My say

From the BBC's Have Your Say section on controlling binge drinking, particularly in young people:

"Why the hell should I be punished by extortionate price hikes due to some peoples lack of control?!

The report states teenagers/children drinking - hello? Isn't it against the law for them to do this?

When the little darlings end up in hospital to have their stomachs pumped/injuries attended to then arrest their parents.

It's nothing short of neglect. Do not try and justify their disgusting behaviour by saying you can't control them 24/7. Yes you can, that is your job as a parent!!"

Contrast with this story also on the BBC. Clearly not exactly the worlds most thorough investigation of a story, but I think that it shows the flaw in the blanket statement from Have Your Say. The parents are going to be the ones least able to control the behaviour of their children once they get into their teens. Hopefully they've passed on the proper lessons at an early age, but once a child starts to rebel, there's really very little a parent can do. If there are childen out there drinking, and there are, they are going to be more of an influence on their peers than their peers' parents can ever hope to be at that age.

The vast majority of the commenters were outraged by the government proposing a tax hike on alcohol, and rolled out all the old 'nanny state' arguments. When it was pointed out the the organisation that produced this report was not a government body, but a seperate group of health organisations, the response was that it was typical that this government was 'hiding behind' lobby groups.

"There ought to be a tax on busybody organisations that continuously poke their noses into other people's business."

While I don't necessarily agree that a tax rise would be the best solutions (clearly there are more complex factors at work than just cheap booze), but the organisation that has come up with these statistics is not saying that drinking alcohol is wrong or should be banned, but is putting forward a suggestion that could reduce alcohol deaths. Maybe I'm being naive, and maybe these organisations are looking to snare a big chunk of government money as a result of this survey, but I would certainly not describe any of the organisations involved as 'poking their noses into other people's business'. As charities, research groups and political pressure groups, the role of these organisations in our politics is job is to produce data and present it to both the government and the public, and that is what they have done. The fact that a 10% tax increase was one of several suggestions wasn't really picked up, because the word tax was mentioned, so everyone wheels out their penny-pinching-Gordon-Brown pens straight away. It's this kind of knee jerk reaction to (ultimately fairly dry) stories that I hate, blowing them out of proportion and picking out the elements that will get the biggest response, but it's the kind of thing that seems to happen more and more in both journalism and public opinion.

The final thing that both annoyed me and came up a number of times in the comments, features in the middle of this post:

"Putting 10%, as I've heard proposed by some groups, on the price of Alcohol is absolutely ridiculous. Do you really think putting that sort of measley [sic] amount on the price of a drink will put off people who want to drink. All the extra taxes will achieve is to give the government more money to squander on beaurocracy [sic] and useless 'studies' and irritate the majority of responsible drinkers whilst doing nothing to put off hardened drinkers."

The comment itself is not necessarily unreasonable; I agree that a higher tax will probably not have the effect that the study groups hope, and that young people who can get enough money together to afford (probably supermarket) alcohol at the moment will be unlikely to be put off by a small increase in that cost. However, I don't like the tone of the message - treating the studies and suggestions with scorn, while not even suggesting at any kind of alternative solution.

It also annoys me that the poster says that all the taxes will do is 'give the government money to squander on bureaucracy'. Maybe he is speaking in exaggerated tones for effect, but I think that his point is still unhelpful. I agree that the level of bureaucracy in government could probably be reduced, but I also believe that the government appreciates this. I can't imagine how difficult it must be to try and keep track of the vast budgets that the government has to deal with, and I don't like the implication of a blasé government throwing tax money around without a care for the effect on the poor workers from whom the money has been cruelly taken.

Again, I'm straying into naive woolly liberal territory again, but I genuinely don't think that the people in and working for the government are just in it for the quick gain. I don't like the way that modern politics forces people to play games rather than govern (but that's another story for another time), and I think that the people who work hard to get elected and into positions of responsibility do it because they want to make a positive difference to the country. This is why it frustrates and annoys me when I see black-and-white, one-sided, over-simplified analyses of the government as a money grabbing behemoth that doesn't care about the man on the street. The government may be a huge entity, but it is made up of individuals that all want to do their best for Britain as a country, whichever party they belong to.

Penultimately, a particularly helpful view of the Labour party from one comment:

"Labour Party Commandments

You must:

• Work hard to support the idle, MPs, criminals and government employees pensions.
• Accept higher taxes and bills without complaint
• Accept that we're watching your every move
• Use the bus/train to travel to work
• Not smoke or drink
• Not drive/fly
• Eat only organic food
• Accept that the law is on the side of the criminal
• Accept that your are second class citizens in what was your country
• Remember we know best what's good for you"

Does the person who wrote that really believe that that is what the Labour government are trying to do? Presumably not. But why try and understand what someone is trying to do when you can just stand to one side and ridicule them.

Apologies for the any of the above that was rambling, poorly thought out, or just naive liberal bilge, but I think most of it at least vaguely represents my points of view on the topics involved, so I'm not going to attempt to rewrite any more of it at this hour.

And finally, quite a sweet story about a cat.

Up for a debate

I enjoy reading discussions on the internet, political, philosophical, abstract, whatever. The presence of a ubiquitous, anonymous, hugely varied community makes for interesting (if not always erudite, coherent or intelligent) debate. The BBC have a couple of good discussion boards that I read from time to time, and over the last week or so, during my few brief free moments at work, I've been glancing through this particular debate on anti-social behaviour, and how to fix Britain's youth.

Reading through the (incorrectly apostrophised) Readers Recommended listing, which sorts the posts by the number of users who have registered their 'agreement' with the contents of the post, a couple of things become clear. Firstly, that the vast majority of highly rated posts have not only a distinctive right-wing slant to them, but also a distinctive anti-liberal slant. I don't want to get too much into my personal politics and any left vs. right business, but I felt that it was an interesting distinction to make. Secondly, the majority of people who top the readers' recommended list are ones proposing simple solutions. Among the most often suggested solutions are:

• Punish the parents.
• Punish the kids properly (inc. bring back capital punishment)
• Zero Tolerance
• Make prisons more undesirable places to live

I think a full discussion of my views and opinions on these suggestions and the underlying problems would be something that would be long, waffley and ultimately pretty uninteresting to read, so in the spirit of Bambi's last post (and as a consequence of my own tiredness), I shall attempt to condense my views:

You can't treat people like animals and expect them to then behave like humans. To train animals, certainly in the traditional sense, you reward them for doing the right thing and punish them for doing the wrong thing. While this method is in general the basis of teaching anything to behave in any particular way, it is too simplistic to really be applied in the same way to humans. The complexity of human interaction and human society along with heightened feedback (you can ask a child what they are thinking, but you can't ask a dog) mean that simply providing rules and then enforcing them with a carrot-and-stick mentality can easily fail.

If a child talks out of turn in class and is caned as punishment, the child will probably not talk out of turn in class again, certainly in the short term. However, the child will also pick up the message that to stop someone doing something you need to cause them pain.

If a teenager steals a car and gets sent to a prison for 6 months, where he is treated like an animal by the other prisoners (and possibly the prison authorities), all he learns is that he really doesn't want to get caught again. The only thing that has changed when he emerges from prison is that he has more fear and hatred for authority. He has the same life situation that drove him to steal a car, the same group of friends and family that failed to prevent him stealing a car and the only difference will be that next time he gets caught with a stolen car, he'll be driving twice as fast to get away. I'm sure that's something we all want to see.

If the child's parents have their benefits cut (assuming we bend, for the moment, to the stereotype that his parents are on benefits), they will be less able to provide for themselves and for the child. This change will not make the parents more likely to teach the child good life lessons, it will not make them spend more productive time with the child. It will almost certainly lead to a decrease in the child's quality of life, in the same way that any legal punishment would, but with the disadvantage that the 'punishment' goes on behind closed doors and without any regulation.

More importantly, by the time the child has turned 11 or 12, if they are already causing trouble and behaving anti-socially, it is very difficult for their parents to actually have any effect on them. By the time a child becomes a teenager, it is almost certain that their friends will have more of an influence on their actions than their parents will. Punishing the parents in this situation is unjust and detrimental to both them and the child.

I'm already starting to waffle, so I'll try and wind it up now.

'Zero-tolerance' is a term that sounds comforting: we've seen what'll happen if we give these kids leniency, so let's get tough on them now. If we're talking about teenagers (or even younger children), however, then we are talking about people who are still changing and learning as they grow. To teach them at this stage that they are so different from the rest of society that they need to be seperated from it; that there are no scales of grey surrounding acceptable behaviour, only legal and illegal; that the way to deal with a problem is to punish the person creating the problem; that there are easy answers to any social problem; even that the idea of 'tolerance', in whatever context, is an undesirable idea, is to push them even further away from what we want them to become. Assuming, of course, that we want them to become contributing members of society, and we don't just want them to go away.

That last paragraph was quite long and poorly constructed. In which senses it mirrored the whole of this post. I blame the late hour.

As a final point, I'd like to confirm that I'm not offering any easy solutions of my own (or indeed, in this post, any solutions at all). I believe there are things we can do to help reduce anti-social behaviour, but I don't think any of them are quick or easy. Maybe I'll even write some of them on here at some point.

I want to try and write more about this kind of issue (and other issues), and any future posts will probably overlap with this one and with each other. For the record, my views are complex and changeable. They will not be encompassed by any one thing I write on here, and they may change in the futue. Whatever I currently think, however, I'm always up for a debate.