SIR. Regarding your story about the 71 bus that crashed after its driver was allegedly attacked by a gang of hooded youths.

The outrageous and demonic behaviour of modern youth was predicted in a novel written in the early 60s.

Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange is worth reading again today for its incredible precience.

Burgess was living in Brighton when some mods or rockers barged into him. The incident moved him to recall delinquent servicemen in London in World War II. After this he took a keen interest in youth culture and some of the ideas that drove it and his famous novel was born.

He saw that while 60s youth culture was a largely innocent affair, a collective letting-off of steam by a large new demographic group ethralled by American culture and rigidly bored by post-war austerity, he also recognised the atavism that bubbled beneath the surface, and he speculated on what sort of youth the new Britain would produce, once it had comprehensively denuded itself of the culture of traditional customs and morality that had largely upheld public manners without much interference from the authorities.

The answer was Alex and his droogs, a gang of violent youths, all dressed roughly the same, rampaging around performing "rape and ultraviolence".

They talk in youth-speak patois and are committed to crime and disorder for its own sake.

It's all rather familiar, isn't it?

He also speculated on what the authorities might do about it. In Alex's case he is mentally reprogrammed into a person who is obedient because he is programmed by science to be obedient, removing the choice to do good or evil, an automaton of the state whose free will has been surgically removed.

Our authorities haven't yet reached for such drastic measures; they simply content themselves with skulking at a distance, and finding elaborate excuses for wicked behaviour. They are backed by "academic research". They have brought the police in line with this defeatism.

Meanwhile, "the droogs" continue.

James Bleaney
Via email