Another fertile Christmas for our youngsters.

Byline: Maureen Messent

MUCH of the passing year has been wasted.

As we come to its close, there is a sense of underachievement - the nation at home is split, continues to bicker, has reached no consensus.

This time last year, our pundits on sexual matters were up in arms that schoolage children were to have access to contraceptives: some saw this as wisdom, others as encouraging early intercourse. The same battle is still being slugged out.

Now the nervously inclined are furious that youngsters will be able to self-prescribe the morning-after Pill while the realists point out that since kids as young as 12 are actively sexual, the Pill and the next day pill is necessary.

I think the latter. We don't truly know how very young girls regard sex because they don't open up to adults. What we can be sure about is that our children are more sexually precocious than ever before, hence the babies born to them.

Only idiots take the view that telling girls to say no is the best option: for reasons best known to them, they don't employ it.

What is clear but unstated through fear of being politically incorrect is that this problem is overwhelmingly a matter of social class: walk through Moseley, Edgbaston and Harborne and you don't see young women pushing baby-buggies: walk through Shard End, Kitts Green and Nechells and you do.

The one-time working class now forming the welfare dependent group are feckless.

Their children are disillusioned to the point of wanting to leave home and give birth to a baby who will love them.

These girls aren't entirely to blame. They grow up in homes where, despite all the modern gadgetry owned, all the cash spent on drink and cigarettes, there is little store to set on learning, reading and academic success.

Where we have gone wrong in dealing with these lost girls is in our government's belief they must be given homes and cash to live on.

We'd nip this breed 'n greed propensity in the bud were we to tell these premature mums: "Sorry, we're neither funding you nor housing you." Then tell their parents these young women are their concern. And offer not a penny in benefit.

I find it depressing that this Christmas there will be hordes of mini-trollops out of their tiny brains on alcohol as they conceive the next generation while their parents sit mindlessly before their huge TV screens.

Britain, as the under-aged tables show, is in one hell of a mess, the worst in Europe.

And we raise not a whimper of protest.