The Left don’t want to talk about the real reason for teenage crime
Academics have told The Guardian that we wouldn’t see Clapham-style mayhem if there were more youth clubs. Seriously?
So why exactly did gangs of teenagers go rampaging through the shops of Clapham, causing mayhem and terrifying customers? Was it because they’re a pack of selfish, amoral, pea-brained thugs whose feckless parents failed to teach them the difference between right and wrong?
No. It was simply because the poor things had nowhere to play table tennis.
That, at least, appears to be the verdict of progressive academics, interviewed for a report in The Guardian. In their opinion, today’s teenagers would be much less likely to behave like this if the state provided them with more youth clubs.
One academic argued: “There’s nothing new about young people organising mass meet-ups. What’s changed is the context. We’ve dismantled the physical spaces where young people used to gather safely: youth clubs, community centres…” Another explained: “Young people want to come together… [They’re] showing us that they need space where they can be a bit more informal and be together in groups.” Meanwhile, “The language of ‘swarming’ and gangs of ‘feral teens’ is demonising young people unfairly” – and the public’s “exaggerated” reaction to the disorder in Clapham was an example of “moral panic”.
I’ve always been fascinated by the way high-minded progressives blame teenage crime on a lack of youth clubs. For one thing, we never hear similar excuses for criminals in other age groups. No one says, “If only Rose West had belonged to a knitting circle.” Or, “The Yorkshire Ripper only murdered all those prostitutes because he was bored. It would never have happened if the government had offered him free Zumba lessons.”
In any case, even if the tax-payer were forced to fund a new youth club on every street in the land, I’m not convinced that such wholesome, old-fashioned places would hold much appeal to the louts who ran riot in Clapham. “Do you know, chaps, I’ve quite lost interest in violent anarchy since I took up rounders.”
Yet, almost every time a rabble of yobs go shoplifting, some lofty academic will pop up to insist that it’s only because the state has failed to spend enough of our money on board games. In 2023, after a mob of youths looted shops on London’s Oxford Street, a professor at UCL declared that the solution was to “invest in public swimming pools, well-run youth clubs…”
Does anyone on the Left seriously believe this stuff? Or do they just pretend to, because they find it too uncomfortable to contemplate certain other explanations, such as the collapse of the traditional family, the death of proper discipline in schools, and the rise of a lawless, welfare-addicted underclass?
Either way, I wonder what would happen if I were to assemble a mob of about 100 men my age, and then we all went round breaking into the homes of Left-wing academics – stealing anything we liked the look of, smashing up anything we didn’t, and telling the police afterwards that we only did it because there aren’t enough pubs any more.
“We middle-aged men just want to come together,” we would explain. “But society has dismantled the physical spaces where we used to gather safely. As a result, we were left with no choice but to embark on a lawless rampage, looting other people’s property and terrifying innocent citizens. We hope the owners of those homes aren’t going to demonise us. That would be a textbook case of moral panic.”
Why it’s time to raise the voting age
See if you can make sense of this. In February, Labour’s Josh Simons resigned as a minister after being accused of paying a US PR firm to investigate journalists in 2023. On Sunday, Mr Simons was interviewed about what he’d done. And at one point he said: “You know, I was 30 years old, I didn’t read the contract very carefully…”
Thirty? Why, he was little more than a boy. A mere whippersnapper. Barely into his fourth decade of life. Give the poor child a break.
Of course, now that he’s reached the grand old age of 32, we can be sure he would never be so foolish again. All the same, there’s an important lesson to be learnt from his youthful faux pas. As a minister, he helped bring in a bill that, if passed, will lower the voting age to 16.
But surely he can now see the problem. After all, if someone aged 30 can’t be expected to read a contract properly, how can someone aged just 16 be expected to read a manifesto?
If anything, he should be fighting to raise the voting age. I was going to suggest raising it to 45, because that’s my age. Unfortunately, a recent poll revealed that the Greens are now the most popular party with every age group under 50. So we’d better make it 55, just to be on the safe side.
Anyway, I urge Master Simons to start work at once on a new bill. Although, once he’s drafted it, he may need a responsible adult to give it a read for him.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/04/07/the-left-do-not-want-talk-about-real-reason-teenage-crime/
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stanika
