On a spell in the army doing them good

On a spell in the army doing them good

Crime.

Gangs of spork-wielding hoodies roaming the streets, high on wallpaper paste and scary old ladies stupid with a Wildean wit and a packet of French ticklers. That's the image of today's slovenly, ill-disciplined youth. And SOMETHING must be done about it. NOW.

Put them all in the army, I say.

I don't mean that in a retired Colonel Daily Mail reader kind of way, because they come from some sort of golden age where A Spell In The Army Did You Good, and gave you some sort of national amnesia about all the murders and robbing and violence that stalked the streets back then just as much as it does today.

Put them in the army, I say, to scare the living shit out of the little scrotes.

Apart from a number of notable exceptions - who are currently heroically hacking through the sweat-drenched jungles of Afghanistan rescuing a stranded Lord Kitchener from loin-clothed, spear-rattling savages (Are you sure? - Ed) - I can inform you with all confidence, that the British Armed Forces are filled to the brim with enormous twats.

You know: the kind of person who sports a wispy moustache and would drive a Ford Capri if they still made them, who - should they ever find themselves listed in Who's Who - would list their recreations as 'Having sex with large-breasted female celebrities' and 'Lying through my teeth'.

So. It's not the discipline of the army that my little scheme's aiming for. It's the sheer pant-wetting terror of 'Give us three months and you'll be like this too. Well, punk?'

The mere exposure to Lance Corporal If-you-can't-pull-on-a-Friday-night-in-Sutton-Coldfield-you-must-be-some-sort-of homo would be enough to drive even the most hardened of hoodies to a nice quiet life working in a High Street bank, helping old ladies cross the road in their lunch break and lecturing their less-enlightened kin on the error of their ways.

However - and I know what you're thinking as a fellow, upstanding British taxpayer- all this needless recruiting of the flower of English youth just to scare the shit out of them. It's not going to pass any Whitehall bean-counter's value for money test, is it?

Budget cuts. And I'm on top of this already. We CAN do it on the cheap.

I think, then, we should take a leaf out of the book of our good friends in the Former Soviet Union. Every Sunday morning since God-knows-when, they fill the airwaves with non-more-patriotic military TV programmes to promote the service to the Fatherland of the nation's armed forces. One of these programmes is even hosted by the current Miss Russian Army, a fine figure of a man, who urges viewers to wipe out the Chechen menace in between unfunny comedy skits, terrifying displays of martial arts and even more terrifying military band concerts.

The Belarusian army's TV programme is called "Arsenal", and that would be an ideal name for such a show hoping to grab the eyeballs of a potential young thug expecting the Sunday morning repeat of Match of the Day.

Instead of an orange-skinned, crisp-guzzling Gary Lineker, the poor saps will be introduced - at little expense to the TV Licence payer - to a procession of wispy-moustached junior NCOs giving forth on the best places to bunk up with the local slappers in the countryside around Aldershot, and which doctors will write out no-questions-asked penicillin prescriptions before regaling them with tall-tales on how they personally killed Bin Laden to death while attached to the Green Berets.

There will also be short films on the glamorous life cleaning the toilets at Catterick, cleaning the toilets at Colchester, and by way of variety, vintage clips of cleaning the toilets up the jungle during the Malay emergency. All this with a voiceover laying out the average squaddie's chances of becoming an SAS hero: "Square root of bugger all, son."

And: "You should've listened in school, you horrible little turd."

At a stroke, teen crime will be eradicated.

God help us if there's a war.