Anarchy in the UK

Article here. Excerpt:

To begin to understand the mayhem in our cities, look at a set of figures on literacy rates that came out a week before the riots began. Teaching a child to read and write is not difficult or expensive. Much poorer countries manage to do it. The statistics in the UK are staggering. A full 63 per cent of white working-class boys and just over half of black Caribbean boys at the age of 14 have a reading age of seven or below. How does that translate into the criminality on our streets? Humiliated in lessons, by 14, the young men I interviewed had either dropped out or were excluded. They then spent their time hanging around on the streets, turning up to school only to sell drugs or stolen goods.

Studies show that about half of the prison population has a reading age below that of an 11-year-old. Of one south London gang I met three years ago, all were bright but semi-literate. Three are now in prison. Bigs, the former leader of one of Brixton’s most notorious gangs, received his first prison sentence at 15. “Other people go from school to university,” he told me. “We go from school to prison.”
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The young men now roaming our streets frighten us because they have such total disregard for our values. But then they have disengaged from society for a reason. They see nothing in it for them. And in this they are quite right. The overwhelming attitude of all the young men I encountered was despair at the prospect of a life on benefits.

The third area in which government intervention has been disastrous is in the home. Politicians are now appearing on TV demanding that parents keep their children under curfew. I wonder what planet they are living on. Certainly not the same one as the boys I know, for whom grown-ups are absent or ineffectual. The children do not even get fed properly. A recent survey found that 49 per cent of British parents did not know where their children were, or whom they were with, in the evenings. Some 45 per cent of 15-year-old boys spent four or more evenings a week hanging about ‘with friends’, compared with just 17 per cent in France.'