AIBU to ask what is happening in Middlesbrough at the moment?

I would presume all were stolen.

Yes she says what a number of us on these threads have been saying. These kids aren’t born thugs.

I totally back her 100% and she’s from Middlesbrough so she gets it far more than me (I live in an affluent town in the south)

She talks about children being let down by schools. I work with teachers who work in the deprived regions of the NE. I've never met a more committed group of people who go way beyond what should be expected of them.

Sorting out clothes and food for children whose families are letting them down. Spending hours looking for funding to support extra curricular activities for children who have nothing at home. Because of their so called parents. Spending their summer holidays supporting charities and local initiatives feeding children and trying to make sure they're not roaming the streets.

There are plenty of families in similar financial circumstances who don't end up with criminal thugs for children. Education is one of the main ways out of the cycle, along with parents who actually parent.

I agree with you. I worked in some deprived schools in this region and some of the teachers and school staff really do go above and beyond to try and help these children

I took what she was saying to mean to school system just not working for these children

I thought she was talking about the school systems etc?
Some children especially young men aren’t suited to further education unless is trades.
My DF said in the olden days, you started as a labourer and saw how sites worked etc.
One of my uncle’s started as a labourer. Then hod carrier, then bricklayer then own business!
But that was the 60’s!
Work needs to pay and grooming for country lines etc ! I just don’t know!
But I’m in north east and the bother is all caused by less than 1% of the population!

For sure, these families don't engage with the school system, but if the children don't at least attend in primary and learn to read and write and do even basic maths, they're not going to be able to learn a trade.

In the past, education was hugely valued among the working class populations of the NE. I know this because my own father, his brothers, cousins, friends, my mum and her school friends, most of whom left school at 14, spent years studying at evening classes to try and better their prospects. Many of them spent their working lives in jobs of hard manual labour but seized every opportunity to learn, whether that was practical work related subjects, or purely for the love of learning. The WEA is still out there, providing opportunities for learning.

There certainly aren't the jobs now, but the attitudes to learning in many of these families completely remove any opportunities for their children.

If I had been in that car my parents wouldn’t even have come to my funeral they would have been so ashamed and disowned me after death
I wouldn’t have dared to do any of the anti social behaviour stuff let alone crime as there was the fear of being seen by other adults who would tell your parents and a healthy fear around that. I sound old but I’m only 42!

we have a fair amount of it round here, I’ve had bricks thrown at my window, kids in my garden banging on the patio doors, bikes being ridden down the middle of the road blocking traffic. Just low level shit but it doesn’t get stamped out. Fuck, if I had thrown a brick at a window I would have been dragged home by my ear, made to apologise, pay for the damage and not allowed out for a year

Yes I took it as the school system too.

and she’s right imo.

Worst thing that happened was taking away vocational courses and making it all based on exams in a limited range o subjects.

we should n ver have scrapped rhe old secondary moderns and technical schools back in the 70s. We’ve now had 2/3 generations of non working households the benefits and crime lifestyles.

What’s the point of vocational courses when there are no jobs? The devastation of the north east is an absolute disgrace. Mining, the chemical industry gone and nothing to replace them. No wonder so many of us rejoiced in Thatcher’s demise.

They need to invest in the area. Levelling up was meant to tackle this problem - except it was never done.

People need to know there’s jobs out there to feel education is worth it so achieve the goal of getting one of those jobs.

The problems we are seeing are as a result of years of neglect in the societal system.

we need investment to undo this.

We need someone with the desire to do it.

And once again, I'll draw your attention to the post by @GarlicAnything:

"There's some grand-scale local government corruption going on. Someone's been caught running a flipping scam on land marked for industrial developments, but there's so much more. Billions have probably been spirited out of the local government purse over the past several years"

It's not caused by "neglect in the societal system". It's caused by corruption and grift and fecklessness.

We don't need yet more investment. It will just be stolen and misused.

We certainly do need someone with the desire to do it. But that needs to come from within the 'communities'. They are people with agency, not passive or incapable children.

Oh get a grip. It’s 35 years since Thatcher was PM.

Do you really think that had she not been PM the North East would still be full of happy miners. That the steel works at Redcar would still exist. The world changed. Steel businesses have gone bust countless times because it doesn’t work economically in the country anymore.

Yes new industries are needed. But you can’t just dance on the grave of Margaret Thatcher - it’s childish.

Interesting question

I believe that in Japan, the prospect of bringing shame on your family is a huge incentive to toe the line

I believe that in Japan, the prospect of bringing shame on your family is a huge incentive to toe the line.

Yes and also being shamed by the community and losing your career etc.

See I would call grand scale corruption neglect on the societal system.

That people will power taking away money from society who will benefit.

And I would say that investment is needed. If they money is there and
it invested it doesn’t matter where the investment came from or stopped. Who is responsible at what level for making the wrong choice. It’s the system failing people. The buck for those failures stops at whoever caused them.

And yes you do need someone with a desire. Whoever is heading up the scam in local government doesn’t have the desire to improve community as a whole. Just to line their own pockets.

I think you’ve misread my meaning.

Andy Burnham is going to fix this stuff. Maybe a 3rd Number 10, "Number 10 even further up-north" complete with another one grand door.

For people like that, going to prison is a badge of honour.

And the fear of being hanged. They hang gangsters in Japan.

Japan is a different culture entirely and has high levels of social etiquette with meaning enfolded into everything, you can’t just import one desirable trait here without looking g at the context!

There are plenty of cultures that have the idea of bringing shame on their ancestors and plenty of young girls who still get beaten up and killed as a result. Which will you
import, can you guarantee? It has a name here ‘honour killings’ because it’s so common in those ethnicities. In India gang rape of girls in that situation isn’t unknown. Japan is much better but does not have an unstained record of women’s rights either (not that anywhere has for a thousand years or two).

@LittleBearPad you seem to have little respect for either history or culture. Thatcher had a massive impact that is still ongoing and there’s nothing wrong with remembering the origins and causes, you can’t adddress them fully without it. We do need new solutions now however. Places like Newcastle have been phenomenally inventive and adaptive in the past. But none of us can really compete in an era of globalisation and the ongoing problems of an exploitative elite in London which does not value anywhere in the country, and likes to pretend it has never heard of the problems of flooded local markets.

Corruption in the north is aided and abetted by southern demands for more money at any cost. What were the Freeports but organised, institutionalised, corruption?

Thatcher decimated great swathes of the industrial North and it’s never recovered.

and it never will

Exactly.

It doesn’t matter how long ago it was c it started the downward trajectory it’s relevant.

I agree with Blossom

Austerity was believed to be a good thing but some. Yes it started 16 years ago.

Now 16 years later those children are the ones we are seeing involved in county lines etc.

Everything trickles down and we don’t see immediate impact of neglect.

Unfortunately that also means we won’t see an immediate impact of any positive changes made either.

More of an occupational hazard/inconvenience.