David Davis
This piece from Devil’s Kitchen contains perhaps the most thoughtful and insightful comments from respondents that I have seen recently about this sad place. Here’s one in full, with which I can personally agree from experience of having to teach some of these poor, miserable, robbed youths:-
” …if you live in shit and continue to elect the people who keep you in shit simply because, historically, your family has always voted for shit, then possibly all you are going to get is… well… shit. “Yup. Exactly. And Tories and Liberals are exactly the same. I’m nearly 56, pity it took me more than 45 years to learn that for myself.I bitterly regret the day I first picked up a copy of the Guardian; and the same for the day I first watched the beeb. Long time ago now.Too late for me … but I’ve taken to talking to gangs of youngsters when I come across them hanging around on street corners. I was shocked (really) when I first discovered that almost none of them even know the names of any political party other than Labour (really). Shocked to discover that none knew anything at all of our pathetic electoral processes. Don’t you learn Civics in school? Politics? No. Don’t you do Citizenship classes? Yes. What do you do in them? Islam. Yes, seriously – I’ve been told exactly this. And I do not ask leading questions.
Then they start asking me questions, always questions. And naturally enough, I give them answers 🙂 . I’ve been as long as an hour trying to get away to get back home – but there’s always one more question.
These kids aren’t stupid. They KNOW that something’s wrong in their lives, but they don’t know enough to know what it is (LA italics). No adult ever takes them seriously, and when someone like me comes along and does take them seriously then they start asking their serious questions – give them straight unpatronising answers and they can’t get enough of it – every answer leads to more questions.
They aren’t thick – they’ve just been kept deliberately ignorant. And they know it.
