Letter: Who's to blame?

WHEN I wrote of our liberal-minded intelligentsia running Britain since the mid-1960s (Letters, 8 August), I had no idea that events would provide such immediate and tragic confirmation.

Michael Kelly (Perspective, 11 August) avers that "civilised societies accept higher levels of crime as the price of the just and proportionate treatment of offenders". Really? I doubt if the law-abiders believe we have such treatment, whether for physical thugs or fiddling MPs, most of whom were not prosecuted.

Nor are the sentences always too light. How on earth are two recent sentences proportionate - six months for looting bottled water from Tesco and for keeping a woman as a "slave" (albeit plus 3,000 compensation)?

So is it not facile for Gerry Hassan (Perspective, 13 August) to say all of us bear some responsibility for everything from the looters to City bankers? When everyone is deemed to be responsible, then, in practice, no-one is.

We individuals must control, take responsibility for and be accountable for our own actions and inactions and for those of our subordinates. In modern society, we also depend on others for many activities best done socially, but they do not have the right to assign responsibility back to us when they fail to exercise reasonable judgment or use their legal powers.

Our responsibility is to work for the good of our family and society, and to bring up our children likewise. If those others (politicians, police, bankers, courts, etc) are over-indulgent, non-judgmental and morally relativist, as in the past two generations, then it is rather harsh for us all to be saddled with the blame for the consequences.

JOHN BIRKETT

Horseleys Park

St Andrews, Fife