You cannot be serious Mr Cameron!

Day 31 – gosh that means I will be 50 in 19 days time.  One good thing, I finally managed to send out invitations to my bring- and- share party; or according to the auto correct "being- and -share" party.  Sometimes I really hate the spell checker!  I hate the way it thinks it knows better than I what I want to say.  What is it with these artificial and intelligent electronics?  My Dragon NaturallySpeaking voice to text program regularly makes up completely different sentences compared to what I have actually dictated.  Even when I go back and correct it we have to have a fight about it!  E.g. whether I actually meant to say "fall" or "wall"

Me: I said "wall"

Dragon NaturallySpeaking: are you sure I think "fall" is better here – let's stick with fall

me: no I said "wall, wall, wall!"

Dragon NaturallySpeaking: oh all right, no need to shout "wall” it is then.

I just don't need to argue with technology as well as my pseudo-teenage son (he's 11 but well into teenage stroppiness). 

By far the worst offender has to be Facebook.  What is it with that software?  There are never two consecutive days, (sometimes hours) where it works the same way!  It hides my messages, prevents me from sharing posts and, get this; it even decided that I was too geriatric and day out after 7 PM and unilaterally decided on the end time for my party when I posted the event.  But I digress…

What I wanted to write about today is David Cameron and his “response” to the riots.  For all you Tory supporters, this is not political bias, if the Labour leader had come up with such a pointless, gimmicky response, I would have been on him like a ton of bricks too.

How dare he speak of "slow motion moral collapse"?  Where have you been?  Do you think this happen overnight?  No, you just couldn't be bothered because it wasn’t in your backyard.  Now you are frightened.  Now you realise that we have been turning the UK into the landscape of the Mad Max film.  Which suggest one thing: it was predicted.   

Storytellers, commentators, authors all saw that a divided society leads to lawlessness and the need to wall off the haves and the have-nots.  You don't need a Ph.D. in sociology to comprehend this.  It's obvious!  If we are governed by consent, you have to earn that consent.  You must maintain the have-nots below the tipping point.  I.e. the point where there are more people, who for whatever reasons identify more with the anarchy than social order.

Why do you think taking benefit away from people who rioted is an effective solution?  Either, they will be locked up in prison and would lose their benefit anyway, or if they get a non-custodial sentence, i.e. the courts felt that their crime did not require incarceration as a punishment; why are you punishing them twice?  How will taking money away from someone with no hope of getting a job help rehabilitate them?  Unless this is, of course, a job creation scheme for burglars and thieves, which is most likely what they will be forced to become without any legitimate source of income.

Giving the police the power to remove facemasks from rioters – errr whilst they are rioting?  I'm pretty sure that if the police had got close enough to any of the rioters to remove their facemasks, then they would have done so!  If on the other hand, the police manage to arrest them and they are in custody, the police will know who they are anyway.  This makes no sense whatsoever.  Unless you actually meant you wish to give the police the power to remove facemasks from young people walking down the street.  I don't know about you, I personally don't see that many people, apart from Muslim women walking about with their faces covered outside of a riot!  Oh I get it this is a back door policy for getting rid of the Niqab. 

All-out war on gangs – honestly Mr Cameron have you forgotten that the "gangs" are armed and quite able to fight a war?  The sensible anti gang programs that stand the best chance of working are already being implemented by the relevant police forces.  It's not a lack of policy initiatives that is the problem Mr Cameron; it's a lack of wongga!  Money!  Cash!!

For more than 20 years I worked in regeneration.  I had access to millions of pounds of government funding, which although packaged under a different title, was primarily aimed at "turning the lives around of the most troubled families in the country" My analysis: short-term ineffective funding for programs that aren't given enough time to embed and work before the next initiative redistributes the money to the latest innovative idea.

I was eventually forced to conclude that the reason that nothing was given enough time or resources to work was because, basically no one was actually looking for a solution.  It's akin to the barefoot and pregnant analogy.  If you are always too busy with your distress, then you never get the time to think more deeply about what is the cause of it.  Our system is based on the exploitation of the many by the few.  The last thing the guardians of the system want is for people to be in a position to start asking serious questions about it.

Not one for backing three legged horses, I don't think I'll be putting any money on the successful outcome of these policies Mr Cameron - but of course their failure is your success!