Letter: Youth threat

FOLLOWING the recent report which highlighted the significant involvement of unemployed and disaffected young people in last summer’s English city riots, Scott MacNab’s report (29 March) of Weir Group chairman Lord Smith’s plea to Holyrood’s Finance Committee on behalf of the many young people who are “completely crowded out of the workplace” here in Scotland, and the report of the similar problem in rich and far away Saudi Arabia, should be a wake-up call to our politicians.

There are too many people in the world and this is showing up graphically in the worldwide bulge of young people who cannot attain the normally recognised status of adulthood. They are stuck as non-persons because there are already more adults than the world can cope with.

Countries like China and India saw this problem coming more than a decade ago and implemented measures to control their burgeoning birth rates.

But mini-tsunamis of disaffected youth are building up in many parts of the world and there is a real probability that they will unite and take on an international dimension.

This is a much more immediate problem than either pollution or global warming, but politicians will have to think on an international scale rather than on a national one to deal with it.

Irvine Inglis

Reston

Berwickshire