The Curmudgeon

YOU'LL COME FOR THE CURSES. YOU'LL STAY FOR THE MUDGEONRY.

Sunday, September 06, 2009

Family Fun

The case of two brothers who indulged in random torture before having attained the minimum age of recruitment for an employee of Blackwater, Serco or MI5 has prompted Barnardo's chief executive to promulgate the heresy that Family Values may not be the solution that fixes all broken Britons at all times. The brothers' mother apparently gave them cannabis as toddlers and made them forage for food in dustbins, while their father was "allegedly a violent alcoholic". Any question of curtailing the breeding rights of such people will doubtless be lost amid the moral clamour over whether their primary victims should be named, shamed and lynched, or hanged, drawn and quartered, or merely locked up for the rest of their lives.

The chief executive of Barnardo's gave it as his opinion that "we try too hard with birth parents. I have seen children sent back to homes that I certainly wouldn't have sent them back to", and that "if you can take a baby very young and get them quickly into a permanent adoptive home, then we know that is where we have success". The brothers, by contrast, were taken into care three weeks before the incidence of premature usage of assertive interrogative techniques, having been known to social services and the police for several years previously. Since it would be uncharitable to suggest, after so many decades of thinking of the children, that budgetary constraints or market forces were a factor, the brothers were presumably left with their delightful progenitors during those several years because of the sanctity of Family Values. Amid deafening silence from the Home Secretary, the Justice Minister, the Minister for Juvenile Resources, the Minister for Tiny Tots, the Minister of Telephoning to See if Susan Boyle is All Right and their shadows in Daveybloke's Cuddly Cabinet, someone from the Centre for Social Justice sat on the fence, endorsing earlier intervention but recommending "the model of the mother and baby going into care, filling that hole and giving the whole family a chance", as opposed to giving a chance to the individuals who compose it.

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