The head of one of the country's leading charities provoked anger yesterday after he suggested that Baby P could have grown up to be "feral, a parasite, helping to infest our streets"..

Baby P was a cute blond haired blue eyed toddler, beaten to death by his mother, her boyfriend and a lodger in a case that has scandalised Britain.

When I first read that Narey, erstwhile head of the Prison Service, had made this startling statement, I thought that he was saying something I have never heard expressed in the media: that it's no surprise if the child of the lowest examples of humanity is genetically programmed to be likely to behave akin to his parents. No wonder that he faced such outrage for such a biologically well founded, but politically incorrect, observation! But it seems he really has been misunderstood. Earlier he had written for the Barnado website:

I don't think I'm a soft touch when it comes to children. Twenty three years working with offenders before coming to Barnardo's, four of them in a Borstal, revealed to me the damage which can be caused by a minority of children and young people. But, the key word here is minority. And yet, somehow, we have arrived at a point where children; all children; your children and my children, are routinely traduced. Dismissed as worthless they are referred to as "Vermin" as "Animals" or as "Feral". .

Narey still believes in the power of nurture over nature. There is no doubt that living in deprived conditions does not bring the best out of people, yet there has been social mobility for years in Britain, and it is entirely possible for anyone, who has the natural ability and the will, to better themselves. The pace of social mobility has slowed now, as the brain drain from the lower segment of society has left an underclass with little genetic capacity to rise above its position. This is sufficient to explain:

"Kids from lower socioeconomic levels show brain physiology patterns similar to someone who actually had damage in the frontal lobe as an adult," said Robert Knight, director of the institute and a UC Berkeley professor of psychology. "We found that kids are more likely to have a low response if they have low socioeconomic status, though not everyone who is poor has low frontal lobe response."."

Once again, the experts will not even contemplate that the reasons for this may be more genetic than environmental. Biological determinism remains tabboo.