Street Crime
Hardly a day goes by in the UK that we don’t hear some shocking story about someone being stabbed, injured or killed and an increasing number of people are frightened to go out, especially at night.
Latest horrific story was that of two 12 year old boys who carried out a machette attack on a 19-year-old youth in Wolverhampton. They have each been jailed for eight and a half years. They attacked the youth after he asked them to move from a park bench.
Bullying among teenagers is nothing new. I suffered badly from it from the age of eight when I moved from a mixed infants school to an all boys school and was the youngest and smallest in the class.
In those days, after WW2 and the bombings in London, large numbers of Eastenders were moved to new council estates on the South Coast and these far more streetwise kids quickly formed gangs.
I was regularly beaten up and I was terrified of these bullies from London. I went out for walks or hid behind trees at lunch times to get away from them. It all came to an end when much older prefects saw what was happening and set upon the bullies and gave them a huge beating.
Teachers got to hear of it and gave the bullies the cane at assembly. They didn’t touch me, or anyone else, again.
When youngsters today are caught carrying knives and are asked why they are doing so, often they reply they are scared not to carry them because someone could attack them with a knife.
Thank goodness, way back in the 1950s, kids didn’t carry knives and what I was attacked with was fists and boots.
But back then there was corporal punishment and it worked. Those Eastenders quickly learned what would happen if they bullied again. And there was nothing like the trouble that there is today.
OK, back then we didn’t have drugs in schools, we didn’t have video games filled with violence, or ghastly stuff you could read or view on iphones.
Kids today are bombarded by negative stuff and discipline has gone out of the window in direct proportion to the way punishments have become meaningless. What is the point of sending a teenager to prison, where he or she will meet even more unruly kids and learn more evil ways. And suspended prison sentences are laughable.
I am strongly in favour of corporal punishment carried out in public – both to humiliate the offender (girls as well as boys, women as well as men) and also to inflict pain. The worse the crime, the worse the pain.
It’s my guess that if corporal punishment was the norm we would have far less crime. Take, for example, a woman who repeatedly goes shoplifting in London and was interviewed recently on TV. She admitted she has made a career of theft and knows that if her haul is under 200 pounds police won’t even bother to attend the store to arrest her.
A damn good public birching would very quickly put an end to her activities.
We’re spending a fortune on prisons and even more in future because the prison population is ever rising. There are many better ways to spend that money, and birching provides a very simple solution.
As for those 12 year old murderers, I think that parents should be held equally responsible. Clearly they had little or any control of their offspring and are not fit to be parents. If parents knew they risked a public birching if their offspring got caught with a knife or did anything serious, they would be far more watchful of what their children were up to – or better still, not have them in the first place!
Freebies are part of British Culture
It’s dreadful to listen to all the crazy hypocrisy over the freebies accepted by prime minister Sir Keir – posh frocks for his wife, etc etc.
TV interviewers have had a field day attacking Labour and, of course, so have the right-wing newspapers, when I know, and every journalist knows, that freebies happen everywhere, especially in newspaper and TV newsrooms.
Companies have, and always will, fall over themselves to give something away if they are promoting something and want some free publicity. Rich political donors will lavish money and gifts on politicians if they think it will promote their cause. Some will say it makes the world go round.
I am not defending it, and people in government should be far more careful what they accept – accepting money for fashion clothing does not look good, especially when at the same time they are telling the country people will have to pull their belts in and accept a winter without fuel benefits for the elderly.
My first experience of a freebie was in Jo Lyons tea shop when I was aged 14, where I worked at weekends and school holidays. I was given an out of date huge apricot pie to take home. My mother’s eyes popped out when she saw it and thought her birthday had come early! I learned at Jo Lyons how to become expert at clearing and cleaning tables. A skill never forgotten!
As a newspaper editor I had unsolicited stuff arriving through the post from companies hoping to get some publicity from it. One parcel came from a leading sportswear company. Staff were delighted and so was the charity shop. And no, the company did not get any benefit.
Later in my career I learned that a free editorial in my newspaper was what every restaurant would love, so my advertising department told them that if they advertised with us for six weeks they would get a free editorial from me as editor. My wife and I were entertained by restaurants – and because many restaurants wanted to get on board, the number of wine and dine pages rocketed from one page to five pages a week – in my free newspaper delivered to 80,000 homes every week.
We had an amazing following – people would go to the restaurant after reading my review and order the same dishes as we had eaten so owners had to make sure they were well stocked!
The paid-for paper used to have the five wine and dine pages– but dropped to one, and for us, well it was what I was employed to do, and the paid-for editors hated it, especially because I was running rings around them showing all of them who came from universities with degrees, while I was trained as an apprentice!
One day a holiday coach company called on me asking me if I would publicise European coach holidays. Mine was the first newspaper they had asked in the UK. They offered a commission for every coach filled – the cash not coming to me but the newspaper, I hasten to add. Within months the commission almost paid my salary and our newspaper became one of the most successful in the UK – we were in the top ten free newspapers in the country, in terms of readership and revenue.
Within months we were sending coaches everywhere and other coach companies wanted to get in on the act. As thanks we went on some lovely coach holidays – yes freebies. Acting as hosts on the coach.
We also ran a lonely hearts club in the newspaper, people looking for partners. After my marriage failed, I saw an advert in the column, answered it and the rest is history.
It’s my guess that there are very few people employed in the country who do not get a freebie of one kind or another from their employer – so please let’s stop the hypocrisy – but perhaps politicians should be more careful what they accept, because an equally guilty opposition party will try, whenever possible, to decry it, knowing full well they are also being hypocrites.
And finally on this, let’s put an end to useless uni degrees. When I was interviewing for new staff I would see some university graduates wouldn’t know a news story if it hit them on the nose. I would value more a well educated person from a secondary school – graduated from the university of life. How many graduates leave universities thinking a degree is the ultimate passport to a good job? Well, it’s not.
Believing Fake News
What a country America is. A crackpot puts on social media that immigrants in a town are killing and eating pet dogs and cats to survive and lo and behold a would be presidential hopeful is proclaiming it at as fact, and thousands rush to believe him.
And if that is not enough, the town’s mayor then starts receiving bomb threats. And this did not stop Trump repeating the discredited reports. What on earth possesses any American to think that Trump should again be the president, after what he did five years ago?
And it doesn’t need the Pope to try to intervene to criticise both presidential candidates – Trump for inhumanity in dealing with would-be immigrants in Mexico, and Harris for her stance in abortion, attacking her for being anti-life. She has wrongly been accused of wanting abortion for full-term babies.
Can’t we stop this obsession in lapping up and believing fake news?
