Sir, – I empathise totally with the writer of the letter entitled "Report these vandals and make them pay" (July l4), who complained about the mindless vandalism committed against his/her car and office. British society today is a jungle in which a small but malignant hardcore of morons determine the agenda, and law-abiding citizens – like last week's letter writer – are increasingly powerless to redress the balance. A society virtually unrecognisable from that in which I grew up 60 years ago, when behavioural standards, family values and respect were the keystones of our communities. We may have been poor in material terms, compared to today's comparative affluence, but those social qualities endowed us with a cohesion which has long since disintegrated. Socially we are going backwards at the speed of light. Three decades of disastrous and misguided influence by deluded, liberal do-gooders have all but destroyed the community life of which we were once proud. As a result, we live in an ever more violent society. One which is also increasingly rejecting marriage in favour of "opt in, opt out" domestic partnerships. A society where more than two million pre- school age children spend most of their waking hours – Monday to Friday – in day nurseries or with child minders, and where the proliferation of one-parent families has become a growth industry. Where smacking has been outlawed on the premise that children who are smacked become violent themselves as a result, but unsmacked children will be far less likely to resort to violent behaviour. Patently that is rubbish. Not only do we have schoolchildren who have never experienced the cane or slipper, stabbing one another to death today, but this generation of youngsters has also combined brutality and sadistic behaviour with modern day technology, inventing the game of "happy slapping" where mindless assaults are videoed on mobile phones so that they can be enjoyed over and over again by the thugs who carried them out. This isn't merely anti-social – it's sick. But the most frightening aspect of the breakdown in British society, is that this hardcore of ill-disciplined, disrespectful ferals will be reproducing within 10 years, passing on their "moral code" to their offspring. The prospect of that nightmare should terrify us all. Tony Thorn, Blackthorne Close, Bordon