I WAS out in High Wycombe last week and saw four little boys huddling together to light up a fag.

They couldn't have been older than ten yet there they were, not a care in the world, puffing away.

It was then it hit me the kids around this area really are getting more and more horrid.

Walking around the streets of High Wycombe in the school holidays has become a nightmare.

The place is teeming with nasty little oiks spitting, throwing stones, dismantling walls, flashing around knives, swearing on buses and generally behaving in an animal-like fashion that would shame even the most hardened zookeeper.

But I don't blame these misguided youngsters and I certainly don't blame the schools.

I blame the parents.

We all know the sort.

That breed of adult that drives the body-kitted motor, sponges a living off the state and whose only real interest in life revolves around what pours into the satellite dish day in day out. These pondlife care for no one but themselves.

The sort of parent who doesn't care where the kids are as long as they are out of the house and misbehaving under someone else's nose.

The sort who choose to pierce the ears of their infants and feed them constant junk.

The sort of low-lives that threaten to 'go up the school' to teach the teachers a lesson after reading their little brat's particularly bad report.

Let's face facts they are to blame.

What we need to do is make parents pay for the actions of their offspring.

I reckon the teenage lout caught defacing property with talentless graffiti scrawl should be forced to clean the mess up. And if not I'd have no qualms about sending a team of council-employed enforcers round to the parents' house.

They can then get to work spraying Mr and Mrs Scum's prized souped-up boy-racer and vandalising the family satellite dish.

How about making bad parents face up to the actions of their tearaway kids. Something tells me a lot of kids would be better behaved if we followed this course of action.

Either that or we could introduce a licensing system for having children. After all you have to apply to own a dog, so why not a human?

The sad fact is that a loud and very visible minority of our youngsters are not very nice individuals and they are giving their peer group a bad name.

But it's not the kids that should carry the can, it's the adults who should be looking after them and teaching them the way of the civilised world. It's a shame some parents can't be bothered to do that, but there's so much on TV these days and, of course, that comes first.