Michael Deacon
The row over small boats has been raging for a very long time. Yet there’s still one aspect of it that I don’t understand. Since 2016, British liberals have given the consistent impression that the EU is an earthly paradise: prosperous, stable, forward-looking and inclusive. By contrast, they fume, Brexit Britain is a hateful, backward, crumbling, economically doomed dump.
Their position is clear. Yet, whenever anyone suggests that migrants should stay in France – the largest country in the EU – rather than cross the Channel to Britain, liberals are appalled. They react as if it’s unspeakably cruel and inhumane. Logically, however, they should take the opposite view. They should think it’s cruel and inhumane to make the migrants stay in nasty old Britain, rather than the heavenly EU. If anything, British metropolitan liberals should be gathering in their tens of thousands to form a human barrier all the way along the Kent coast, in order to prevent migrants from entering – for their own good. “Turn back immediately!” they should bellow through their loudhailers at every approaching dinghy. “Do not, repeat not, seek sanctuary in Britain! This country is a failing, bigoted, corrupt, austerity-ruined, sewage-sodden, virulently Islamophobic hellhole populated by ghastly Tory-voting gammon who worship statues of slave traders and despise anyone whose skin is any colour but crimson! So for pity’s sake, turn your boats around, and enjoy a glorious new life in elegant, cultured, joyously cosmopolitan France! We’d leap aboard and join you ourselves, if only the stupid Brexiteers hadn’t ended our freedom of movement!”
That at least would be logically consistent. Instead, however, British liberals are still outraged by Lee Anderson’s suggestion that migrants return to France. But why? Don’t they think these poor migrants have already suffered enough, without having to endure the misery of life in Brexit Britain? What makes liberals so eager to inflict this fresh horror upon these desperate, vulnerable people? It seems dreadfully callous of them. I think it’s time they showed some compassion – by campaigning to shut our borders straight away. Shopkeepers are living in fear. After a horde of youths caused mayhem on London’s Oxford Street last week, inspired by videos on TikTok about shoplifting, there have been constant rumours of teenage flash-mobs plotting to loot high streets across the South East. Clearly something must be done. But what?
One person who thinks she knows the answer is Mariana Mazzucato. A professor in “the Economics of Innovation and Public Value” at University College London, she is, according to The New Republic magazine, one of the world’s “most important thinkers about innovation”. And her proposal is as follows. Open some youth clubs. This is the key, she told her 250,000 followers on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter: we must “care for youth”. To this end, the Government must “invest in public swimming pools, well-run youth clubs, community centres, mental health programmes, summer activities…”
Mental health programmes are one thing. The other items on her list, however, imply that young people turn to crime largely because they’re bored. But this is nonsense. It isn’t even new. It’s a decades-old cliché. When I was a teenager in the 1990s, I remember commentators claiming that we would stop joyriding, shoplifting and mugging old ladies if only we had youth clubs to go to, where we could play nice wholesome games of ping-pong and Boggle. Where this naive notion comes from, I don’t know. But it’s only ever applied to criminals who are young. Never older ones. No one says, “Harold Shipman would never have murdered all those patients if the Government had opened more lawn bowls clubs.” Or: “If only Jack the Ripper could have joined a local book group.”
In any case, today’s teenagers aren’t bored. They can’t be. It’s impossible. Boredom has been abolished. Fifty years ago, perhaps, British teenagers could legitimately moan that they were bored. But not today’s lot. They’ve all got smartphones, video games, YouTube, social media, countless TV channels, and access to every piece of music ever recorded, free of charge. So if they’re plotting to loot our high streets, it’s not because they’ve got nothing else to do. It’s because they’ve got a fundamental lack of respect for other people and their property. And instilling them with that respect is a job for their parents, not the tax-payer. Until that job’s been done, there’s no point wasting our money on building youth clubs. Because they’ll only go and loot them as well.
The Telegraph
