Scuzz Nation
Fewer than one in 100 car break-ins in London result in a charge. Such statistics don’t shock us any more because they’re so common. Shoplifting is at its highest recorded level; fly-tipping is up 50 per cent over the past decade; there’s a burglary every three minutes yet 96 per cent go unsolved; most people say they’re seeing more anti-social behaviour but the number of incidents recorded by police has fallen to a historic low. Everywhere we look, Britain appears grubbier and more unpleasant. Welcome to Scuzz Nation.
Scuzz Nation looks very much like the country of a few years ago, only worse. It’s a place where decay happens faster than repair, where crime largely goes unpunished and where the social fabric has been slashed, graffitied and left by the side of the road. Progressives often sneer at Farage’s favourite campaigning slogan – ‘We want our country back’ – asking back from whom, or back to where. To which the residents of Scuzz Nation reply: back from the growing number of people who flout the basic rules of civilised behaviour. And back to a country where the rule of law is actually observed on our streets.
Take a walk down Scuzz Nation’s high streets to see what they mean. Twice the number of shops are empty compared with 2007 and those that remain sell vapes, American candy or second-hand phones of dubious origin. There are lots of Middle Eastern barber shops too, which seem curiously empty. Police in Shrewsbury recently raided one as part of a national crackdown on money laundering. The barbers claimed they had a turnover of £1.8 million – impressive for a town of 76,000 people. Citizens of Scuzz Nation don’t go out as much as they used to, because it’s too expensive and their town sometimes feels a little scary at night. Pubs continue to close, while the number of takeaways increases. Food delivery cyclists run red lights on illegally modified e-bikes. Many are euphemistically called ‘irregular migrants’.
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The few remaining optimists might say that despite a general sense of lawlessness, reported crime has actually been trending downwards. They’d be right, but such claims don’t reveal the full truth. A majority of people who witness crimes don’t bother to report them, with more than half saying they believe the police will do nothing. And who can blame them? Victims have a less than one in ten chance of seeing justice. There’s good reason for thinking that the fall in reported crime is really about people giving up on their failing police.
I once caught a Polish street scammer as she was trying to defraud a member of the public next to Victoria station. I called 999 and was told the police couldn’t arrive for at least an hour. When I said that wasn’t good enough, that I was worried the scammer might be part of a gang and I was putting myself at risk, the handler burst into tears. The scammer was also crying that she was going to be deported. (She needn’t have worried, fewer than one in five foreign criminals are sent home.) I found myself standing between two sobbing women wondering why I had even bothered.
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Most of the time we don’t like talking about foreign criminals. It makes us feel a bit uncomfortable. Only when faced with something as sadistic as the grooming gangs scandal does our anger become public. Here, too, we find that Scuzz Nation is partly to blame. NHS workers and social services turned a blind eye and victims who reported perpetrators to the police say they were dismissed.
A fear of seeming discriminatory haunts the vast army of public-sector workers. Rick Prior, the now-former chairman of the Met Police Federation, was fired last month for saying that the police’s job is getting harder because of ethnic tensions. ‘There seems to be an assumption of racism right from the off,’ he said, ‘particularly when it’s a white officer and a member of the public from a minority ethnic community.’ Such statements are obviously true – just look at places like Rotherham, Rochdale and Telford. But appearing tolerant is more important than doing the right thing in Scuzz Nation. Anyway, it’s not as if proper law enforcement is affordable any more, even if the police wanted to give it a go.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/welcome-to-scuzz-nation/
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