IT'S a week since it was revealed that two police community support officers failed to jump into a lake to save a young Manchester lad from drowning and it's still a burning topic of conversation in various cop shops up and down the land.

At time of writing, we still don't know the names of these hapless PCSOs and don't know why they weren't required to attend the inquest into the death of 10-year-old Jordan Lyon.

Neither do we have any adequate assurances from either Manchester Police, or the Home Office, whose idea the plastic policemen were, as to how the situation is going to be remedied now and a similar horror prevented in the future.

As the news broke on TV, a giant debate broke out in the Daily Echo newsroom which astonishingly centred on whether Jordan's parents, who appeared virtually maddened by grief, were to blame for allowing' their kids to go to the lake in the first place.

I suspect his mum and step-father did nothing of the sort.

I expect they told Jordan and his younger sister to play close by and not to go near any water and believed that was good enough.

I expect, like most parents in this country, they had no real idea what their kids get up to when they can't see them.

Because we don't, do we?

I know where my kids are supposed to be.

I know where they've told me they'll be.

But short of hammering a GPS into their cranium, I've no way of knowing if they always go where they've said they will.

Of course I could secretly trail after them.

I could insist on accompanying them at their play.

And then I'd be one of these "over-protective parents" who, if you believe the clap-trapping classes, are set to destroy the future through over-worry about our children.

The people who are still condemning Jordan's mum Tracy Ganderton and her partner are, I bet, the very same people who slam parents who keep their children close and won't let them out to do anything on their own.

We can't win, can we? Keep the kids in and they'll become lardy social disasters; let them play free, just like we all used to, and if anything happens we're being irresponsible and should be flayed alive in public.

When you let your kids run free, just like the liberalists and the do-gooders want, sometimes they get hurt. Sometimes they don't go where they've said they will.

Sometimes they do stupid things.

But when they do, we want to be able to rely on the people we pay to rely on, like the police and the fire service, to jump in and help them.

Who's to say whether those plastic coppers could have saved poor Jordan? We don't know.

But they should be condemned forever for not even trying.

I cannot think of one ordinary citizen, let alone a proper copper, who wouldn't have thought twice about having a go in this situation.

After all, the only reason Jordan was in that lake was because he had jumped in to try and save his younger sister from drowning.

He was a kid yet he stepped up to the plate without a thought.

And it's a sobering thought that two grown-up people in a position of trust couldn't even summon the wit, the courage or the humanity of the 10-year-old who was drowning in front of them.