Every now and again, a single news story exposes what is “going wrong in modern Britain”, said The Telegraph. The head-on crash that killed two policemen and five joyriders in Middlesbrough in August, and its aftermath, is the latest.
This is “a community beset by brazen criminality”. The five young men were linked to organised crime and had 37 convictions between them. And the horrific crash has been followed by a series of gang-related incidents and acts of destruction. A house was rammed by a car and a man stabbed in suspected tit-for-tat attacks. At a memorial for one of the men, cars were smashed into each other in a field and set alight. In a separate incident, a seven-year-old and her aunt died in an arson attack. Last week, 200 officers from the National Crime Agency and other forces were drafted in to calm tensions.
‘Feral underclass’
“Almost all of the recent crimes have taken place in just one postcode,” said Felix Pope on UnHerd: TS6, a collection of deprived estates in southeast Middlesbrough with what one local politician calls “a feral underclass”. Residents speak of balaclava-clad young men on electric bikes and scooters terrorising the community. One local told The Yorkshire Post: “TS6 has gone mad.”
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All this in a town that “once brimmed with pride”, said Ross Clark in The Sun. “Middlesbrough was once ‘Ironopolis’, one of the biggest producers of pig iron in the world.” Teesside shipyards turned out trawlers by the dozen. But after heavy industry went into a long and deep decline in the 1980s, Middlesbrough never recovered. The steelworks closed in 2015; the town is now one of the most deprived places in England – a place where the last two generations of many families have never known paid employment.
Successive governments should have done more to help these people, said Simon Heffer in The Telegraph. Instead, “the white working class has been pushed aside to stew on welfare benefits or in low-esteem jobs” – abandoned by a state whose first duty is to protect them. “No wonder so many of them feel no connection with it.”
‘Potential powder kegs’
Cleveland Police, the local force, is also a victim of neglect, said Leigh Jones in The Independent. Its area now has the highest crime rate outside central London. Yet it is one of the smallest forces in the country, and has been gutted by years of austerity. Had its budget kept up with inflation, it would be at £246 million this financial year; instead, it is just £196 million.
Yet this force is not an outlier, said Dominic Adler on UnHerd. Across the country, cash-strapped local constabularies are sitting on “potential powder kegs”, but these forces don’t have the resources to deal with even “modest” manifestations of organised crime, such as county-line drug gangs. Look beyond the police, and the whole criminal justice system – prisons, the courts and probation service – is poorly run, and often in crisis. Middlesbrough’s plight is the sign of a “full-spectrum failure, from nose to tail”.
