IT is hard to walk through Worcester city centre without becoming painfully aware of the carnival of knuckle-dragging grotesques on show.

Sometimes it’s as if the fair is in town but at least you knew that was entertaining and, when the fun was over, they’d all pack up and ship out.

I refer of course to a growing minority of ratty-looking teenage chavs, often wearing tracksuits, hoodies and outlandish designer shoes, swaggering about the streets like so many charmless circus clowns. Like clowns, they are by turns funny and tragic, entertaining and sinister, repellent yet strangely hypnotic.

Perched on their shaved heads at an absurd angle is that ubiquitous badge of human idiocy, the baseball cap. Then there are the morbidly obese teenage mums, fag in hand and pushing prams, who are, I’m sad to say, our nation’s future. For, whether we like it or not, their children are the future and they seem to be popping them out every chance they get – and at your expense.

I remember overhearing a conversation in the bus stop at CrownGate between a lad who looked about 11 years old and one of his mates.

He said his girlfriend was expecting their second child. He had a scooter in one hand and an ice lolly in the other.

What chance, I ask you, does that child have or any child raised by children? Because very often it’s the State – the police, the courts, the NHS and social services (all funded by the taxpayer) – who have to raise these kids, not their feckless parents. Take a trip to Worcester Magistrates Court if you want to see the social consequences of the breakdown of family life and the waning power of religion. I’m not religious myself but at least the fear of God (or rather the terror of hell) kept people in line.

I watch these young people swagger out of court smirking, handed a conditional discharge or a suspended sentence. Many of them have to be told to take off their baseball cap or spit out their gum as they stand in the dock.

They have no respect, no shame and no fear. The lawyers trot out their sob stories, shrug and tell the magistrates the prisons are full. I’ve seen magistrates smile almost benevolently at the defendants as they basically let them off. They might as well just say, “Try not to be such a naughty boy next time you poor young scamp.” Perhaps I’m being unfair. I was fortunate enough to be raised in a stable home and many of these people didn’t get the chances or the support that I got. Still, I also went to an ordinary comprehensive school in the north east and I worked hard and without having to be told.

Surely there comes a point where you are responsible for your own life and should stop blaming others for how it turns out.