There is a real sense of righteous conviction among those who claim that standards have come tumbling down, particularly in the postwar years.
The police and magistrates, they say, have had their hands tied by the sentimentality of penal reform and "do-gooders", while defiant youths laugh in the face of the law. All this, it is claimed, is part and parcel of a need to get back to basics and halt the process of change and modernity, which has gone too far.
Here's an example: "The passing of parental authority, defiance of prewar conventions, the absence of restraint, the wildness of extremes, the confusion of unrelated liberties, the wholesale drift away from churches, are but a few characteristics of postwar conditions."
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