Home Office defeated by small child

OK, possibly a slightly misleading headline, but it made me laugh... Anyway, 15-year-old "W" in Richmond has won his case against a 9pm curfew. Naturally, the Home Office will be appealing (although not in that sense), their main argument apparently being that W "had never been stopped by police inside a dispersal area", so was unable to 'claim'.

A Home Office spokeswoman is cited:

"Whilst not limited to young people, 'teenagers hanging around' is a big cause of concern to the public as cited in the British Crime Survey."

And therein lie so many reasons as to why the future of the country is in doubt. Do we actually understand our younger generation any more? Who can say. Do we expect them to just behave, despite the huge amount of pressure (socially, educationally and commercially) for them to conform to whatever-we've-decided this week?

I'm not a parent, but will continue to question our whole attitude towards the people who will be taking over the country when we're too old to run it anymore. The politicians will persist in claiming that parents should take responsibility for the actions of their children, and they're partially right. But they're also absolving themselves of any responsibility to society invested in them when they became MPs. The kicker is that adults and children alike are still part of a social fabric that all of us are a part of. Responsibility for anyone in that fabric also partially lands upon all of us, but so far (and increasingly moreso) our response is to look the other way, and hope things we don't like get "mopped up" by the police.

And then we'll be shocked when we do one day find ourselves in a police state.