Today's children have much more to fear than a belt from Dad, Cilla

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail On Sunday column



We live in a censored society, made all the worse because we gag our own mouths.

Since I first heard it decades ago, I have loved the ‘Liverpool Lullaby’,  a rather good poem about a mother’s exasperated love for her troublesome son.

A lot of other people love it, too. It should be taught in schools instead of that boneless, rhymeless twaddle they call poetry these days.

Not many songs get released as a B-side single and then become more popular than the A-side.

It is hugely evocative. The opening lines – ‘Oh, you are a mucky kid, dirty as a dustbin lid’ – summon up a whole way of life: a bare room with a small coal fire, surrounded by a  twilit landscape of terraced streets stretching down towards the docks on a long-ago  Saturday evening. Dad’s at the pub. There’s not much food in the house.

Cilla Black recorded it in the 1960s (it was written in 1959) and still gets asked to sing it. Except that it’s now been watered down.
 
In a recent TV appearance, she replaced the mother’s repeated warning to the boy that he’ll ‘gerra belt from your dad’ with the feeble ‘you’ll get told off by your dad’.

I asked the song’s author about this. He is Stan Kelly-Bootle (a Cambridge-educated mathematician and computer whizz) and – while he quite understands why Cilla Black did what she did in these PC days – he says: ‘The phrase “you’ll get a belt from your dad” is hyperbole typical of Liverpool and means nothing more than “wait till your father gets home”.

‘It’s the same as saying, “I’ll kill him” when someone has misbehaved big time. It doesn’t mean you’re going to organise a drive-by shooting, at least not in the UK.

It’s just an expression and I don’t think that you should read modern attitudes to child abuse into a song that was written over 50 years ago.’

Quite. If Cilla Black really wants to update the Lullaby, she should go much, much further. There’s no room here for a long debate about smacking. But we do so many worse things now that we’re enlightened.

Today’s deprived child is probably zonked on Ritalin (and his mother on Prozac). He’s probably not that mucky, as he sits all day and all night in front of the TV instead of running wild. The dirty dustbin has been replaced by a battery of Eric Pickles-sized eco-containers.

And while the poor have more money than they did, they have many more perils, too. I wonder what rhymes with ‘pay-day-loan’? ‘Methadone’, perhaps?

But saddest of all, the Lullaby’s boozy, wastrel Dad has vanished from view in hundreds of thousands of homes. He won’t be coming home because he was never there in the first place.

The man who might turn up instead is much more worrying, the current boyfriend who loathes any child that isn’t his own. You’ll get much worse than a belt from him.

And then, not long afterwards, there’ll be the social worker who can’t see anything wrong. Sing a song about that, would you, Cilla?

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It is worth pondering how some forms of ‘discrimination’ are still  all right, and others not. Killing baby girls because they aren’t boys is one.

Now here’s another. Aric Sigman, a psychologist and biologist, points out that women who raise their own children can be sneered at without fear as ‘self-lobotomised’, servile and sexually unattractive.

Dr Sigman has spotted the modern Stalin-Hitler pact that unites huge, supposedly incompatible forces against this defenceless group.

‘The older feminism, liberal-Left feminism, has ended up a strange bedfellow with Right-wing capitalism.’ Almost there. But why does he think capitalism is ‘Right-wing’?  If Leftism pays, that’s fine.


The ONLY way to protect the innocent

Politicians who know the case for capital punishment is unanswerable will often wriggle out of supporting it by a trick.

They will ask anxiously: ‘What about hanging an innocent person by mistake? How could we have that on  our conscience?’

Leave aside the fact that every murder victim is innocent, and that many now dead would be alive if we still executed heinous murderers.

Note that nearly once a year, an innocent person is killed by a convicted murderer given a ‘life’ sentence but freed to kill again.

The latest such horror is the death of Graham Buck, a valorous and noble man who went to the aid of a neighbour.

That neighbour was being attacked by Ian McLoughlin.

McLoughlin, now back in prison, will, with a bit of luck, stay there until he is no danger to anyone.

But you might ask why he was free,  or even alive.

In 1984, a court somehow ruled that it was ‘manslaughter’ after McLoughlin killed Len Delgatty, smashing his skull seven times with a hammer, cramming his body upside down into a cupboard and ransacking the house for money.

He was out of prison in five years. The judge pretended to sentence him to serve ten. Even that was reduced to eight years on appeal.

Can these judges sleep? Three years after his release, he was sent to prison for ‘life’ for stabbing Peter Halls to death.

Then some genius allowed him out on day release, so freeing him to murder Mr Buck.
Innocent deaths all over the place.

And I promise there will be more. But none of them causes our compassionate, conscience-stricken politicians to  regret their abolition of the gallows,  or reconsider it. Funny, that.

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Have you noticed how mainstream advertisements are turning political? While waiting to see that puzzling but exciting film Captain Phillips, I endured two  bank commercials.

In one,  a young man was seeking a home loan because he didn’t like his granny’s ‘Right-wing views’.

In another  we were shown two female twins, with contrasting lives but the same sort of debit card. One had a husband.

The other had a lesbian girlfriend. What are these commercials really selling?

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For reasons that will become clear, I can’t use names here. But, as I too often do,  I was investigating claims of police indifference (and worse) to the plight  of an individual besieged by louts.

A spokesman for the force involved asked to ‘go on background’, that is, to say things that couldn’t be quoted.

This publicly salaried official then began to smear the complainer, saying there were ‘issues about mental health’.

When I didn’t immediately swallow this poison, and asked for details, the mouthpiece turned hostile and refused  to say more.

The blackening of Andrew Mitchell is a huge issue because the police in general are  out of control. Small, local forces on foot patrol are the answer, not helmet cameras.

 

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