Did anyone see the Dispatches programme on Monday evening called 'Britain's Yob Culture'. I just turned the the telvision on and caught it, shortly after it started. Bsically it was almost an hour long promotion of the kind of fear of young people that I might expect to see in the Daily Mail but not on a reasonably respectable telvision documentary. It contained such amazing gems as "We commissioned Mori... they found that 71 per cent of people had seen large groups of kids hanging around and 41% (or figures like that, i wasn't taking notes) were intimidated by them." Like that proved anything other than the perceptions of adults were that young people in groups were innately dangerous. Actually with TV programmes like this in prime time slots it's little surprise that they do. There were a horde of anecdotes, some a little dubious, of violent behaviour by young people. Of course these were always of the most extreme kind, as if to suggest that this sort of behaviour was common.

There was little balance, particulalry when, they reported that places with higher populations of older people had higher perceptions of the prevalence and seriousness of youth crime, and when the reporter spoke to some young black males, but these were throwaway concessions to the overall fear message presented by the programme. It also contained an interview with Richard Sennet, where he made some critical comment on the UK government Respect agenda, but even he seemed a little out of place.

Comparing this to the documentary I caught last month presented by Shami Chakrabati, the director of Liberty, it really did appear like astonishingly irresponsible journalism. Her programme, wher she spoke of the 'war on young people' was, in my view a little sensationalist in approach, but it's message was much more considered, and of course I agreed with it a lot more. There's some information on the Dispatches programme here.

http://www.channel4.com/news/microsites/D/dispatches2006/yobs/

This is my first post to this blogspot. I thought that this might be a better way to keep clients and potential clients informed about Clear Plan and what we are doing.

I don't promise to update it every day but I intend to use this to generally discuss stuff, any kind of stuff to do with Goverment and community. I also hope to keep it a little entertaining. Our line of work can really do with a bit of humour sometimes.

Anyway it's late at night, otherwise I wouldn't have the time to even do this. i'll maybe put something a bit more intersting up tomorrow morning.

Colin Duff