Fear and anger are useful against feral youths

When conventional wisdom was 'spare the rod and spoil the child', a time which my backside has cause to remember, there were no feral children stamping on the faces of old ladies. But in today's Britain, where that old saying has been turned on its head, feral children in the inner cities are becoming almost commonplace.

This is not to suggest that the progressive removal of fear ­ - parental, pedagogic and the police - ­ from children's lives has not been in some ways a blessing, liberating their spirits. But if it is obviously true that in the old days the shadow of fear lay too heavily over the lives of children, today, equally obviously, it does not lie heavily enough.

Of course we can't turn the clock back, and reintroduce corporal punishment. But we can at least, in our public conversation on the

radio and television, give a greater recognition to the beneficial uses to which fear can be put - indeed should be put ­ in a civilised society.

On a recent radio talk programme, for example, I heard someone who ought to have known better calling on judges to forgo their wigs so as to look less frightening to juveniles.

Of course, such an absurd idea should have been laughed out of court. But it wasn't. Nobody said ­ as they should have said ­ that a non-frightening judge was a contradiction in terms. So, to a lesser extent, is a non-frightening parent or a non-frightening teacher.

Fear can be a force on the side of the angels. So can anger. It is time that those in authority once again felt free ­ - indeed duty bound ­ - to make good use of both.