The difficulties with young men and boys has become so great that they’ve wheeled out Gareth Southgate to solve it. Like he solved the ‘how to win a World Cup problem’ during his tenure as England football manager. But he is a really nice bloke.

The problem is that boys are ‘lost’. They want to grow up all lovely and considerate and obey the rules of equality and decency but they get ‘influenced’ as soon as they first turn on their first mobile phone, by morons like Andrew Tate and the world of pornography which greets them, embraces them and shows them how women really loved to be slapped, raped and strangled until they pass out.

We’re breeding a generation of default misogynists. Because they simply know no better. And they’re slumping in school, compared to girls, and lack any direction and leadership.

Who can their role models be? Footballers? God forbid. The ones who aren’t currently accused of rape themselves are awaiting charges for gambling issues. Rock stars? Same problem.

And when the kids are at home all they want to do is sit alone in their rooms with their headphones on playing ‘first person shooter’ games, so they can learn how to kill people in vast numbers. As long as someone else leaves them a few weapons of mass destruction lying around on the footpaths.

Safe to say that of all the child-murdering psychopaths which have surfaced over the last 5 years, in all countries, they’ve all been male. Or, in the most part, identified as predominantly male.

Not that the young women escape entirely as they seem high on the suicides. Bullied and trolled online accompanied by legions of vile individuals extolling the praises of killing yourself and showing the means and methods of doing so.

And it all stems from mobile phones. Those ‘harmless’ little super-computers we all carry around religiously. And Joey looks at the football league tables and loses himself in the relative goal differences between Port Vale and Stockport, while Lila gets YouTube videos of American teenagers being impossibly stupid. Then we grab our phones back.

It seems, Gareth, as you eloquently put in your Dimbleby Lecture last week, that we need to control the phones. And ‘you’ can’t ban them from kids whilst ‘you’ run every facet of your life on yours. Its hypocritical.

The answer’s simple. Dump the phones. All of them. Remove them from our lives. Totally. Pretend they never happened. It may render Mark Zuckerberg penniless within 10 minutes but how likely is that to happen?

(I wrote this on a ‘slate’, to lead the way.)

Happy Sunday

A xxxx