you know, we look at the Charles Dickens story ‘Oliver’ thinking it was a different time, a different situation and after all just a story.

Poverty and social welfare was such that the street urchins of the last century had little choice but to make a dishonest crust to survive.
Is it the case that there’s now ‘Fagens’ again (or did they never go away and I have just been lucky/cosseted in my 41 years of life to not see that side of our population)?

I was perhaps just chance that the kid wasn’t British, but was eastern European or from the middle east. I am sure the indigenous UK population has it’s fair share of petty thieves, however both those places have wide divides between people who are wealthy and those who suffer poverty and perhaps it is the depth of their poverty that drives them to enter the UK and some to crime.

Poverty and hardship does not give anyone the right to steal however.

Who are the parents of this oik?
Are they the reason he has turned to stealing?
Is this the type of people we are allowing to stay in our country?

Personally the softy liberal side of me want’s to understand these kids and help them. You know; give them the advantages that my kids have had in life and educate them to the straight and narrow.
On my other shoulder however, the fascist dictator side of my personality is telling me to round them up and in Kenny Everett’s immortal words “put them in a big field and bomb the bastards”.