those who can make them no profit do not matter.  Then again, they don't plan to make a profit anyway.  They plan to give that away for free!

If the council really does genuinely want to save money on the running of swimming pools, it would be far cheaper for them simply to close them until better economic times than it is for them to spend millions demolishing them and then rebuilding some of them.  Perhaps it goes with the times to treat those who pay a lesser share of council tax with contempt, but if the council thinks that spending millions it won't get back is the same as spending less, it really needs its planning staff to go back to primary school and learn some basic mathematics.

A history lesson for Mr Major

Sir John Major, the former prime minister, said the other day that if Britain left the EU it would be disastrous for the economy.  Sage words, one might think, from a man who's sat in the top circle of government and who might be expected to know things like this from experience.

Hang on though.  This John Major is the same John Major who, nearly twenty two years ago, signed the Maastricht Treaty which allowed the EEC to transform itself in the the present cleptocratic, morally and financially corrupt EU.   This is an achievement he's always seemed rather proud of.  So perhaps he should have declared an interest before making his public prediction of calamity should the British People decide to declare that they never gave him a mandate to sign our sovereignty away in the first place.
It's not as if we were that comfortable about our membership of the EEC in the first place.  Ah yes - the good old EEC, which started life as a free trade arrangement under the Marshal Plan in order to help rebuild the shattered economies of Europe after the Second World War.  In its early days our own economy was fairly shattered and we probably would have benefitted from membership.  But Charles de Gaulle saw to it that we didn't get in when it might have been useful to.   The same ungrateful de Gaulle who had been sheltered and supported to the hilt by Britain during the very war the continent was recovering from.  Luckily though, we still had the British Empire to trade with so after a few hard years of austerity the British economy was rebuilt without the need to be part of the EEC.  As the Empire transformed itself into the Commonwealth we continued to enjoy a healthy and mutually beneficial trade with our established trading partners and things seemed very healthy.

Some of our politicians were still mentally living in the late 1940s though.  MacMillan was a keen devotee of EEC membership and so of course was Ted Heath.  Mac got knocked back but was still able to point to the economy and remind us that times had never been so good.  By the time Ted Heath was in the hot seat the world was changing and the time when it would have benefitted us to join the EEC was probably already past.  Heath hadn't noticed though.  Whether it was his love of sailing, his penchant for conducting orchestras while the economy sank, or the wretched business of trying half heartedly to confront the militant unions who Wilson had allowed to become over mighty, who is to know.  But his rosy spectacled view of the EEC ensured that while everything fell down around him, he lost none of his avowed Europhilia.

As soon as the opportunity allowed, Heath railroaded his country into membership of his long desired dancing partner.  The EEC promptly imposed quotas to dictate who Britain could trade with and by what factor.  Cheers in Downing St were matched a thousandfold by anger around the Commonwealth, where countries like Australia and New Zealand saw their export trade slashed by as much as a third.  Unsurprisingly, it didn't take long for a severe anti-British backlash to take root in many parts of the world which had once been coloured pink on the map.  The desperate search for new markets in the years following 1973 meant many of our best friends in the world turned to look away from us.  The painful memory of being kicked in the teeth and needing to find new friends has imprinted itself on the collective minds of many in the Commonwealth and is one of the strongest root causes of the anti-British attitudes that many people in those countries now espouse, along with the alternative views on our shared history which have accompanied this souring of attitudes.

Back in Britain, shorn of friends in the world and presented with new partners who looked down their noses at us as we all felt the heat of the oil shocks, the voting public grudgingly said 'yes' in a referendum on what was in any case a fait accompli (and which was widely rumoured to have been rigged, as well).  The youngest person to have had that dubious honour is now 56.

A little like John Major and Maastricht, Ted Heath was enormously proud of having chained us to the continent.  But then, despite all the evidence to the contrary, he thought of himself as a great man, so I suppose it was only natural for him to feel that everything he did was wonderful.  I wonder if Pope Paul VI agreed with Mr Heath's assessment of himself when he was presented with a signed photo of the prime minister as a official gift during a state visit.

Whatever the supposed merits of Ted Heath's tenure of 10 Downing Street, it remains the case that no-one under the age of 56 has ever has a say on whether they wish to remain part of the EU.  It is also the case that the EU of today is an entirely different beast to the EEC of 1975 in both name and nature.

John Major may look back on his years as prime minister with a sense of nostalgia, if not achievement, but that does not give him the right to make patently false claims in public.  On one hand, the percentage of our trade with non-EU markets (including many of our old friends in the Commonwealth) grows steadily year on year, and on the other, why on Earth would manufacturers and farmers within the EU wish to deny themselves business by refusing to trade with their established market in an independent Britain?  In his prophesies of doom, Mr Major is as deluded as Mr Heath was in the 1970s.  Leaving the EU will not bring us low as we were forced to bring our friends low under Heath.  It would give us our independence back and millions of people want to be able to say so.  Who is John Major to deny them that right?

Why I didn't go to dinner with Katie and Dan

Why I didn't go to dinner with Katie and Dan 

Recently, I received an invitation to dinner - very nice, one might have thought.  Of course, this particular dinner was due to be happening in London, which is some distance from where I live.  There was also a cost of £45, but that really didn't seem so bad, even when travelling costs were taken into account, considering that well known television historian Dan Snow was due to be at the same dinner and would be conducting a guided tour through the Imperial War Museum afterwards.  As someone who took my degree in history and enjoys good food to boot, this sort of thing would normally be right up my street, so to speak.  I decided not to go though.  'Why not?' you might be forgiven for asking.  It was simply this: despite the very reasonable cost of dinner and the opportunity to chat with the many erudite people who would be there, I declined because the invitation I received came from Katie Ghose, of the Electoral Reform Society, in whose cause the dinner was being held.

The ERS of course, is well known for its ongoing campaign for proportional representation.  Their cause has a great many supporters, and not just among the membership the Liberal Democrat Party.  I am not one of them though, and I think my argument on the matter has as much going for it as those of Angela Eagle, Polly Toynbee, John Denham, Lord Tyler, Nick Clegg's special advisor Polly MacKenzie and others who were due to be attending the dinner.
There are many who argue that our existing 'First Past the Post' electoral system is unfair.  They may well be right: certainly many people's votes count for little when a party they have not voted for wins in a 'winner takes all' style election.  Most of these same people, like the ERS, argue that PR is a fairer way to elect our representatives.  Democracy would be seen to have been done when a party received a representation in parliament directly proportionate to its share of the vote in a national election - each party would have been treated fairly for a change.  Fair enough, but is that the same as what most people in this country understand as democracy?  I would contend that it is not.  I think it is reasonable to suggest that most voters believe in a contractual aspect to their occasional shot at direct democracy.  They believe that in exchange for electing MPs, they have the right to expect those MPs to represent their views in parliament, along with expecting that they can call on their MPs to help them sort out their more intractable problems - in short: that an MP is there to represent his or her constituents.  This would appear to be confirmed by the number of emails most MPs receive.

The problem with PR, is that MPs elected under it do not represent constituents, but instead represent party machines which may be largely unaccountable to the public, except when approaching elections.  Parties are free to follow their own ideological ends, no matter how divorced from public opinion, secure in the belief that no MP who values his seat will dare vote against the party line, for fear of being deselected.  In such a situation, most MPs would instantly choose the whip's wish, which could ensure a sustained career, over a mailbag full of letters from voters begging them to vote against their own party.

Under our present system, listening to the views of constituents and voting against your own party is not without its risks, but as Gunnar Beck wrote in the Spectator recently in relation to Germany, where you have proportional systems, voting against your own party can be tantamount to political suicide.  The result is 'consensus' politics and a political conveyer belt.  The idea of representative democracy goes out of the window - voters only matter during elections.  At all other times parties are free to go on ignoring public opinion, confident that their spin doctors can get the public to give them enough votes come the next election to win it for them.  We might assume that voters would see though this, but when all parties can act that way, election spin might end up being the only thing which separates them.

Where PR in Germany has resulted in oligarchic Euro-mania in the face of public scepticism, in New Zealand, where I spent many years and maintain many close links, a mixed PR system has resulted in often overworked constituency MPs, alongside list MPs who are simply there to vote as the party directs and who are sometimes openly dismissive and often disdainful of public opinion.  They know that their value to their parties will result in high positions on party lists, meaning they have little need be accountable or appeal to the voter to retain their seats.  Those actually appealing to the pubic and thus electable for constituency seats will be lower down the list, to ensure the party yes-men and women will always get in.  A few list MPs do do constituency work alongside constituency MPs, but many do not.  This situation is doubtless mirrored in many other countries where parties have won the right to be proportionally represented.  I don't think this is what people in this country want from their democracy.

Now, I'm not trying to argue that parties here don't already do things the public don't like, or that our MPs always represent their constituents views - they often don't.  The difference is that most British voters can still expect representation by their MPs, regardless of who they voted for, and may hope to influence them when they feel the MP's party does not represent their interests.  I'm not sure that that would always work so well under PR.
So FPP may be far from perfect, but I believe in representative democracy.  Whatever Katie and co. think, dinners and museums notwithstanding, I don't think PR can necessarily deliver that.

Supervising the bad and the dangerous

Supervising the Bad and the Dangerous

Not long ago, the papers were filled with the case of Phillip Similane, the paranoid schizophrenic man who stabbed schoolgirl Christina Edkins to death on a Birmingham bus in March.  Similane, who had a history of violence and criminal damage, had been released from prison against a psychiatrist's advice three months earlier.  As always in tragic cases like this, fingers of blame were immediately pointed at the various agencies which should have been supervising him.  They were right of course - a dangerous man had been released into the community and he had certainly not been supervised sufficiently to prevent the needless death of an innocent schoolgirl.  Hands were held up and the usual statement that "lessons will be learned" was meekly trotted out.  How does something like this come to pass though? Similane's case is hardly an isolated one - in the past year thirteen people have been killed in random knife attacks in Birmingham alone.  Comparable figures can be seen in several other major cities across the UK as well.  Many of the killers have turned out to be people who were already on social services' radar.  How, the public must ask every time, can this keep happening when public agencies always claim to have leant their lesson from the last tragedy.  The sad reality though, is that no matter how much hand wringing is done and how many promises are made to learn lessons, even the best supervision cannot prevent such tragedies from happening.

Allow me to explain.  Most social work staff have personal caseloads of between a dozen and thirty individuals or families and only a limited amount of time to supervise them in. The time which can be dedicated to any individual case must necessarily be limited, especially when copious amounts of requisite paperwork are taken into consideration.  As someone who is often in the position of performing supervision on potentially dangerous people, I can attest to the fact that it can be extremely difficult to achieve.  If an individual fails to answer the door or keep an appointment, there can often be little option but to move onto the next case, as every other case must be attended to as well. If you cannot meet with your client, time constraints frequently mean that there will be no opportunity to meet again until the following week.  If a person insists on refusing to engage, there is often little that social agencies can do.  You cannot force someone to answer the telephone, any more than you can force entry into their house to check on them without a warrant.  If you suspect a mental health issue you cannot forcibly section them under the Mental Health Act either.  They must do it voluntarily.  The police, who also often shoulder blame, are the only ones who can forcibly subject anyone to a psychiatric assessment.  They are busy though, and generally require more tangible evidence than social workers' suspicions to take action.

In an ideal world we would provide 24 hour supervision, but reality means that only about an hour and a half can be dedicated to each person per week and even then, only if they choose to work with us. Even if they do keep appointments and seem to engage, there is often no way to observe what they do during the other 166 hours of the week.  Along with people who succeeded in finding the straight and narrow, I have also had clients who smiled and signed up for training courses, but later turned out to have been habitual burglars or muggers in their unsupervised time.

There are, of course, ways to try to regulate someone's behaviour.  Tags can be fitted and curfews imposed to limit mobility, but these are often notoriously ineffectual.  I recall one ex-offender I worked with whose door was fitted with a sensor, which would trip an alarm if it was opened after 6pm. She also received a telephone check each day at 6.05pm to confirm she was home. If she wasn't, she risked returning to prison.  Yet one day I saw her out with friends at 9.30pm.  I called her social worker next morning and was told that she had answered the curfew call and no alarms had been tripped.  She laughed as she told me she had simply climbed out through the window.  Another client subject to a curfew seemed to be fully committed to retraining as a plumber.  He turned out though, to be in the habit of inviting people to visit shortly before his curfew time and then holding them captive overnight under threat of violence, in order to extort money from them.  While these are not examples of random murderers, they do demonstrate the fact that outside institutions, people cannot be supervised 100% of the time.  Even the most engaging person may be hiding a dark and criminal side.

Not all ex-offenders are dangerous, but there are certainly many, like Phillip Simelane, who common sense says should have remained locked up.  The NHS though, is lacking thousands of the mental health beds it needs and lack of places in our prisons is axiomatic.  Managers sometimes have no choice but to move some of their inmates on before the next lot arrive.  When one of them then randomly attacks someone, there is justifiable public anger.  Who should take the blame though?  The support worker who tries hard to work with a person who refuses to engage?  The social worker with the overlarge caseload?  The police?  The prison or NHS manager who needs to find spaces for a steady flow of new occupants?  Or the person who opposes new prisons in his back yard?  I don't have the answer.  We just do our level best to help our charges to become responsible members of society.  When the inevitable tragedy happens, it will be one no-one could have prevented, but the public will still demand that lessons be learned.

Do we really need so many more houses?

This was originally a reply I wrote in response to a series of postings on a financial discussion website.  Afterwards I expanded on it slightly but ended up not submitting it to anyone.


It is often stated that in order to get the economy going again we need to build more houses.  This would stimulate the building industry again and provide homes for the many thousand presently on waiting lists for housing, we are told.  I disagree though.

The country doesn't really need many more houses - the simplistic solution that building more houses is the answer to all our economic and social woes is trotted out far too often, but it's not really true - there are literally millions of empty houses already.  It is true that building houses would provide short term economic gain for building firms but this tends to ignore the fact that construction is only a relatively small part of our economy.  What the country really needs is a set of serious policies on the part of government to halt the inexorable pull of the population towards London and the South East by creating or encouraging suitable economic conditions in the Midlands and particularly the North to encourage companies to relocate and new businesses to start up, thus creating the job opportunities and resultant domestic spending power which too many areas outside London are presently so lacking in.  Reinvigorating the Northern economy would bring many houses which are presently empty back into use and would substantially relieve the pressure in the south.

There are other factors though in the apparent scarcity of houses and high asking prices.

There are not really that many more people here than there were twenty years ago.  It is true that many people have come here from overseas but it is also true that many people have left Britain for other places as well.  Many of those who come here also return home again a few years later.
One thing that has really changed though, is the number of families which have broken up, meaning that two houses are often needed for the same number of people.  As economic factors are often a strong driver of family breakdown, more needs to be done to create better economic conditions for families.  Tax credits are all very well, but why not tax them less in the first place, which would also be less of a drain on the public purse?

Next we have the continued existence of the housing bubble, because it has been prevented by government action from deflating as it naturally would have done.  There was a period of madness in the late nineties and early years of the last decade, when people, duped into thinking that property prices would rise forever and never fall, were often prepared to pay ridiculously high asking prices for houses which were really not worth what was being asked.  The banks encouraged this with apparently limitless credit (temporarily paid for by a greedy trade in increasingly worthless assets), and irresponsible television programming encouraged the idea that buying and selling property as a commodity to be traded was a surefire way to get rich.  Estate agents (who make their money by charging a percentage of the sale price and therefore have an interest in overestimating values) also encouraged sellers to ask stupidly inflated prices for houses.  The couple next to me at the time put their house on the market for forty thousand pounds more than the previous house on the street had sold for.  The house needed some work but they couldn't understand why no-one was showing an interest when I spoke with them a month later.  They were asking what an estate agent had told them they would easily get.  Predictably though, a London based buyer bought it sight unseen for the price they were asking in order to add it to his 'portfolio'.  
When the economic crisis hit, many of us had been seeing the bubble for what it was for years.  It was difficult to understand though, when the true nature of much of the credit which had been available had been exposed, why more people did not then see the bubble for what it was.  The government, afraid that tens of thousands might be sent into negative equity of have their homes repossessed, put measures in place which sought to prevent this happening, thus keeping the bubble inflated.  This should not have happened though.  Prices for commodities go up and they go down - that is the nature of things.  Houses, when treated as commodities, are no different.  Negative equity is a terrible experience but many who happily paid far too much for properties which were never worth it should have only themselves to blame.  The ban on repossessions has also helped keep the bubble inflated.  There are thousands of houses which are months or even years behind on their mortgage payments but are still permitted to be seen as assets worth huge sums by their occupants.  In the harsh world of the natural economy, many thousands of repossessions would have taken place by now, which would have helped the bubble to deflate naturally.
If the bubble were to deflate back to where the natural economy would have it (as well as the Bank of England allowing interest rates to rise to what they naturally should be), asking prices and thus deposit amounts would naturally drop to the level that the real market (the people who have been properly checked and found worthy of sensible mortgage credit) can afford.

Then there is the culture of entitlement which afflicts our society.  There are huge numbers of people in this country who could rent a house privately but instead feel that it is their right to be granted a council house with subsidised rent.  Councils often do not help matters here by allowing people to make choices over their accommodation options which leave many buildings, particularly high-rises only partially occupied, while at the same time allowing thousands to clog up their housing waiting lists who should be being told that they are already earning enough to rent privately.  Despite the continual talk of rising rents, this is not true everywhere.  There are many places where rents have only risen in line with inflation for years.  Yet thousands of people with stable incomes insist that they would never rent privately and must instead be given a council property, thus falsely skewing the overall numbers of people apparently in need of housing in the statistics.
I know landlords who are desperate to rent out houses which are lying empty. I also know people who got onto the housing list years ago and say they can't get a house but will not consider private rental despite the fact that they are now working. 

Finally, of course, there are the second home owners.  As far as I am concerned there is nothing wrong with owning a number of properties which are then rented out to tenants.  We will always need landlords after all.  However, far too often over the last two decades, people with good city incomes have bought up houses in rural areas to use as weekend retreats.  This has had the twin results of reducing the availability of housing for local people and inflating prices to suit the spending power of wealthy individuals, as well as leaving many villages denuded of people during weekdays. This in turn has led to the loss of shops, post offices and bus services from many villages.  I am not sure what the solution to this problem is, but it is definitely a problem.  We need people in government to take it seriously and come up with a solution which rectifies it properly.

So yes, some houses will always need to be built, but in many ways, the apparent housing shortage and the inflated prices are symptomatic of deeper problems which need urgently to be addressed and overcome.

Rioters and looters one year on

I wrote this in  October 2012 after pitching it directly to an editor.  Unfortunately it turned out to be a very full week for news and my article didn't make the final cut.  That means it gets to here though, so there's a silver lining to everything.


Rioters and Looters One Year On

The riots in August last year shocked the nation, seemingly coming out of nowhere and lasting several days.  Naturally there was immediate speculation about the conditions which could give rise to the behaviour we saw.  After the family of Mark Duggan publicly disassociated themselves from the rioters, commentators rightly looked for other reasons for the rioting and looting, as it moved alarmingly from district to district, always a step ahead of the police.  A link between welfare dependency and the areas most affected was quickly established and for a little while, a light was focussed on gangs and the criminal nature of many of their members and associates.  As we watched people engaging in an orgy of looting and burning on our television screens, a realisation settled briefly over the nation: there was a whole class of young, 'tech-savvy' people in our midst who had no respect for people's property and possibly no concept of right or wrong.  The world of 'Shameless' was suddenly on the evening news!

  Depressingly quickly though, figures in the media started trying to assign more easily understood causes to the disturbances: they had been about poverty; about anger against government cuts; or anger at bankers' chicanery with our money.  By the time those involved started to be processed through the courts, the media position had moved so far that there was widespread surprise at the revelation that the majority had previous convictions and that many were under the age of eighteen.

  Unfortunately, as someone who works with 'problem' families and teenagers leaving care, these facts came as no surprise to me, nor to others who work in the same field.  I come into contact, daily, with people for whom the lines between right and wrong are decidedly blurred: young people who see nothing wrong with stealing and selling stolen goods; who see engaging in intimidating behaviour as fun and who understand 'respect' as little more than freedom from criticism.  Many of them come from broken homes, some having spent years in the 'care' system; frequently they have been excluded from school, most lack positive role models and most of them are utterly alienated from wider society.  Despite our efforts, few who I talk to have any real expectation, or desire for that matter, to work for a living.  To them, work is a 'mug's game' where the only thing to be gained is the responsibility of paying more bills.

  A corrosive link between high welfare dependency and criminal activity is easy to demonstrate.  Benefits are calculated to be sufficient to cover little more than essential costs, but in our consumer society young people experience huge pressure to possess the desirable items marketed to them everywhere they turn.  To obtain these things while living on benefits though, the choices are limited: either buy from catalogues with interest heavy payment plans lasting months, borrow from payday lenders and loan sharks to raise sufficient money, or choose the quicker options of either stealing or buying with the proceeds of dishonesty.  In housing estates rife with crime the local criminal kingpins are well known to residents and teens pressured by constant marketing know that speaking to these people can ensure a lucrative market for stolen goods or an equally ready supply of drugs to sell.  Peer pressure and a musical diet of 'gangsta' rap which glamourises criminal behaviour ensure that many are willing entrants into the world of crime, where moral scruples and respect of the rights of others are definite disadvantages.  Many drift into informal gangs and families are often unaware of their whereabouts, some being lied to, others criminally complicit.

  Since last year though, many people seem to have forgotten much of this and some recent media commentary has sought to identify the riots as part of a trend which has torn through Europe as populations take to the streets to show their anger at tough austerity measures.  Audience members in a recent edition of 'Question Time' apparently thought that government cuts had been the cause.
  A number of the young people I work with were involved in the rioting.  A year on, out of custody again, none of those I speak to seem to understand that there was anything wrong in their actions last year.  Unlike most British teenagers today, few of them seem to understand why they should not simply have or do whatever they want.  One describes the riots as the best time he has ever had.  It was 'cool', it was 'rocking', he says.  Others delight in bragging about what they or their friends stole or vandalised.  Many are proud that their 'crew' played a part in what was, for them, the memorable event of 2011.  Any concept that they bear any responsibility for the pain and losses suffered by their victims appears to be beyond them.  

  Those who seek to blame the riots on austerity, bankers' abuses or class envy are wrong.  The attacks were not on local government offices, banks or McDonald's outlets, the usual targets of anti-government or anti-capitalist rage.  Instead it was sportswear shops, jewellery shops and shops selling electronic goods or booze.  There was no political motivation, no reaction to austerity measures - for them it was all about having a perverse type of fun, grabbing the consumer goods they desired and taking the opportunity to attack police, who are seen as an enemy who seeks to prevent them from going about their 'business'.

  In Britain today we have large numbers of young people who have no respect for authority, no respect for the rights of others and no sense of personal responsibility, but who have a strong sense of entitlement and a desire to possess fashionable items.  They may have dropped below the media radar again but they are still there.  And while they remain forgotten, are allowed to fail at school, allowed to be left with a choice of poverty or crime rather than work and allowed to alienate themselves, they will persist in that state, to the detriment of all of us.