The Scouts is 100 years old today and the milestone is being marked with events up and down the country where Scouts will renew their promises.

I was never in the Scouts – by the time my hugely oversubscribed local branch had free places I’d lost interest.  However, my eldest has just joined and I took him down to Ironbridge at 7.30 this morning to join his Scout troop.  I was surprised at the number of Cubs, Scouts and Guides of various varieties that turned up, particularly when a similar number of local Scouts were hiking up the Wrekin (the highest point in Shropshire) and the super-camp the Scouts have going on at the moment in Scotland has over 40,000 attendees.

Listening to the Scout promise, I found myself wondering how many of these kids would end up going off the rails.  They promise to do their duty, to respect God and the Queen and to help other people.  The religious bit aside, that’s not a bad set of values to instill in kids and I don’t reckon you’d see many former Scouts ending up in prison for mugging grannies or stealing police cars.

As I mentioned above, when I was a kid the local Scout group was oversubscribed with a waiting list of several years.  By contrast, the group that my son has joined has only a handful of members.  Is this because the Scouts is seen as a bit naff by todays youth?  Is it because kids today don’t need to join something like the Scouts for entertainment and to see far off places because they’ve got the TV, Computers and the internet?  Or is it simply that the Scouts don’t advertise themselves much?

My son didn’t bug us about joining the Scouts – it wasn’t something he really thought about.  We happened to be at a local “fun day” and the Scouts were there so we asked him if he wanted to join.  I offered to help try and secure free parking for people attending the event today at Ironbridge using my contacts at the council, I spoke to a councillor who said he’d take the matter up but needed to know who the officer was that had been dragging his heels over it.  I thought it would be easy to contact the local Scout group but it proved to be impossible – they weren’t listed in the phone book or on the internet.  So perhaps the problem is with promoting themselves?

I think the Scouts would be a very useful organisation for helping our kids stay on the right path and to make sure we don’t end up breeding a society of wannabe gangsters, muggers, joyriders and hoodies.  As well as teaching kids discipline and respect, it also teaches them practical skills.  Certainly more should be done to promote the Scouts and to do this effectively they need money.  We’re not talking about piddling amounts of money from car-boot sales and car washing, it needs a multi-million pound advertising and marketing campaign and for that they either need a very wealthy backer or government money.  The trouble is, government money comes with strings attached and they come in the form of diversity targets, ethnic quotas and “reform” which is a byword for buggering about with things until they’re broken.

More effort certainly needs to be made by the Scouts to promote themselves but the “establishment” also needs to do its part.  There are very few organisations left that haven’t succumbed to the lefty liberal, multi-culty way of doing things under Liebour’s oppresively PC regime and are still preapred to instill traditional values into children.  The Scouts could be just the thing that is needed to reverse the trend of kids getting into drugs, crime and anti-social habits but they can’t do it by themselves.