Over at Antonia Bance's blog she's got a piece on what we can do to help prevent any more Rhys Jones type horrors. One thing stands out for me. She says:

I don’t believe that anyone is born a criminal (one of the reasons why I’m on the left)

I'm not sure that follows. The other day I was having a dicsussion on another forum with someone whose personal political hero was, he said, Peter Hichens. I don't think that people at that end of the spectrum would ever believe that people are born criminal either.

Where they would differ is in whether the chance of committing crimes was determined by one's socio-economic outlook and therefore whether spending money on particular groups of people helps prevent such a descent into crime or not.

What they would say is that the suggestion that because you're in a poor or deprived area or have few opportunities you are more likely to turn to crime is itself an unjust slight on the vast majority of people in poor or deprived circumstances who live without committing crimes.

They would say that the sort of language used by the late Victorian social reformers, such as in that Charles Booth map of east London poverty where whole areas were blocked out as being "vicious and semi-criminal" that, with a bit of outside assistance, could be lifted out of such a plight, was patronising middle class liberal rubbish that let people off the hook of taking personal responsibility for themselves. And that "the left" by adopting that prognosis perpetuate the problem.

Me - I don't know. I believe in the innate goodness of everyone. And that the free will with which we are all vested means that everyone, rich or poor, chooses to do right or wrong. But I also believe that many are diddled out of their natural birthright by the great monopolies that the anarchists, libertarians and liberals of that late nineteenth century idenitifed. And that pre-distributing that common birthright ought to be enough to give everyone sufficient opportunity to be able to make he choice not to commit crime. That we ought not to be deciding how to spend others' money so much as simply making sure that people have their common birthright in the first place and then leaving them to their own decisions.

Just one final thing on Rhys Jones and other teen murder victims before I shut up about it...

I spotted this comment on another blog :

"what is going on in this country, if children are not being abducted and killed, by adults, they are being killed by people of their own age, we need to stop this now"

...and to be sure, the reaction of some in the political and media sphere is encouraging this kind of hysteria, but, whatever the tragedy of each individual case, we ought to recall that these incidents are still very rare. There are over thirteen million under eighteens in this country and the vast, vast majority will make it to adulthood without these sort of traumas.