This is a cross-post from A Rabbit’s Eye-View of the Hyperborean North.
… to embarrass the next as well suggests you are a bit of a blabbermouth.
Still, at least no-one would consider mocking the Speaker.
Update – as the comments threads descend into a Swiftian netherworld of reaction which is stalked by walking uteruses intent only on getting pregnant so to receive a council property and benefits, one such comment is taken to task by Larkers:
Normal life gets shattered all the time. Why should any girl get immunity from normal life, just because she dropped her knickers? All the parents around her, who are providing for their own bairns, working, earning, saving, have to cope with all the pitfalls of normal bloody life.
Years of brooding resentment have gone into this. It is a view of human life grown downwards.
This ‘breeding’ remark is pernicious. Frankly I am sorry for Mr Flight who seems to me to be a sad character if truth be told.
Sixty years ago my parents had their seventh and final child. None of us has been in debt, what is now called “recovery”, or in trouble with the police. All own their own homes and live sober lives; excepting three went abroad and speak German; but you must allow for some recklessness. I have cousins who also came from what are historically now large families who likewise live blameless lives.
I have had the privilege in older age to get to know many young people; I have watched a fair number grow up. I can say I met very few who gave me anxieties about their attitudes in the long term. They seemed to me, once one got over the tattoos and face rings and strange coloured hair do’s, decent and civilised young men and women.
I can remember ‘dysfunctional’ families back in the 50s. One set about their own father! On a 1950s Sunday afternoon! In many ways we at least know more about underlying problems and subjects such as distressing child abuse are not today hushed up.
Schools had been instrumental in changing lives but recently find themselves marginalised by bureaucracy at the instigation of the right wing press to the status of little more than crammers. Public housing has been designed by people who don’t use it. The disruption of the cities in the re-building programmes of the 50s and 60s have broken up traditional patterns of occupation. When I raced about the streets people could say “I will tell your Father”. Everyone knew their neighbours; on the ‘new estates’ shared experience is today almost always negative.
It has been seen elsewhere and in remote places, how social transformation comes at a price. Some cannot keep up and the collapse of self esteem and will are not confined by geography. De-industrialisation comes at a human cost. In viewing our industrial past it is forgotten how collective it was; people by our standards hardly seem to have had independent lives at all. ‘Freeing up’ society – even ‘choice’ itself – is a great idea except not everyone wants the responsibility; many don’t know where to begin.
Someone once observed the answer to the problems of industrialisation was not less industrialisation but more. However, the remedy to our socially excluded is not greater exclusion.
