Jon Bright (London, OK): Poor Rhys Jones is dominating comment sections recently, with a rather predictable left right split. On the right Janet Daley is talking about the erosion of social values in the Telegraph: "it was the poor - struggling to keep their families on the straight and narrow - who depended on devices such as stigma and shame to police their own communities". Iain Dale links it to single parent families - lack of a strong male role model in particular. Cameron has called for a "social covenant" to extend the responsibility for fixing 'broken society' on to everyone - something similar to the "military covenant".
For the left Madeline Bunting is in the Guardian talking about life chances - 90,000 boys are leaving school every year without a single GCSE - following up Mary Riddell the day before (who thought the figure closer to 30,000). We've never filled the gap left in male employment by the decline of the industrial sector, she argues.
The debate over 'what to do' has yet to be coloured by the discovery of the identity of the killer, so it's unsurprising people are talking in generalities. As yet we know nothing about his or her actual background. All, to a certain extent, are blaming certain perceived consequences of a neoliberal economic system - whether they be a loss of traditional values or widening economic equality. But the stuff on lack of GCSEs certainly sparked my interest. Can our education system really be producing 30,000 (or even 90,000) people a year without a single GCSE qualification? What prospects do they have when they leave school? When L. Paul Bremer demobbed the entire Iraqi army at the stroke of a pen, he was rightly pilloried for sending thousands of angry young Iraqis into the streets with nothing to do. But it sounds as if our education system does something really quite similar once every year...
