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.”