Leatherhead Matters

What sort of society have we become….. when over half a million children a year are referred to the Child Protection Agency?

As Camila Batmanghelidj of Kids Company points out (Children are not born criminals or killers), as these kids grow up “they know how to kick because they have been kicked, they know how to stab because they have been stabbed, they know how to torment and humiliate because they have experienced the same.”……and so we lay the foundations for future horrors, like the recent murder of Gary Newlove.

Margaret Thatcher once famously said “There is no such thing as society!”. The present Government have institutionalised this by ensuring the State meddles in everything. We are all now suffering the consequences of wholesale individual & community abdication because, the government have tilted the balance. Not only have the Government established an expectation that they alone can step in and resolve issues of feral kids on our streets and violence in our communities but, they now use the powers of state to protect their monopoly. We have all learned that a public spirited individual who intervenes to stop youths vandalising, abusing or, assaulting others is now automatically put in the position of the accused. The state has neutered one positive force from establishing community cohesion and has become negligent in carrying out its own monopoly role…. as has been reported re Gary Newlove’s killer, Adam Swelling

When the state once again supports reasonable interventions by individual citizens and protects them afterwards from reprisals we will be starting down a path of reducing the present blight on civilised society in our country.