YESTERDAY the Labour government was carrying on with its campaign to demonise the country’s youth, reaching truly laughable levels of trivial pursuit.
Its supporter, the Institute for Public Policy Research, set out to prove that Britain’s youth are the worst behaved in Europe.
It found that on every indicator of bad behaviour – drugs, drink, violence, promiscuity – the UK was at or near the top. It must be trying to start a stampede of EU youth into Britain’s ‘badlands’.
The Institute found that, measured against the well behaved German, French and Italian youth, British 15-year-olds are drunk more often and involved in more fights, and a higher proportion have had sex. They are definitely alive and kicking and not couch potatoes.
The institute adds that young Britons are marked out by how they spend their free time. It finds that British youth are much too social. It states that this ‘worst’ behaviour includes in England and Scotland more than 45 per cent of 15-year-old boys spending most evenings out with their friends. This is a truly shocking fact!
In France just 17 per cent of boys allegedly spend their time in the same way. Presumably the other 83 per cent are tucked up in bed by 8pm.
The youth in Britain are so bad, we are told, that some seek Anti-Social Behaviour Orders as the only badge of status that capitalist society is likely to give them. They are obviously not intimidated by the capitalist state attack. One can only warm to them.
British capitalism has lost the confidence of youth. It fears and hates youth so much that it has to pursue them for 24 hours of the day.
The adult population must be extremely grateful for this policing of the allegedly dangerous younger generation.
In fact, it turns out that the adults are even more heavily spied on by the ruling class and its state apparatus.
There are up to 4.2m CCTV cameras in Britain, one for every 14 people, recording the every movement of the working class and the middle class, a level of surveillance that makes George Orwell’s ‘1984’ look amateurish, and makes Stalinist North Korea look a model of freedom.
The UK also holds 3.6m DNA samples – the world’s biggest database. The ruling class is desperate to have everybody on this base from the moment that they emerge from the womb, to establish a nation of criminals, until proven innocent.
These techniques are supplemented by ‘dataveillance’, the use of credit card, mobile phone and loyalty card information, with identity cards, containing a mass of information about the individual, to come.
A generation of youth is being demonised by Asbos, with the usual racist slant that 22 per cent of youth given Asbos are black or Asian – two and a half times the proportion of ethnic minorities in England and Wales to the total population.
At the same time, the whole of the working class and middle class are being criminalised by CCTVs and the ever growing DNA database.
The inventor of DNA ‘fingerprinting’ Professor Alec Jeffreys yesterday warned: ‘When the DNA database was initially established, it was to database DNA from criminals so if they re-offended, they could be picked up.
‘Now hundreds of thousands of entirely innocent people are populating that database, people who have come to the police’s attention, for example by being charged with a crime and subsequently released.’
His concern was that ‘samples taken for one purpose could be used for different purposes in the future,’ ie for fitting people up with crimes that they have not committed.
Crisis-ridden British capitalism and its ruling class is seeking to put the entire working class and middle class into a strait-jacket, to try and preserve its decrepit system and rule.
The working class and its youth, as Marx established, are the gravediggers of capitalism. They will not be intimidated or coerced by the capitalist state, but will take society forward with a socialist revolution to free the productive forces and the whole of society from capitalist exploitation and dictatorship.
