Teenagers are going to fiddle about with each other's bodily bits. They always have and they always will. I recall some enjoyable experimentation form my youth, and naturally I required a statistically representative sample size. However, full sex didn't come about too early because everyone knew some fool who had landed a girl pregnant and landed himself with either an early marriage or sixteen years of payments. Now an NHS buffoon has said that teenagers have as much right to a full sex life as an adult. Well, they can have mine. I'm going through a dry spell so long I've almost forgotten what goes where. I'd be happy to swap my adult sex life for a modern teenage one.

Legally, once they hit sixteen they can have sex with anyone who'll have them. According to the law, they are sexually mature adults at sixteen. Some actually are, some aren't, because the one thing none of the smug morons who dish out rules will ever understand is that people aren't all the same.

So, they can legally bonk away to their heart's content at sixteen. They'll need to get the bus to each other's houses because they can't start learning to drive for another year. They'll have to wait until they're eighteen to have a smoke afterwards, and if they fancy a nice meal with wine beforehand, well, they'll probably have to wait until they're fifty by the time the Hysterical Harpies of Health have finished.

Some of those killed in the recent round of shoot-the-barely-armed-soldier in Afghanistan were twenty years old. They would have been denied a bottle of wine in Tesco. They would have been asked for ID if buying tobacco. They would have been turned away from all the 'over-21' boozeramas. The Puritan Righteous would have insisted they keep the dangly in the trouser holster until they were older. Well, they didn't get older. They died protecting us from a bunch of mountain men who weren't really much of a threat to us at all. That's right - I don't believe any religious nutjob on the other side of the planet poses any threat. When they come here, that's different. They have to come here to be a threat because they don't have long range missiles. We do. So why are we sending soldiers? All we need to send is a postcard with a picture of a missile on it and a note saying 'Get the idea?' That needs fifty pence out of the defence budget and we can use the rest to buy proper equipment for the army.

How can a country have no problem with regarding someone as sufficiently adult to join the Army and therefore choose to put their life at risk, and yet consider them too young to have sex or to decide for themselves whether or not to smoke or drink? Why are there so many people intent on telling us what to do, how to live and what to think? And why are there now so many stages to growing up?

It used to be easy. When you were sixteen you could choose to leave school and get a job, or stay on and try for a better job later. Leaving early was not a shameful thing. In fact, the only way to get enough years of NI to get a full pension was to start work at 16. We did not look down on those who left school because, while we were still wearing school uniform and reading books, they were earning money and in some cases, starting the mortgage payments on a house and/or starting their own businesses. Imagine starting a 25-year mortgage at say, 17. When you hit 42, your house is paid for. I'm still paying and I'll stil be paying when I retire unless I get seriously lucky. They had real money. We had pocket money. That's all going to stop now because nobody gets out of school until they're 18. That choice is gone. The option to grow up has been deferred.

At 16, the option to smoke was there. I didn't take it up at that time. That particular hobby had to wait until I had money. At 16, the option to get married and start a family was there. It still is, but how anyone can do that when they can't escape the school system is hard to see.

18 was the biggie. That marked definite adulthood because then you were allowed in to the Big People's Place. The pub. You could go to the bar and buy drinks yourself. If you were a boy, the act of buying a pint without having to distract the barman from thinking about your age was the point at which you became a man. With all the responsibilities that included. If you hurt yourself, you didn't sue, you didn't look for someone to blame, you could no longer go crying to Mum, you had to deal with it. Fail that test and you'd be derided without mercy. At 18 you were accepted as adult by the tribe.

There was also a big celebration at 21, but as far as I could tell, the only extra thing you could do then was have sex with your own gender, and I've never been interested. I think the 21 thing was a bit of a hangover from the old days. 16 and 18 were the only two stages that mattered.

Now, at 16 you can get married and have kids but you can't smoke or drink or leave school. At 16 you can legally work but you can't leave school.

At 16.5 you can join the Army but you still can't leave school yet. The Army has raised the maximum age because they aren't getting enough recruits, and they expect to have soldiers still fighting at 55. They ain't seen nothing yet. Wait until the school leaving age reaches 18 in a year or so.

At 17 you can start learning to drive but you still can't get out of school. By now, you could have a wife and kids at home, you could be working all night every night to support them but you can't get out of school. You still can't cut back on the stress with a smoke or a beer. Oh, and despite having a fairly firm grasp of the birds and bees, you can't watch an 18 film yet either. You can, however, pay taxes so that the Ripper's husband can watch them.

At 18 you can buy a beer in a pub but you can't buy it in a supermarket. So you cannot have a glass of wine with dinner but you can sit in the pub all evening. Unless you've also decided to take up smoking. You'll have to go outside to do that. At least you can finally leave school.

When do these kids become adults? The pub is no longer a marker. In there, we're still treated like children who can't be trusted to make their own decisions. We used to have that first decision at 16 - stay in school or leave and start a career. That option is gone. We were trusted, at 16, to choose whether or not to smoke. No longer. We were trusted, at 16, to decide whether to have sex and who with. If we got it wrong, we had to deal with it. Nobody else's problem.

Not being allowed to leave school is something that happens to children. So they cannot be considered to even begin becoming adult until 18 now. It's not that the kids won't take responsibility for their own lives. It's that they are not allowed to.

The Righteous ensure that chldren always get their way. That anything a child says or does trumps an adult's view or actions. It's not the child's fault that the discipline is gone. It's not the child's fault that they can do what they like and get away with it all. It IS the child's fault for doing those things but then, adults are supposed to teach children how to behave in a social group as they are growing. So while it is the child's fault if they act like little shits, it's not the child's fault that they don't know they're acting like little shits. They've been told it's okay. Smashing things is self expression. Here, have an iPod.

Now the Righteous have blurred the transition between childhood and adulthood so that these kids don't know when they've grown up. The first time they realise it is when the Righteous turn on them.  At some point, they will find that all those Righteous who defended their every whim against adults, now defend children against them. Smashing windows used to be legitimate self-expression, blamed on boredom and social inequality and made-up syndromes designed to make money for psychologists. Now it's drunken loutish behaviour and they must be put away for the sake of the cheeeldren. It's the same behaviour by the same people. Nobody tells you when the Righteous will take away your self-expression and turn, snarling, at those they once protected.

Is it any wonder kids are confused? Is it any wonder those short-tempered teenage hormones send them into a rage?

Look at the sex story. Get pregnant as a teen and you get a free house. But you're bad and irresponsible. But here's some money. But you shouldn't be doing it. You'll get a horrible disease of the willy. You'll get a cushy life for sixteen years - longer if you have another one. Don't have sex. Have as much sex as you want. We're going to look after you and give you all you need but we despise you at the same time. Christ, I'm nearly fifty and it confuses the hell out of me. What's going through a sixteen-year-old's mind, faced with that?

Discipline, responsibility and consequences. We used to have those. If you were stealing and beating people up, you could expect to get a beating yourself. Or prison. Or both. If someone caught you breaking in to their house, they could whack you and call the police and you'd be arrested. Now, if you whack a burglar, you get arrested and you pay him compensation. Without the whacking, it's community service, which some have used to case new joints for later burglary (it's happened here). There is no real consequence. Schools have no credible disciplinary threat. Whatever the kids do, there's a Righteous with an excuse. These kids don't show responsibility for their actions because they've been taught not to. When I was a kid it was easy. You did something wrong, you got whacked and you didn't do it again. No confusion. No ambiguity. This is right and that is wrong. Easy.

We now have an awful lot of utterly revolting thugs who roam about in gangs and stab and shoot each other. Most kids are not like this, but those who are not owe more to their parents and to their own thinking abilities than to the meddling of the Righteous, who have consistently attempted to put a stop to such things as parents and thinking. It has nothing to do with money. Being poor does not automatically make a child evil, nor does it automatically make parents uncaring. Being rich does not automatically mean the reverse, either.

However, giving more money to uncaring parents and feral children to 'solve the problem' seems to be the only answer Government has. It does not solve the problem. It makes it worse.

You do not stop bad behaviour by rewarding it. You do not stop bullies by rewarding them. You do not stop teen pregnancies by giving them State support. In each case, you reinforce the behaviour by rewarding it.

The only thing Labour, Tories and Lib Dems and most other parties think about is money. Problem? Throw money at it. Not working? Throw some more. Still not working? Raise taxes and throw some more.

Some things are not about money. At all. Most social ills have nothing to do with money and are in fact made worse by money. Money and Righteous meddling leads to the situation we now have, where even the police can't work out what the law is any more and children trying to make the transition to adult have no fixed point to focus on any more. They are going through bodily and hormonal changes at a rate that's different for everyone, they are confused and awkward during that change and then they are faced with conflicting messages from figures who'd like to believe their opinions matter but who are actually no more than verbal sewage outlets. At puberty, the child going through transition looks to adults for guidance. What's happening? What's it all about?

What they get in response are authoritative declarations of  'This is good and bad at the same time, you must and must not behave this way, you can and cannot say and do these things and you are not an adult until we've turned against you. Oh, and if you become a problem we'll throw money at you and keep throwing it as long as you remain a problem.'  Work that one out while your body metamorphoses and hormones you didn't know you had reshape your brain.

The highest teen pregnancy rate in Europe. Streets less safe than Beirut.

Is it any surprise, really?


Immigrants are not to blame for immigration. The Righteous are to blame for paying them to come.

Children are not to blame for feral behaviour, selfishness and the Sense of Entitlement. The Righteous taught them to be that way.

Know your enemy, and know that he's good at hiding behind his creations.