Insanity

YOBS used a makeshift wrecking ball hung from a railway bridge to try to derail a train, in the first of three attacks that put passengers’ and workers’ lives at risk. The weapon, made from a plastic carrier bag filled with bricks, smashed the windscreen of a train after it was suspended from the Rockcliffe bridge in Connah’s Quay. The train was filled with passengers travelling from Llandudno to Manchester, when it was hit at 8.40pm on Saturday.

The gang struck a second time around an hour-and-a-half later when a brick was again hung from the bridge and smashed the windscreen of a train travelling from Holyhead to Crewe, at 10.15pm.

Then yesterday a third train was struck, when a gang hurled bricks at the driver’s cab from the same bridge, as it carried passengers from Chester to Holyhead, at around 12.30pm.
This sort of insanity used to occur in the big cities, and often on motorway bridges. Eventually, the individuals get caught, usually because these people have room-temperature IQs and aspirations to match. They're duly dragged off to the beak, where they receive sentencing if found guilty. And it's here the outcries begin.

If no one was injured in the attacks, the law doesn't take into account possibilities and probabilities; instead, social enquiry reports have to be completed, which inevitably paint a depressing picture of their childhoods and uncaring parents, and the law will then impose 'meaningful' and 'supportive' sentences.

There's good reason for the law to be dispassionate, of course; most decent folk would probably have them hurled into a bottomless pit or exported to Afghanistan, but the law tries to make a considered decision. But what's the real cause of all this?

It's absurdly simple. Bad parenting. Until we in the UK address that issue, then these sorts of insanely stupid acts will continue. Of course, interfering in the 'rights' of people to become pregnant will have the civil liberty groups up in arms. But have we - as a society - possibly reached the point where non-intervention in that process might not be more harmful than intervention? Those who watched the BBC2 programme about the little boy in Liverpool. shot by a thug last year, cannot fail to have been stunned by the fact that the killer's mother repeatedly lied to protect her evil offspring. And she's far from alone. How long can we afford to allow utterly inept, selfish and gruesome women to bear children, or moronic, self-serving men to assume sex is on a par with video games in responsibility terms without enforcing some sort of sea change in the UK culture?