"Children: The Cause of All Crime"

In 1970 the Scarfolk Crime Commission embarked on the largest study into crime to date. After two years of intense investigation it found a startling correlation between the types of people who commit crime and their early life experiences.

The findings were unequivocal: 100% of criminals had also once been children.

The council immediately put into effect acts intended to reduce, if not entirely eradicate this insidious cause of crime. Thousands of children were rounded up in camps. Toys were burnt in massive pyres. Adults were sterilised. Anyone who had been in regular contact with children, or had ever been a child, was quarantined in vast bunkers specially built several storeys below the council building.

Though Scarfolk was reduced to a ghost town, the scheme proved a success. During the first month that these stringent measures had been implemented not one crime had been committed. Consequently, at the 1972 Conference of Sham Utopias, a local conservative MP predicted that the most successful towns, and even countries, of the future will be those that eradicate all citizens who have any connection to, or dealings with, children or the adults they grow into.

For more about bad children, see: Brood parasites, Serious Infant Dental Assault, the Never Go with Strange Children campaign and the Infant Liberation Front terror group.

"Don't Wait to Hesitate" Public Information (1970)

Scarfolk Council wanted to nurture a generation of passive citizens so that it could do what it wanted without interference. But it was also fully aware that it needed to sell this passivity as positive action.

A 1970 government leaflet (see above) stated that "urgent, active dithering is strongly recommended" and that "citizens should be single-minded about being in two minds. Resolute hesitation may or may not have made Britain what it is today."

Dithering and faffing were also promoted in the media as attractive character traits and by summer of that year large DIY stores were selling specially-designed garden furniture to consumers who wanted to literally sit on their fences. Student activists wore T-Shirts emblazoned with fashionable slogans such as 'Don't Go to War With Hem & Haw', 'Yes & No & Maybe' and 'Erm'.

By the end of 1972, however, the state had become aware of the long-term physical and economic side-effects of sustained dithering. Unforeseen mass drooling, for example, cost the state hundreds of thousands of pounds in community bibs, and by 1973 the promotion of hesitation gave way to the more definitive 'Don't' campaign.