This week Austin has been reflecting on the good, the bad, the downright ugly, and ponders whether society's carrots ought to be balanced with a few well placed sticks.

There has been quite a plethora of cases of almost unbelievable cruelty and violence. A Glasgow ned knifed an Indian man for money in view of the cctv cameras at the very Fiscal’s office in Glasgow. Angelika Kluk’s savage murder is still raw; Moira Jones was slaughtered and raped in a suburban park in Glasgow. We’ve just seen a trial arising from a gang fight in the east end of Glasgow near my office there in which two men fought with swords – to the death as it happens. And lots more at this and lower levels – look at any newspaper any day or any news webpage and you’ll read the blood, the guts and the awfulness. Some people tell me it’s not like the old days, and folk have only recently become more decadent and bestial in this modern world cursed by greed, gratification, X-factor, the internet and bingeable cheap drink.

I more than suspect the reality is not so. I am reading Bernard Cornwell’s Azincourt, a populist historical novel recounting the great battle of Agincourt, and the hit-rate of beheading, rape, eye-gouging per page is as good as anything our modern urban wastelands can come up with. I challenge you to find a year in known history when there was not plenty of vicarage rape, child murder, granny-bashing or the endless list of crimes and sins committed by man. When we bought our present house in Glasgow, on taking up the carpets we found the floors lined wall to wall with copies of the Evening Citizen from 1927. Even in those days the news output was rammed with stories of criminal outrage and bloodstained court cases on more or less every page. That, and the endless bespoke drapery adverts.

Anyway, I am not going to get all mediaeval, or even historical, on your ass, but stick to the present day. It was Saturday’s karate class that brought it to the forefront of my attention.

Like all karateka (practitioners of the way of the empty hand, that is) I am a peace-loving person. We fight in the class in a gentlemanly and ladylike way, observing the dojo rules and treating each other with complete respect. There is a great spirit of friendliness among all the participants. Violence in sport we leave to footballers.

Our instructor, one of Scotland’s top karate men, a former policeman and boxer, built like a shed, makes a point of telling those amongst us who might (mistakenly) fancy our chances with a mugger or a drunken idiot in the town that karate is not ideal for street fighting – he also teaches some instant reaction and running like hell as the best strategy for keeping safe. He said to us on Saturday that whilst he grew up in Govan and needed to be a lad handy with fists, then was a cop who had to wade into some ugly mobs, and then was a pugilist who punched and was punched regularly, the fact of the matter is that since he took up karate and lived in Newton Mearns, he has never had to land a blow in anger.

And that is the same as the rest of us, by and large. Most of us live in nice areas where the chances of being mugged or assaulted are not nil, but they are pretty small, especially if you take basic care not to court trouble.

I was always struck, as it were, by that phrase used by Edward Heath, which became a byword for a political outlook – the One-Nation Tory. One nation, whether indivisible under God or not. We know what he meant. But I have never believed that is what we are. I have always thought that there are fundamentally two kinds of people.

It would be easy and a gross oversimplification to use the label “the haves and have-nots”. Plenty of poor or modest folk are peaceful, amiable, and gentle. Equally, plenty of well-off are spouse-beaters, crooks, bastards of one hue or the other. No, the distinction is between those who are good, and those who are bad. I spend money on locks and an alarm on my house, car and offices because bad men might want to break in and murder us or just thieve our telly or computers. I go out late and later in the car to pick up my teenage daughter from being out with her pals because there are bad men and women who might want to attack her. I don’t walk about certain areas of my home city because there are gangs of bad youths who would mob me to steal or disfigure.

I practise karate but could never lift my hands in aggression to another. I bet the overwhelming majority of you lot are just the same – indeed the thought would scarcely cross your minds. And while I can’t fathom the anti-social, the wanton, the cruel, I do recognise it- and yes, see plenty of it in general legal practice.

You’ll recollect in Macbeth, the, er, hero murders Macduff’s family –and anyone else he can get his hands on, but not before the audience is treated to a chat between Lady Macduff and her son about the failure of the good men to keep the bad men in check, and the relative strengths of the two constituencies. And that is my point too.

In all sorts of ways, humanity generally and our nation in particular is hamstrung by some/most of us striving for decency and peace, but having to corral, accommodate and even excuse the negative elements.

The tabloid version of this can be put succinctly – why should our hard-earned tax pounds be used to pay ne’er-do-wells a couple of grand in slopping out compensation, so that they can just go and shoot is up or bet it away or drink it? Why should human rights be enjoyed by those who want to act in a bestial fashion? There is a difference between making a mistake, and making your life’s work the destruction of anything decent and worthwhile. There is a life of crime and selfishness to be followed or avoided. It’s a human, intelligent choice at issue. Free will.

Ok, you can argue that some can’t help it. It’s their heritage, nurture and environment. If everyone around is doing graffiti, then why shouldn’t I? But this is precisely the approach that has got us into the disaster we are in. too much sympathy, too much understanding. It’s all excuses. It is too much carrot instead of a balance of that with the stick. Certainly help and counsel, but if counselling doesn’t work or is rejected, take a harsh remedy and don’t think twice about it.

Pour encourager les autres is I suppose a heavy-handed philosophy of criminal correction, and doesn’t always work. But I reflect that in my childhood, a parent or adult talking common sense to me was not always enough – a sanction was sometimes the thing that held back my temptation to misbehave or even offend. And that’s what is missing. Even if it takes many years to reconstruct, or maybe innovate, a society where badness is actually reduced, made more difficult, made less appealing, it must be attempted. Offenders must be made not just to pay by way of fines or the jail, but to confront their responsibility to the rest of us. I’ve said before that very often we have a fatally flawed process, in which a convicted person appears in court but has to say nothing, whilst a defence lawyer seeks to put a gloss on outrageous behaviour and shields the miscreant from accountability, and it’s a fundamental mistake.

If someone has kicked and punched another citizen, he should be put on television and interviewed as to his conduct and motivation, and rightly mocked. He should be made to feel the shame up close and personal instead of sitting dumb in the dock while justice is attempted to be done a distance away among the professionals. Vandals should be made to clear up their mess, wearing distinctive clothing to show their exclusion from decent society. And so on.

I am fed up paying a third of my hard-earned income: a) to give penal room and board to morons who can see nothing more than their own selfish gratification; b) to pay for repairs and refurbishments to damaged property and fithied streets; c) to pay for an education system that pretends everyone is entitled to learn, and miserably fail, Spanish or whatever when they would be better given the tools - literal and figurative - to go out and get a job ( maybe someone can give me the actual number of teenagers who are paid to stay on at school so they don’t appear on the unemployment stats after being taught useless subjects that don’t interest or help them); and d) to finance one fancy Government initiative after another designed to mask the abject failure of those who lead us to reverse the trend of money-for-nothing enjoyed by our growing underclass.

I am not an elitist, I want a level playing field for everyone, but I am sick of being the hind end of the donkey. It has gone beyond political correctness – the bad men are in danger of winning over the good, and doing it on my money.

And money talks. It won’t be an upsurge of a sense of justice or fair play or slavering revenge that will change the balance of society. It will be finance. Or the lack of it. Glasgow City Council has to make tens of millions of pounds of savings in its budgets due to the downturn and no doubt the lack of council tax and other income. The UK Government is selling off the family silver to try to halt the runaway billions. There are only so many pips you and I have for them to squeeze. Some day soon, the neds and the spongers and the lazy and the criminals will have to stop living off us, and join in as part of the solution instead of the problem. Or face the consequences.

Austin