Let me ask you a simple (possibly hypothetical) question. If you go out drinking one evening, and you drink so much that you have difficulty walking, and in you attempts to stagger home you trip up the roadside kerb, fall over, and injure yourself. Is your first thought to sue the council? If you answer, 'yes', then you are like a significant number of people in today's society who believe that their actions, and the repercussions of those actions, are not their own, but someone else's responsibility.
Another question. You are a 15 year old girl. You go out one evening, drink alcohol, get a bit merry, have casual sex, get pregnant and have a baby. Is your first thought going to be: what council house would I like and, what office do I go to for benefits? If you think this is an acceptable line of thought, then you may well be someone who has difficulty accepting responsibility for your own actions.
Personal responsibility is the acceptance that my actions, and the consequences of my actions, are my responsibility. This simple premise forms the very bedrock of our justice system, and as such is a cornerstone of our society.
However, over the last 30-40 years a serious faultline has opened up under this crucial foundation. This faultline has been created through a number of socially seismic disturbances. The removal of discipline in the raising of children is one. The creation of the monster known as the 'Nanny State' is another.
Let's look at the former for a moment. It is a cliché to say this, but 30 years a go, if a policeman told you off for riding your bike on the pavement, and you took no notice, you may well have got a clip round the ear. If you were rude or disruptive at school, you might get the slipper (this writer got several slipperings during his secondary years).
In other words, there were repercussions for bad behaviour. In our 21st century society, discipline has been removed, and with it the vital learning experience that if I do something wrong, there will be repercussions, and sometimes, unpleasant and possibly painfully so. Please don't think that the threat of exclusion is a punishment. It is not, it is a gift. Neither are ASBOs punishments. They are rather badges of honour among a certain social class.
Let's look at the 'Nanny State' for a moment. The 'Nanny State' really came into being on the 5th July 1948, with the creation of the NHS (National Health System). It is not unreasonable to say it was possibly one of the most momentous social changes for the population of the UK. For the first time UK citizens could look to the State for provision of vital health care regardless of their social or economic standing, and let's not deny that this was a very good thing.
But it fundamentally shifted, within society, the fulcrum of responsibility. No longer was the individual responsible for their health care - if they had the means to pay for it - but now the responsibility fell to the state. Of course, every working adult contributed to the NHS in the form of National Insurance and general taxes, but nonetheless, we now looked to the state to look after us.
Nationalisation (euphemistically referred to as, Public Ownership') of industry was a central policy of the Labour government in 1945 and very quickly became more and more of a creeping menace which saw the nationalisation of the Bank of England, and the coal, aviation, telecommunications, Transport, electricity, gas, iron and steel industries, and has continued through to the part-nationalisation, in 2008, of the Royal Bank of Scotland and the newly merged HBOS-Lloyds TSB.
What this has meant is the de-empowering of the individual in favour of an all encompassing enrolment of the state as protector, benefactor..... Nanny.
Thus has our individuality, as citizens of a democratic country, become eroded, and left behind the overwhelming misconception, in the minds of many people, that it doesn't matter what I do, the state (or someone else) will 'pick up the tab'.
So now, children are growing up in a social climate which tells them either explicitly or implicitly, that it doesn't matter what they do, how they behave, who they hurt, who they disrespect, who they rob (and even, increasingly, who they kill) that it's not their responsibility and there will be little, if any, punishment or repercussions.
That is totally unacceptable and is leading us to complete social breakdown.
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