Letter: It's time to dish out some tough love

THE current wave of rioting and looting by young people should remind us that the new five-point parenting plan overlooks the most important duty of parents: namely to teach their children that their actions have consequences.

This is not easy when consequences may be medium or long-term or may even fail to materialise. Nor is their task helped by a society that teaches sentimental rather than tough love and has removed the easy sanction of corporal punishment without giving instruction in the much more arduous application of alternative sanctions.

If children have learned at home that there are no consequences to their actions, their conviction is reinforced at school by the system of mixed ability classes and automatic promotion from year to year whether they have learned anything or not.

It is further reinforced in the world of work where their income may be the same whether they work or not and in the world of health where they receive the same treatment whether or not they have brought their illness on themselves by adopting an unhealthy lifestyle.

Generous and optimistic systems of education, benefits and healthcare are always open to exploitation unless people have learned responsibility.

Efforts to correct in later years false impressions gained in early years have very limited success. The damage is done.

We need, therefore, to establish the importance of teaching consequences in early years, to develop coherent systems of rewards and punishments and to train parents across all classes in their consistent application.

David R Hill

Relugas Road

Edinburgh

REGARDLESS of the rights and wrongs, or whatever the underlying reasons for the riots, let's not forget against the backdrop of lawbreaking on a vast scale that only a few weeks ago we had a public admission from members of a media family and their cohorts that what they had effectively done was rip up the rulebook on acceptable behaviour and morality.

Serious lessons need to be learnt from this episode of community decay where people have no respect for what they own.

There is a common theme running through these incidents of rioters and the corporate behaviour of a large media empire. It's all about money.

Those who have plenty of it feel as though they have no accountability to the moral standards of right and wrong, and those who have none of it feel as though they can take what doesn't belong to them.

We need to draw a line in the sand, step back and take a deep breath before starting the repair process. A good starting point would be to give our crumbling communities a second chance.

Alas, I suspect that most of these rioters may not have even received their first chance, but that's the challenge for our leaders.

Michael Connelly

Greenoakhill Avenue

Glasgow

IT IS not just glaziers who will benefit from the current spate of riot and insurrection in the UK.

The greatest rewards will accrue to lawyers, who will not only be more than adequately remunerated for defending and prosecuting those allegedly involved, but will also rake it in at public expense through civil actions.

According to the Association of British Insurers, uninsured people who have suffered loss in the riots can claim compensation from the police under the Riot (Damages) Act 1886.

No doubt insurance companies will seek to recover payouts to their own customers via the same route.

The resulting costly legal battles to decide liability should ensure that legal practitioners on both sides will ride any recession while the public will no doubt be double-dipped in having to pay both higher taxes and raised insurance premiums whatever the outcome of lengthy litigation.

John Eoin Douglas

Spey Terrace

Edinburgh

Politically correct politicians demur on the subject of water cannons, the army and plastic bullets as a way of dealing with rioters and looters. They call such measures extreme and brutal. Very little harm can come to rioters targeted by a water cannon. At most, they can be bowled over and get a good soaking.

As for the army, soldiers do not need to be actively engaged with rioters and looters. Their very presence in large numbers backing up the riot police in the front line would be enough to make the yobs think again.

Numbers are the key. When 16,000 police appeared on the streets of London, the troublemakers vanished. Any experienced general will tell you that, in order to win a battle with the least casualties on all sides, the attackers should advance in overwhelming numbers.

In future, when any incident or demonstration liable to lead to trouble takes place, large numbers of soldiers and police should be on standby, ready to be deployed at a few minutes' notice.

George K McMillan

Mount Tabor Avenue

Perth

SO DAVID Cameron is promising that those involved in the mass outbreak of pillaging across England "will feel the full force of the law" (your report, 10 August). Really?

Those involved know that even if they are one of the few hundred against the tens of thousands rioting that are caught, tried and sentenced - and that's a big "if" - after background reports where all manner of defence trump cards can be played, their sentences will be paltry.

Balanced against those ill-gotten gains they could never have afforded in a lifetime's honest work, it doesn't take a bookie to realise the odds are heavily in favour of these latter-day Vikings.

When a few months pass and more people realise that these scum will be getting clean away with it while they're the ones expected to pick up the bill in higher taxes, how many more will join in come the next inevitable pillaging expedition, realising they've nothing to lose?

Consumerism has become a more dangerous ideology to our society's fabric than any political or religious ideology. Fuelled on decades of mass-marketed "must-haves" and easy credit, those riots are its poisonous creed taken to the ultimate conclusion - that people have an inalienable right to goods regardless of need or ability to pay.

Add this to a hamstrung justice system and you've the recipe for disaster.Hence why in Egypt, Bahrain, Libya, Syria and Yemen people openly rebelled at the risk of their own lives because they wanted a free government; but in England, people openly rebelled at the risk of others' lives because they wanted a free telly.

Ask yourselves now which nations are more unstable.

Mark Boyle

Linn Park Gardens

Johnstone, Renfrewshire