Anna Smith Column: Neds: make parents pay

YOU see them everywhere, with their sweatshirt hoods hiding their faces, or baseball caps pulled over their eyes. The superneds.

Scotland's growing menace of child thugs is out of control.

Already an 11-year-old Edinburgh hoodlum has made history as the country's most persistent offender. With 100 crimes under his Burberry belt in the past year, he has been reported to police a shocking 43 times.

It is part of a frightening picture of communtities

It is these neds who have driven grandad Andrew Pattison out of his Edinburgh home, by wrecking his car, throwing eggs and flour at his windows, and shouting abuse at him. They have turned the Broomhouse scheme where the 60-year-old Andrew lived most of his life into a Little Bosnia, forcing him to ask to be rehoused.

All this despite his efforts to improve their lot, taking them on safari park trips, campaigning for a skateboard park and generally defending their rights.

And recently, I too was visited by such a bunch of twisted little toerags with their despicable brand of wanton thuggery.

While I was working at my desk trying to earn an honest crust, they came into my driveway and slashed all the tyres of my car in an unprovoked and wicked act of vandalism.

I was shocked. Like most people in the solidly working class village I live in, I hoped thugs like the 11-year-old from Edinburgh were few and far between. I hoped that in places like this, folk still brought their children up with good old-fashioned values, respecting other people's property, privacy and views.

But in truth, that has all but broken down. My primal instinct is to hunt down the thugs who did my car and stretch their mean little necks from my cherry blossom tree. But even if I'd caught them and kicked their backsides, it would have been me who ended up in court.

Frankly, I don't buy this piffle that these youngsters are victims, kids with no hope and no future, in a mushrooming underclass. And I'm not alone in that view. Someone has to answer for this rotten bunch that are the parents and voters of tomorrow.

Let's get their mums and dads in the dock. Where are they when their little "hoodies" are running riot with a Samauri sword in the neighbourhood? Where are they when some old women is being terrorised in the only home she's ever known?

Decent people are at a loss as to who they can turn to for help. The Scottish Executive's flagship Anti Social Behaviour Bill pledges to clamp down on such teen crime. But instead of putting more police on the streets, they do it on the cheap, bringing in Community Wardens.

In their luminous jackets and powerlessness, they will be like red rags to bulls for these yobbos, targets to hurl bottles and abuse at.

There was a time when young people had a modicum of respect for their elders, but that is long gone. The fact that 7000 teachers have been attacked in class in the last two years is testament to the indiscipline of teenagers throughout Scotland.

If the Executive is serious, why not introduce something like on- the-spot fines? And if the parents can't pay, take it off their dole money. Or better still, take a leaf out of the village in Dorset, where the council took out an Anti-Social Behaviour Order against a young thug, restricting his movements and the company he kept. The order was granted after a court heard evidence anonymously from residents.

To tackle the yob culture, we must consider radical measures like this. And if we did, people would be queueing up to inform on the thugs who bring nothing but misery.

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