Strolling through Ludlow the other week, I saw a young woman discard a cigarette butt into the gutter. If a litter warden had spotted her, she could have been slapped down with a £50 on-the-spot fine, or dragged through the courts as littering is now a criminal offence. Around 300 new offences being created every year and ever increasing criminalisation is now the way we control society and individuals within it. Responsibilities that used to lie with communities, issues that might have been dealt with by local bobbies—or a lively row between neighbours—are now dragged through the courts. Communities are losing their role in shaping behaviour and defining what is acceptable in society. Worse than that, our sense of community is ebbing away so fast we seem not to be noticing its disappearance.
Schools are at the heart of communities, especially in rural areas, and have a role to play in shaping social behaviour, but the way the government is burdening them with responsibilities is having the opposite effect. Over the next few years breakfast and after-school clubs, and learning targets for children at nursery school, will further erode parents' responsibilities for guiding and shaping the lives of their children. And kids will have to spend more time away from home on the bus as schools close and merge to cope with their growing responsibilities and demographic changes. The government's aim is to increase economic productivity, but the consequence is to erode personal and social responsibility for our children. If parents still can't cope with the few responsibilities they are left with, we are told we need not worry. Local authorities can slap an ABSO Parenting Order on them and send them to compulsory parenting classes.
Qualifications, and behaviour at school, matter so much to the government that every 14 year old is now to be given a Unique Learner Number. The aim is to create a "tamper-proof CV" for colleges and employers, with records of qualifications, attendance and exclusions. But it will also mean that a child who, say, stays away from school to avoid bullying will have her attendance record hung like a millstone around her neck for life. Childhood, the most precious time of life, will be further eroded as parents and teachers warn kids: "if you misbehave, it will be like a criminal record for the rest of your life".
A child born in 2008 will be treated by the government in much the same way as a cow born in this year. The cow will get an "passport" that will identify it from the first month of life to the slaughter house. The child will be placed on the National Child Database at birth, get its Unique Learner Number at 14 and an Identity Card at 16. Still, at least it this should make it easier to easier to issue penalties for dropping litter, especially if children are forced to have their numbers clipped to their ears like cattle. Better still, why not save paperwork? Just give the litter louts a whack with an electric cattle prod!
Where have all the children gone? Treated like criminals every one. When will they ever learn?
Andy Boddington
Published in the Clun Chronicle, March 2008