ABSTRACT
There has been during the last five years throughout Europe and other Western states a classic ‘moral panic’ concerning the perceived decline of personal behaviour, which has heralded a lengthy public discussion on the relationship between morality and the motivation for social and economic life. This heightened concern has been brought about by a series of events from the Dunblane tragedy in Scotland to the murder of a London headmaster outside his school and, more recently, the Colorado school killings in the United States. The earlier events were ruthlessly appropriated by all the main British political parties during their autumn conference season and used, in the run-up to the last General Election, as their raison d’être for introducing further law and order measures and more regulations to be held over and against young people and their families. This has continued throughout the present Labour government’s period of office and, not unsurprisingly, the debate about ‘adult life’ was jettisoned when it was realised that once again the real culprits were working-class young people and their families, who it appears have lost their civilised sense of right and wrong. New youth prisons, zero tolerance policing, and changes in the school curriculum along with the criminalisation of bad parenting are all aimed at the re-civilising of the poor and especially poor youth.
