6 hours ago
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Last week, some teenagers in the Clapham area of south-west London started running up and down the high street. The terms used to describe them ranged from “feral gang” to “chaotic swarm”; evidently, it is in the eye of the beholder as to whether they were closer to animals or insects. Definitely, positively, some of them shoplifted.
Fireworks were let off, which sounds like the kind of mischief the Bash Street Kids would get up to, but is quite scary in real life, and the line between “Beano” and “scary” is finer than I thought. Marks & Spencer needed a police guard and closed early; Oliver Bonas briefly had a security guard, which was like seeing a bouncer outside a library – either a mad overreaction, or the end of days.
Things started to gallop after that, in a manner typical of the world’s frothy discourse. On Friday, the London mayor Sadiq Khan’s police detail left a bag of guns on the street outside his house, a mere four tube stops (then a walk) away from Clapham, and these events collided in many imaginations, particularly on radio phone-ins, to prove that the mayor was losing control of the city.
When Bell Ribeiro-Addy, the local MP, posted on Instagram that the intimidating scenes were inexcusable, the replies … well, let’s not call anything a cesspit, but put it this way: opinions were divided. If the constituent who suggested focusing “on supporting the next generation and giving them a world to grow up in” ever met the one who described London as a “Vile city full of immigrant scum! We need a referendum on a new capital!!!”, we would have a civil war in Clapham, which would be way more serious than a few hoodlums half-inching a Southern Fried Chicken wrap. I’ve been told off socially, more than once, for minimising the offence of shoplifting by naming the wrap, and I take that. And yet it always, always is Southern Fried Chicken.
With unfortunate timing, the Telegraph popped the bonnet on the Sentencing Act, which came into effect in March, and concluded that 12,000 shoplifters were about to be let out of prison. Anyone who has seen career shoplifters in action will know that they are nothing like teenage boys, being brisk, meticulous and stealthy, but let’s not get lost in the detail. Lord Walker of Broxton, the executive chairman of Iceland, suggested that security guards should be armed with truncheons and pepper spray. In the maelstrom, can we quickly agree one thing? The person who suggests truncheons and pepper spray should be the first over the top in their deployment. It’s only fair.
Anyway, by Saturday, things seemed pretty quiet when I went to a pilates class in the area, but maybe all ruffians keep a low profile around us because they’re scared of our core strength. I am going to pass, this once, on pontificating about the degradation of youth services, the ills or benefits of social media, and whether everyone is on ketamine or that’s a sidebar moral panic, and just make a general observation about teenage boys: everyone glares at them, all the time. I first noticed it when walking around with my son, who is now 18, and after that, I noticed that where you see a teenage boy, you’ll see someone unabashedly scowling at them as though they shouldn’t be there. If they are in school uniform, travelling in a swarm unavoidably, because they all got let out at the same time, they get the ice-cold fish-eye deserved by the worst platoon of young men ever to wear uniform. If they are carrying a football, passersby stiffen into an anticipatory hunch, getting ready to protect their imaginary greenhouses. If teenage boys wear a hood, they become hoodies, with all attendant associations of crime and subterfuge. Never mind check your privilege – just check your own wardrobe, which I bet is full of hoods. I bet your dressing gown has a hood.
If they talk too loudly … OK, they are always talking too loudly, and it is annoying. But they can’t win, because if they are making no noise, they become ominous or sinister. If they ride a bike, they are about to steal your phone; if they walk, they’re blocking the pavement; and if they break into a run, it’s another of those swarms. Sometimes, nextdoor.com lights up with the news that three teenagers were seen standing on the street – stay safe everyone!
It’s hard to put your finger on what amount of “good” would satisfy this social scrutiny: a teenage boy can walk down the street reading (a book, not a phone), or be in a barbershop quartet. Otherwise, he is a shoplifter-in-waiting. And I draw no conclusion about what is going on in the head of the teenage boy – he is unknowable. But if it were me, I’d be thinking: “Might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb or, more precisely, a Southern Fried Chicken wrap, as for doing nothing at all.”
