Poor Man About Town

I noticed this ad in a shop window "Sales Consultant Requred - Apply Within", what happened to good old 'shop assistant'; 'sales staff' etc. Working in a shop can be badly paid, employers do not want to change that version of reality; so what do they do? They change the language, give the job some status but not much in the way of financial incentive to reflect this. Shop staff work extremely harm and sometimes have to put up with an awful lot of crap from irate customers, most move into better paid jobs with better status; I should know I was one of them.

The weasling of the English Language can be found in the lingo and jargon of the real estate industry. Take a look at these word:

• Stunning new apartments
• Exciting development

Now would you like to go home after a hard day at work to a Stunning New Apartment, no, you want to relax, have your tea, pour yourself a drink and flop out in front of the telly. You don't want to be stunned by the place in which you live, you want to relax.

Exciting developments usually occur close to railway lines, social housing estates, motorways. Yep, I guess you can expect a little excitement in such developments. It happened to me when I moved out of London into an Exciting Development.

Then we have further weasling around with the language, I read in today's Observer:

Crime czar: stop calling children 'yobs'

Somebody needs to tell this guy that no-one calls children yobs, people call yob children yobs. There he is in a well-paid job hoping that changing the language will make the problem go away. He ought to go and live on an Exciting New Development close to a social housing estate and see whether his view will change. I read in yesterday's Guardian about how youths are terrorising an entire district of Manchester and where "grown men" are frightened to confront the problem because they feel they may have their house "bricked".

Yet in today's Observer we have this. Is this guy a bozo or what?

What went wrong was this -

Prior to the advent of Thatcherism, numerous juvenile delinquents were looked after by the state in Approved Schools or Community Homes - the purpose of their existence was to house, socialise and educate the more deprived and criminal elements of the community. Children who came from what was termed broken homes. There was recognition of the social and psychological causes for their behaviour. They were housed in large houses with massive grounds, it was like a holiday camp - this was designed to give these kids a sense of space. For their communities they had the respite of not having to put up with their horrible behavious, indeed this was confronted within the confines of the school. I guess it was a form of exile, but better than the penal system in that they were not deprived of their freedom, got well fed and asylum from really horrible homes. Having said that, the more extreme delinquents were either placed in Borstal Training or Detention Centre. Remember that you could walk down the street in the 60's and 70's relatively unmolested.

The Thatcher administration did not agree with this approach, ideologically it was namby-pamby, economically a waste of money. There was a wholesale shutdown of these homes. The Thatcher Administration replaced these places with the Short, Sharp, Shock - The Administration discovered that the juvenile crime wave was escalating and the Detention Centres were proving far too costly. It shut down the Detention Centres and addressed juvenile crime with Criminal Justice Teams whose existence was to look at ways and means of keeping kids out of prison (far too costly - remember, this was a time when moneterism called the shots). Options for sentencing were probation, community service, attendance centre, fines, conditional discharge, anything apart from custodial (this was reserved for more serious crimes such as murder and robbery of your local Abbey National).

Well, you can imagine - there was a period of economic downturn, younger people were leaving home and had children to get council housing - these are the children with which we are having to deal. Numerous communities are having to shoulder this burden, the quality of their life is being affected.

Now some overpaid Czar tell us not to call such children yobs!. Stop trying to shape the world by language - the only way you can shape it is by spending some money, open up some community homes for these children, give them the chances they need and hopefully turn them into contributors to their communities rather than their destroyers.