The disorder that burst onto the streets of Middlesbrough last weekend continues. On Thursday night, three cars were senselessly set alight in a field.
What began as a gathering to mourn the passing of Michael Cahill, 23 – one of five occupants killed when their car shot down the A66 in the wrong direction – quickly descended into a banger race, terrifying residents nearby.
The burning vehicles have become a picture of lawlessness that shames a corner of England of which I’m otherwise immensely proud.
As Tees Valley mayor, I represent the people of this region, and I can tell you that most are utterly repulsed by what they have witnessed these past few days.
They are decent, hard-working people who want nothing more than to get to work, walk their children to school and enjoy their own town centre without fear of crime.
The problem has never been the people of Middlesbrough, but a drugs trade that has sunk its claws into the town, and wannabe gangsters who settle their petty scores in broad daylight with no thought for anyone else.
No amount of polite language should be allowed to disguise what is driving this. These are not misunderstood young men who took a wrong turn.
They are criminals, plain and simple, chasing money and status through drugs and intimidation.
Tees Valley mayor Ben Houchen is pictured at the Conservative Party Conference in 2022
Cars were set alight in Middlesbrough for one of the occupants of the VW Passat involved in the fat A66 crash
The burnt remains of three cars sit in a scorched field billowing smoke into the sky
They have been allowed to flourish because for years the people who hold the levers of policing and criminal justice have been soft where they ought to have been hard.
This is not just a Middlesbrough problem, but symptomatic of Underclass Britain. This is the world where worklessness, drugs and benefits have become a way of life.
This would rot any community, but what really kills it is the loss of respect for authority and personal responsibility.
There are now whole sections of this country that simply do not fear consequences, for the very good reason that there have not been any.
They have grown up learning that a police officer can be sworn at without a second thought, that a teacher can be defied, that a court order is a piece of paper to be ignored.
Hand in hand with that goes the slow death of personal responsibility, because in this world everything is always somebody else’s fault.
The drugs, the violence, the intimidation, the stolen cars driven at lethal speed through streets where children play, all of it gets explained away as the inevitable product of circumstance – ignoring the millions who grew up in exactly the same tough towns and chose instead to work, raise their families properly and keep to the law.
Clips of the cars skidding around the field were captioned ‘Rest in peace Micky’ in reference to Michael Cahill, one of the A66 fatalities
Scores of blue balloons spelling out ‘Michael’ were released into the sky
It is a national failure that just happened to be on show in the North East last week.
I do not want to hear local politicians talking piously about ‘all the victims’, because on the A66 that night there were two victims and their names were PC Matthew Blades and PC Tom Clough.
Nor do I want to see books of tribute opened for those who lose their lives committing crime, as though recklessness that puts everyone else in danger is a tragedy to be romanticised.
Over the coming weeks and months, the Home Office needs to get a grip by backing the police to flood these areas with officers and then keeping them there for as long as the job takes.
Forces such as Cleveland should be given the fairer share of funding they have been denied for years, so that officers can get back on the streets.
And courts must lock up the people who wreck lives instead of handing them yet another chance they will only throw back in our faces.
None of this is easy and it can’t be fixed overnight, but the alternative is exactly what the country has just watched, which is families grieving, communities frightened and a political class that keeps quietly telling itself that all of this is happening to somebody else.
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