Sorry to plagiarise Red Julie’s byline, but this one probably will not surprise most sensible bloggers around these here parts!
It turns out that Wavy Davy might have been spouting empty rhetoric yesterday when he said that all looters and rioters will be severely punished. It appears many of them are being let off to roam the streets and to cause more mayhem. Quelle surprise!
I suspect that if they make any more trouble, a good few of them might get (accidentally) battered, as the police and public will know they will NOT be severely punished, by the courts.
Boadicea's Chariot 
No it’s not a surprise. Until Governments make parents responsible for their children’s actions youngsters who break the law will walk free believing, rightly, that they are immune from prosecution.
Agree, Boadicea. There is a dichotomy at the heart of efforts to deal with un-socialised young people summed up by the phrase, ‘juvenile delinquent.’ If an individual is a ‘juvenile,’ then that individual needs to be ‘managed’ into adulthood and before that is done, how can the individual juvenile be considered to be ‘delinquent?’
What we are seeing in England is a society where this management of the juvenile into adulthood has been abandoned and neotonic behaviour – selfishness, lack of forethought, carelessness of, and inability to accept, consequences and the expectancy that the teat will always be available – is carried into what should be adulthood and maturity.
Anthropologists recognise rites of passage into adulthood in all societies, and, until the
sociologistsvoodoo scientists, the education bureaucrats and the marketing whackos got to work, we had our rites of passage in this country also – now there are none, so it should be no surprise that, if there is no management of juveniles into adulthood by either the family/clan or the tribe/village/society, indeed, if such management is actively suppressed by society, juveniles and undeveloped adults indulge in the sort of behaviour we have seen over the last few days.PS. A rite of passage played quite a big part in this movie…any guesses?
Bravo, dear chap, please read the help page on posting YouTube videos; on the menu bar under the Boadicea banner. 😕
I refer the right honorable gentleman to my comment #112 on the post of this same name some days ago.
“You are of course totally right. I note with great cynicism Cambuffoons statement that the police will be given full support and the legal backing to employ whatever methods they deem necessary to regain control of the streets.
‘If you are old enough to commit these crimes then you are old enough to face the punishment.’ Yeah right boy David.
Watch what happens the very first time one of these ‘minors’ suffers so much as a paper cut as a result of detainment.”
Hmm We never saw that u-turn coming did we?