Rights without responsibilities home to roost

If there is one thing this Government is good at it is knee jerk reactions usually with half baked legislation, directives, action plans, delivery authorities or something else to grab that day's headlines and do little else.

Latest banner up the flagpole is knife crime which is rapidly becoming a scourge of society with hardly a week going by without someone being stabbed to death. But blaming knives for this explosion of murders is rather like blaming cars for deaths by dangerous driving. They might be the tool but the blame lies elsewhere.

There has been a headlong rush to devalue and diminish both marriage and the family, that stable unit of father, mother and children which has served mankind well for several millennia and which is still the bedrock of most civilised societies. We are one of the exceptions, having the benefit of New Labour which obviously knows better than entire civilisations which have gone before.

On top of that has been the obsession with giving children whole rafts of rights which effectively protect them from any meaningful discipline or punishment without them having any responsibilities whatsoever. We now have a whole generation of feral youth who see benefits as a career option, treat society, the police and the law with contempt and value human life as little more than characters in a video game.

They have been created by Government policy and legislation, social meddling and Labour's obsession with dismantling anything that could be seen as middle class values - the middle classes in their eyes being merely Tories in disguise. The result is gratuitous violence on our streets every day which sees dads beaten to death for little more than complaining about anti-social behaviour and fatal stabbings running at more than one a week.

When I was a kid every lad from eight or nine upwards had a large pocket knife, all complete with a thing for taking stones from horses hooves - not that I ever met anyone who had even ever found a horse with a stone in its hoof, let alone taken one out. The knife was used for whittling, carving whistles that rarely made a sound, for turning branches into spears, staffs or walking sticks, depending upon length, for pointing sticks, producing shavings to start fires and a whole host of other things including the game of splits. I won't go into details or foot amputations will rocket.

A fair number of youths were also in the scouts or boy's brigade. I can't speak for the BB but in scouts everyone had to have not just a sheath knife but a Bowie knife, the thicker, longer and sharper the better. Thus on troop nights or summer weekends when jamborees were in full swing half the youngsters of the country were wandering the streets with four or five inch knives in their pockets and anything up to a 10 inch Bowie knife hanging from their belts where some even had a trimming axe with its head in a leather case just in case the odd felled tree needed trimming

Yet knife crime, at least among youngsters, was so rare as to be unknown. Stabbings were the province of gangsters with stilettoes.

Knives have hardly changed and I would even hazard a guess that there are far less around now than 40 to 50 years ago. What has changed are the reasons and attitudes of the people carrying them. Now setting up a working party to find out why that has come about would be useful but I suspect there might already be an uneasiness that the answers would be far too close to home