We are all shamed

Is there not a link between the abuse Fiona Pilkington and her family suffered for more than a decade and Carol Hill, the dinner lady who spoke out to the parents of a girl being bullied at school?

I have found it impossible to read fully the reports of the decade long thuggery against Fiona Pilkington and her family. We have had examples like this in Birkenhead, although similar cases in which I was involved took place a few years ago now. I am not saying that there are no such examples in Birkenhead, but the pattern of gang warfare that Fiona suffered for a decade has subtly changed in Birkenhead.

I now get many, many more complaints about the behaviour of adults rather than young people. And I cannot help wondering whether it is some of those young thugs of yester year who have now graduated into being parents themselves.

If this is true then it is doubly dispiriting - dispiriting because of how these individuals wreck other people's lives. But dispiriting also because it denotes a change in what is up until now been a traditional pattern of ‘criminal' behaviour.

That pattern was for some working class lads to get themselves on the wrong side of the law. But this pattern of criminal behaviour for most would cease once they were into their twenties. Setting up home and beginning a family seemed to transform the lives of most of these lads.

That prospect now seems closed to many of them. Too many of them leave school without being able to read or write, are paid benefits indefinitely and never have a job.

Any partnerships they form are usually short-lived and the chaotic life style of the gang is reproduced in the home they form with their partners. Many of these partnerships appear transient.

Dealing with the yobbish behaviour of these families clearly calls for different skills than those needed to deal with the yobs that drove Fiona to commit suicide. Part of any strategy, but only part, is to break in to the supply chain of yobbish behaviour.

That is what Carol Hill tried to do in informing the parents of a little girl who she discovered tied up and being whipped by a group of boys at the school where she is a dinner lady. Mrs Hill has been sacked for unprofessional conduct.

The Sunday papers hint there may be more of this story to come out. But it is difficult to see what could come out that could overthrow the urgent need now to consider a network of laws and rules which make the exercise of a generous public spirit a sackable offence.

The big failure with Labour's anti social behaviour strategy has been that it is exclusively mechanical, and worse still, the machinery is largely run by middle class professionals who do not live in the areas most blighted by anti social behaviour.

The details being given at the inquest into the death of Fiona Pilkington and her daughter Francesca should silence any politician who claims that this strategy against anti social behaviour is working. But no serious rethink can begin without looking at the sacking of Carol Hill.

The aim must be to move back to a self-policing society where neighbours, friends, dinner ladies, voluntary workers, are all singing from the same hymn sheet. Part of this singing is to speak out, and, where possible, act against this tide of yobbism which has already begun to destroy what was once a relatively peaceful self-governing society.