There is no shortage of post-riot commentary pieces about what to do with Britain’s under-educated and unemployed teens. The prize for most dangerous proposal so far goes to Mr. Mark Street of Doha, Qatar, an expat Brit who writes to the Financial Times to express his “shame at these disgraceful scenes.” A lot of us share that sentiment. But I’m not quite so keen on Mr. Street’s proposed solution:
My suggestion would be to introduce legislation to create a compulsory two-year “national service” for young people leaving school with minimal qualifications. Not a military service, but one with military discipline, the objective of which is to help the less fortunate in places such as the Horn of Africa, building basic infrastructure or distributing food aid. That would give some purpose to their lives, and showing them how well off they are in relation to so many people in the world might teach some lessons that our education system has so profoundly failed in doing.
To which one can only say no, no and thrice no. I suppose I just about grasp the “moral education” argument here. But does anyone really think it would be feasible – let alone advisable – to ship thousands of narky British teenagers into a famine-stricken and violent part of the world like the Horn of Africa? Who would protect the truculent little fellows from bandits and Islamist militias? Would this army of hoodied road-builders have to be housed in a sort of gulag archipelago of work camps? How resistant would they be to disease? How many vats of high-factor sun cream would we need to ship through Mombasa to protect these pale-skinned sons of Britannia from the glaring African sun? Has anyone noticed that the Empire is dead yet?
And so on and so forth. While I am always sympathetic to conservative nostalgia, Mr. Street would probably be best advised to advocate more practicable old-school policy options, such as putting rioters in the stocks and pelting them with offal.
