If you behave badly enough, we'll pay for a life-coach!

Three items in this morning’s paper confirm the suspicion that the people who run this country are, by reason of sheer stupidity and a refusal to learn from past mistakes, utterly unfit to do so. Firstly, 120,000 problem families – i.e. loose agglomerations of unemployed sperm donors, alcoholics, drug addicts, prostitutes, child-abusers, wife-beaters, criminals, their feral offspring, and pit-bull terriers  (referred to collectively as “the underclass”) - will have a further £450 million of taxpayers’ money squandered on their useless, moronic hides in the form of an army of “family troubleshooters”.

The idea that sending in a bunch of no doubt left-wing life-coaches is going to get these wretches off welfare and out of the courts is, er… optimistic, to say the least.

If the troubleshooters were all former army drill-sergeants intent on teaching these wastrels that self-discipline and taking responsibility for your own life are the keys to a useful, happy existence, some good might come of the scheme. But these troubleshooters will turn out to be the sort of bleeding heart left-wingers who have done so much to create and foster fecklessness, irresponsibility and anti-social behaviour for the past half-century. For years, liberal social workers, teachers, probation officers, magistrates, priests and politicians have been telling the underclass that the moral and physical squalor of their shabby little lives is the fault of The System – and, of course, to an extent, that’s true, insofar as social workers, teachers etc. are the system.

Granted, my last set of predictions (concerning Cameron and the veto) were hopelessly wrong, but this time I feel I’m on firmer ground. This new scheme – a classic example of the “hell, let’s announce something – anything – as long as it’s under half a billion, to make it look like we’re across the problem” sort of initiative – will result in the following:

• The underclass will grow
•  The promise to pay troubleshooters partly by results will evaporate – they’ll get paid for failing
•   The troubleshooters’ main functions will be to ensure the underclass are able to scrounge even more benefits – and to protect them in the unlikely event that the criminal justice system attempts to curb their appalling behaviour
• Within six months, those involved in the scheme will be blaming its failure on underfunding, and will be demanding the right to waste even more of our money

Another story this morning was the decision by Salford City Council to save money by refusing to deal with noisy neighbours – from now on, anyone being driven mad by barking dogs or excessive DIY racket can scream all they want, because there’ll be no one to stop them. The police offloaded all responsibility for protecting the public from inconsiderate or downright malevolent noise-makers years ago (so, one presumes, they could get stuck into all that lovely paperwork) – so now the ratepayers of Salford have no one to call on. If they try to take matters into their own hands, of course, Old Bill will appear instantly and the full force of the law will come crashing down on their blameless heads.

Finally, the Telegraph today tells us something that the Guardian reported last month – that new arrivals at Ashfield juvenile prison outside Bristol aren’t exactly being given the “short, sharp shock” treatment that many of us might feel might do them some good:

“Two tiny bars of soap have been laid out on the desk of his cell, there's a television, a white plastic comb, two packets of Colgate and a pink toothbrush. In the future he will have to buy his own toothpaste and shampoo, but this is the welcome pack everyone receives. On the bed there is also a pile of sweets – a pack of Polos, fun gums, Refreshers, a Fudge bar – and some orange squash.”

And there you have the whole problem in three nutshells. If you commit a crime, you’ll be rewarded with sweeties. If you make life miserable for other people by making a lot of noise, you’ll get away with it. If you’re sufficiently anti-social and feckless, you’ll get your own taxpayer-funded life coach.

I reckon about three-quarters of British adults (and quite a large percentage of our children) understand only too well that if you constantly protect idiots from the consequences of their own bad behaviour, they’ll behave even more badly in future, and others will be tempted to follow suite.

I wonder why our public sector has so much trouble grasping a fact that the rest of humanity has never had any trouble grasping?